Organizational Behavior - Stress and Healthy Jobs, Creativity, Leadership, and Qualities - Essay Example

Running Head: Organizational Behavior Name Course Instructor Date Misbehavior Organizational misbehavior is any behavior that brings harm or has an intention of bringing one to an organization, its employees, and stakeholders, while leaving slip ups and causing mischief without evil intent or even accidentally (Sagie , Stashevsky & Koslowsky, 2003). These behavior include workplace aggression, sexual harassment, covering up behavior, social loafing, job burnouts, bead emails just to mention but a few. It is also worth noting that, these deviant behaviors is not always destructive and therefore this gives rise to a chance to constructive deviance (Sagie , Stashevsky & Koslowsky, 2003). In other words, there are some deviances which are potential to become constructive as sources of innovation and entrepreneurship and therefore, they contribute to competitive advantage. However, it a point to note that both destructive and constructive deviance are a violation of the organizational norms. Organizational behavior contributes in a big way to the misbehavior in any given organization. This has been exonerated by much investigation which entailed why employees try to cover up mistakes and why they are aggressive to each other. In organizations, employees are expected to do a number of things at work and at time, these employees involve in actions that are inconsistent with the organization’s expectation and norms (Richards, 2008). This being the case, the antonym for organizational behavior is really organizational misbehavior. In other words, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of individuals in any organization are influenced by how the perceive whether the organizations are just and fair in their practices and procedures (Pelzer, 2005). Managers are faced with challenges everyday for employees bring more and more diverse standards of behavior into the workplace. For instance, they are obligated to ensuring that the employees behave as expected and cooperate with the management requirements in the process of accomplishing their work. When there are traces of misbehavior, managers provide counseling as one of the options available to them to bring employees back on track. There are some deviances that are of much benefit to the organization. Unlike the field of organizational behavior which main focus is on the managerial dysfunctions, constructive deviants facilitate organizational change to the good of the entire business; there is some misbehaviors which violate the organizational norms, but which in the long run help the organization (Richards, 2008).. For example, employees may intentionally depart from dysfunctional organizational policies or procedures to solve a certain problem. Managers also may opt to violate the company procedures so as to solve a customer’s problem. These misbehaviors finally benefit the organization for they affect the performance positively. It is also noteworthy that, misbehavior facilitates change and innovation. Constructive misbehavior in managers are increased by emotional intelligence, trust, empathy and extroversion. Additionally, emotional intelligence helps them understand one’s feelings and regulate their emotions to increase the quality of life in the organization. They connect with people by understanding their emotions (Pelzer, 2005). Empathy on the other hand correlates with an understanding of experiences, concerns and perspectives of another person and the capacity to communicate this understanding. This is of great importance for managers for it helps the reduce stress, enhance positive expectation, reduce negative emotions and positive influence on the performance of the employees. Conclusively, it is a point to note that, constructive employee’s misbehavior benefits the managers for they learn on how to manage employees with fairness which employees fell treated which determine their reaction to equity (Pelzer, 2005). In other hand, it helps managers discharge their duties effectively with the organizational behavior in mind as well as the behaviors which are correlated to employees, and thus ensure that the performance of the entire organization is well taken care of to the competitive advantage of their entire organization (Bennett & Robinson, 2000). Stress and Healthy Jobs Work and health are inseparable. Due to the ever changing nature of jobs and the aging plus the growing diversity of the work force suggests that the threats a worker health are dramatically different today that it were some days ago. In accordance to the ecological theory of human development, individual’s dispositions, resources and characteristics do shape their perceptions of how their jobs affect their health (Susan & Joseph, 2001). There are various aspects which do affect the health of an individual. For instance, the physical aspects of the working environment such as the ergonomics of jobs or even the toxic substances, the objective or the number of hours worked per week or shift work and social aspect like economic adequacy or social prestige and finally the psychological such as decision latitude and demands and psychosocial referring to relationships and workplace culture. All these aspects determine the health of workers in any given working environment (Susan & Joseph, 2001). It is therefore noteworthy that, workplace is an important setting for health promotion. This is due to the fact that, the organization of work affects the health of the employees. Leaders play a very vital role in determining the health aspect of their employees. It have been noted that an increased personal control over the work situation promoted health and wellbeing of an individual employee, and affects his/her possibilities to develop competence in work (Susan & Joseph, 2001). Most of unhealthy situation in workplaces have been associated to stress. In other words, the major risk factor for ill health related to stress ion working life has close correlation with high demands and low decision latitude. Managers have for a long time been working towards having satisfied workers so as to increase productivity but doing very little to address issues related to health and quality of working life and how to create supportive environments for health (Michael, Patricia & John, 2007). Managers therefore must work hard towards realizing that, health working environment is as important as any other motivating factor. Leaders have to delegate responsibilities to employees, and thus have them get them involved in the running of the organization. This is in other words referred to as employee engagement. When this happens, there are self managed work teams which create high degree of control to employees where they plan, control and organize their work tasks. In the long run, self managed teams contribute to a feeling of responsibility which is closely linked to job satisfaction (Andrea, Bjarne, Haglund & Runo, 2008). To create conducive working environments, or to harness good psychosocial work environment, there is a need to have changes through job content or changes of the organization of work. This for instance can be exonerated through giving more influence and autonomy to the individual worker, training workers on conflict solving. This means that, employees are given chance to have smooth flow of life in the working environments (Schabracq & Cooper, 2000). On the other hand, high level of internal or self generated motivation is dependant on experienced meaningfulness, experienced responsibility and knowledge of results. When each psychological state is increased or rather is harnessed, the characteristics of the job are exonerated and thus job stress is minimized (Michael, Patricia & John, 2007). Experienced meaningfulness arises from the compensatory relationship among skill variety, task identity and task significance. Conclusively, to have a healthy working environment, managers must keep performance track whereby they make sure employees know what they want, let them know how they are doing and being precise about the expectations. Tap the employee potential whereby, employees are given chance to perform in accordance to their potential and expertise. This reduces pressure and stress. Set the climate so as it can be conducive as a healthy working environment (Michael, Patricia & John, 2007). Creativity Creativity, taken in reference to an organization, is a very wide term and mostly associated with capabilities (Jeff , & Richard, 2003). Being a critical area to organizations, it encompasses analyzing and getting solutions to challenging issues hence coming up with valuable solutions leading to their implementation. Leadership in an organization is vital to creativity amongst the staff since it is responsible for driving change as well as pushing for a conducive environment where creativity flourishes (Unsworth, Wall, & Carter, 2005). To see an organization’s growth therefore, it needs to have smart personalities in their staff that is able to foresee potential issues and situations as well as take the necessary reshaping of the company thus avoiding difficulties that may be encountered. A company which embraces creativity, values innovation and always remains at a competitive advantage. It is worthwhile to note that creativity comes from the harmonious merging of three key components. The first component encompasses knowledge, which refers to all relevant comprehension that an individual injects to creative effort (Jeff , & Richard, 2003). This knowledge mostly stems into two distinct areas. In one perspective, it provides a playground for creativity born from over-a-time focus as well as a deep experience in a specific area of specialization thus developing the necessary technical expertise (Min Basadur, 2001). On the other hand, creativity rides on the ability to merge previous experienced aspects in new approaches, which implies considering a wide focus on the issues at hand as well as interests. This second aspect calls for a harmonious balancing between the in-depth of knowledge and experience to achieve the peak of and individual’s potential (Twyla, 2003). For breadth to be improved, it is therefore important for business managers to create teams of staff with different bases of knowledge. The collaboration ensures creativity intuition. This therefore concludes that diverse knowledge combined together in a working environment produces the best results when it comes to innovation (Unsworth, Wall, & Carter, 2005) The second component is all about creative thinking, that is, personal approach to challenges. It largely depends on individual personality besides working and thinking style. The vital aspects of creative thinking can be classified in four spheres (Jeff , & Richard, 2003). First, an individual should have a capacity to be comfortable even in disagreement with others as well as trying to come up with amicable solutions, which may not be, in line with his status quo. Secondly, he/she is an individual with the ability to combine knowledge gained from previous experience (Jeff , & Richard, 2003). Thirdly, he/she should exhibit perseverance while faced by spells of challenging circumstances and finally his/her ability to retract from an effort that may not be producing worthwhile results only to inject fresh perspectives later. The third component is all about motivation. Generally, it is a vital component to creative production especially when the motivation is intrinsic, that is, having a drive and interest in the task in question as opposed to extrinsic motivation (Jeff , & Richard, 2003). It is arguable to note that individuals’ most creativity is achieved when they are primarily motivated by work itself in respect to its satisfaction, challenge as well as interest. An intrinsically motivated staff’ in most cases, will go along way to seek diverse pathways to get solutions and all along he/she is found to be enjoying every bit. Conclusively, a manager should not rule out extrinsic motivation as beneficial to creativity in an organization because extrinsic motivators that are enabling as well as informational support and bring about intrinsic motivation (Jeff , & Richard, 2003). In other words, when an organization has well motivated employees, innovation and creativity is inevitable. Leadership qualities Leadership is the ability of oneself to influence a group of people towards the achievement of the same goal. Questions have been raised on what make up good leaders in management and in the work places. Traits of leaders from al corners of the world have been studied i.e. including the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi and others to examine the similarity in their leadership. Usually an effective leadership relies upon so many qualities upon a manager and this influences the notion of the importance of leadership qualities in the management and in the work places. Therefore, there are common desired leadership qualities, which are in the prosperity of organization and with the leaders (Northouse, 2007) Integrity is the most important leadership quality that is supposed to be employed by managers and in the workplaces. Managers are viewed as role models of the organization hence they must maintain their characters because managing is the ability and capacity to bring people to a common objective and the character in the manager will inspire the confidence. In addition, they should maintain their values and integrity whether they are on duty or not on duty. So many people understand that leaders should lead by example and therefore e what the managers utter or take into action affects highly on the organizational behavior (Smith, 1998) Managers should therefore embrace the display of the required values of the organization as stated in their governing constitution in order to inspire the employees positively. For success in the organization, the leaders should posses a vision for the entity. Contrary to this will lead to the change of the working hours where every one is reporting to work late and the focus is lost. This vision will enable the leader to lead, stating of the target of the organization and it acts as an igniter in the working places where thy follow the actions of the manager and the stating of the vision to achieve their goals and objectives. The managers should have good communication skills in order to pass the message to the management and to the working forces. Having a vision without having the message being passed to the management and the general working force does not matter in any way. Therefore, the leader must influence the impact of the message by sharing ideas and knowledge with the management. The leaders should show accountability as the managers and the general workforce embrace the fact that respect should be put in place for the mutual understanding between the parties. Being an accountable leader and employing accountability in the working places empower and gives trust to the community in which you are working in (Nahavandi, 2006) Honesty is a leadership quality which also help to eradicate the mistrust I the working place because it reduces the productivity and “mistrust drives out trust” among the workers and the managers. Commitment in the tasks allocated determines the productivity of the organization. Each an every leader recognizes the goals that have been set and therefore commitment is an essential quality I leadership to help influence the management and they be vigorous, aggressive in their duties. Commitment of every party helps ones personality to converge to openness hence encourage interaction .It also encourage s dedication towards the success of realization of goals. The leaders are also required to be highly competent where the managers are able to state the strategies, they are able to coordinate in a way that it will be unique from others and this will help to attract and inspire the management. The competency of the managers will be visualized when they are showing up frequently and while one is ready to work. Bibliography ANDREA ERIKSSON, BJARNE JANSSON, BO J. A. HAGLUND and RUNO AXELSSON. (2008). Leadership, organization and health at work: a case study of a Swedish industrial company. Leadership, organization and health at work , 127-133. Bennett, R. J. and Robinson, S. L. ( 2000). ‘The development of a measure of workplace deviance’, . Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, , 349–60. Jeff Mauzy, and Richard Harriman,. (2003). 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