Individuals in Organizations - Essay Example

(2000) introduced the notion of a proactive employee as one who is highly committed and involved, an autonomous contributor who is highly responsible and has initiative. In order to enhance his individual experience and relationships at AMX, Dave Green has to become a proactive employee through applying the various skills important in increasing both intrapersonal and interpersonal effectiveness. Shockley-Zabalak (2011) identified four important skills in improving individual effectiveness: cultural intelligence, active listening, accepting diversity and descriptive message strategies.

Shockley-Zabalak (2011) defines cultural intelligence as the ability of an individual to understand people’s behavior depending on human universal behaviors, specific human behaviors, and culture-dependent human behaviors. For Dave Green to understand human universal behavior, he has to understand how the various motivation theories relate to human behavior. Abraham Marslow proposed the Hierarchy of needs theory that suggests the pursuit of satisfaction is what shapes human behavior. He grouped several needs as they relate to human behavior in a hierarchical order from the most important to the least.

The needs include psychological needs, safety and security, social belonging, prestige, and finally on top of the pyramid is self-actualization (Shockley-Zabalak, 2011). Here, Dave Green has to determine what is important and to what level does his personal needs affect his behavior as well as that of his team. He has to understand his team better in order to understand what motivates them and use this knowledge to form an efficient team. The motivation-hygiene theory proposed by Fredrick Herzberg stresses that human behavior is affected by both internal and external factors (Shockley-Zabalak, 2011).

He proposed that factors such as salary, working conditions, interpersonal relations and supervision all affected the satisfaction levels of employees. For Dave Green to better