Operationalising the Ability, Motivation, Opportunity Framework - Assignment Example

? Operationalising the AMO Framework Operationalising the AMO Framework Human resource management plays a critical role in the overall success of an organisation (Gilbert, De Winne, and Sels, 2011; Wright and Kehoe, 2008). Although each and every department of an institution is important in its operations, the significance of human resources and its management to organisational performance and profitability of the company is much recognised. Several researches claimed that the performance of employees and the workplace are dependent on the strategies that human resource management applies to the organisation. According to Savaneviciene and Stankeviciute (2010), there are no established human resource management practices to specifically measure its management, though the ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO) framework provides numerous situations that can help managers to apply its theories in order to effectively guide employees in increasing their performance. The AMO framework, also known as the people and performance model, is defined as the sum of the ability, motivation and opportunity of an employee (Raiden, Dainty, and Neale, 2006). Cox, Higgins and Speckesser (2011) further explain the AMO model as the following: ability “refers to the practices that ensure employees are equipped with the skills needed to undertake their jobs, with a presumption that jobs will be relatively highly skilled…”; motivation refers to the financial and non-financial factors that can be offered to employees to suit their satisfaction such as performance pay schemes, employee share-ownership programmes, commissions, and “by creating an atmosphere of trust and encouraging employees to think of themselves as stakeholders in the firm”; and lastly, opportunity is defined as the “involvement in the decision-making process of the firm.” The ability, motivation and opportunity strategies that HR experts present to employees give the latter reasons to stay at the job and strive for higher positions or salary by increasing their performance in return. In addition, the AMO context is influenced by the practices that human resources system applies in work and employment in the organisation. As a result, employee performance levels are affected by these practices both individually and collectively. As Boxall and Macky (2009) noted, “every human resources system works through its impacts on the skills and knowledge of individual employees, their willingness to exert effort, and their opportunities to express their talents in their work. However, human resource systems also affect a range of variables on a more collective level, helping to build organisational capabilities, and influencing the organisational culture, and social and psychological climate in which individuals are embedded.” More so, studies show that the AMO model does not only impact the organisational performance but the high performance work practice as well. Human resource managers are guided by policies and strategies covered by the disciplines of human resource management. These principles help managers in dealing with obstacles and serious situations of handling people well (O’Donnell, Livingston, and Bartram, 2009). Lee and Cummings (2008) supported this claim by recognising that managers “are credited with the responsibility of front line leadership and management.” As such, the knowledge of these leaders in applying the ability, motivation and job opportunities framework to employees and the workplace by implementing its theories into the company’s organisational behaviour is essential in the success of human resource management. Katou and Budhwar (2009) maintained that “the motivation to perform is further moderated by managerial style and organisational culture.” Strategies that can be used by managers include creating reward programmes, creative recruitment methods, job rotation and job redesign. To achieve high performance from employees, managers can apply the learning behaviour consequences feature of the Social Learning Theory. This form of learning is based on the notion that employee behaviour can be influenced or transformed through observation and expectation of consequences. For instance, managers can form a special group of information technology personnel that will remotely check the actual or real-time browsing of office employees on their desktop computers in random order to verify their efficiency during work hours. Those employees that the group found to be idle for a certain amount of time or for those who are surfing non-work related websites will be appropriately reprimanded (O’Donnell, Livingston, and Bartram, 2009). Furthermore, the social learning theory models, which are comprised by behaviour modelling, learning behaviour consequences and self-reinforcement, enhance the ability of employees to behaviours that are suitable in the workplace and are expected from them by the organisation. Social learning theory is defined by Leonard and Blane (1999) as “an approach that synthesizes principles of learning with those of cognitive psychology. It is a systematic effort to explain how the social and personal competencies that are often referred to as personality develop from the social context in which such learning occur.” Collectively, the behaviours and attitudes of the employees will eventually shape the organisational outcome of the institution. Employees can be motivated by creating programmes that could provide them favourable compensation and incentives. For example, if the management offers bonuses to its employees who exemplified perfect attendance throughout the month, the employees will develop positive attitude to drive them in going to work every day. This sense of commitment is shaped by the satisfaction that they will acquire upon satisfying the requirement of the incentive scheme at the end of the month. Consequently, the rate of absenteeism will decrease while performance of employees increases. The rationale behind this organisational behaviour is the emotion that is being fed by a programme that drives or empowers an employee to act in response. This form of motivation to perform is called the drive to acquire under the Four-Drive Theory by Lawrence and Nohria, or the determination to improve oneself by answering the need for approval and recognition in the workplace. These human needs to gain control and achieve aspiration are strong motivational factors in employee productivity (Boxall and Macky, 2009). Moreover, the four-drive theory is a universal approach to the emotional aptitude and social stimuli of people. This theory includes the drive to acquire, drive to bond, drive to learn and drive to defend, the all of which are strong emotional dynamics that affect employee behaviour. From an organisational perspective, the strategy of giving rewards to employees with perfect attendance bonus is a “direct attempt to enhance motivation, which may also be improved through empowerment, information and knowledge” (Boxall and Macky, 2009). Another policy that managers can apply to increase organisational performance is by creating a strategy to counter the biases of the Attribution Theory. For example, managers can draft a memo requiring workers that incurred tardiness or absence to submit a letter explaining the reason why they were late or were not able to report to work. This move is essential in avoiding conflicts among employees and the whole organisation by ceasing the impulse to immediately assume the reason behind the offense through authorizing employees to explain first where they are coming from before taking any action against them Weiner (2000). The attribution theory refers to the processes where an event or behaviour of a person is determined by internal or external factors. Internal factors consist of the ability or motivation of an individual, while external factors involve situations caused by the environment. According to Weiner (2000), co-workers have a tendency to attribute tardiness to either the known personality of the individual in question or to other circumstances that the person cannot control such as emergency situations. Mostly, employees who often come to work late are always identified such brought about by the consistency of his tardy behaviour. Furthermore, researches conducted for organisational management show that supervisors sometimes use causal attributions to explicate their feedback to the performance of their employees (Lord and Smith, 1983). Therefore, it is critical to give the subordinates the freedom to clarify their side of the story before assuming anything avoids managers in concluding attribution errors. These errors are composed of fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias, which refer to the preconception made to an individual because of personal qualities rather than other situations of external nature, and the inclination to attribute flattering results primarily to internal factors, respectively. These biases or partiality between the members of the organisation can be minimized, if not eliminated, by levelling the attribution tendencies, which in turn will lead to gain confidence and trust among employees (Weiner, 2000). The fourth strategy that managers can practice to escalate employee performance is by advocating Employee Engagement through conducting regular trainings and sponsoring career development programmes. Saks (2006) defines employee engagement as the perceptive and emotional motivation of an individual to be useful to the organisation in compliance to the latter’s visions. By adopting the company’s beliefs and values, the employees learn to apply these elements to their own personal morale, thus intensify their commitment to the organisation. As a result, employee performance and efficiency increase as employee engagement deepens. Besides, Cox, Higgins and Speckesser (2011) recognise the essential factor that employee engagement plays in employee performance enhancement, stating that “greater worker involvement and participation might require workers to be trained to think holistically about their work process. Flexibility in work processes requires multitasking and team working may require some form of formal training in interpersonal skills.” Aside from ability in the AMO model, training also provides motivation since the workers will construe the trainings as investment that the company gives to them. As a consequence, employees will feel indebted to the organisation and will commit themselves in improving their performance. One of the widely used concepts in enhancing employee performance is by developing Performance-Based Reward programmes either at individual, team or organisational level. As a sample, managers in a contact centre company can create a score-card grading system for employees to rate their performance every the quarter. Corresponding points are set in different factors affecting their overall performance such as attendance, customer satisfaction score, trainings participated and supervisor assessment, among others. Individuals and teams that attained the top marks will be awarded reward items like top of the line gadgets and team excursion budget (Armstrong and Stephens, 2005). Reward management deals with the “formulation and implementation of strategies and policies the purposes of which are to reward people fairly, equitably and consistently in accordance with their value to the organisation and to help the organisation to achieve its strategic goals.” (Armstrong and Stephens, 2005). Providing money or objects of high monetary value to recompense the knowledge and skills that an employee shared and exerted to fulfil his role in the organisation is a strong motivational factor in employee productivity. When the organisation is giving out performance pay to individuals other than the top leaders, employees feel the “organisational willingness to provide financial rewards to motivate workers regardless status” (Cox, Higgins, and Speckesser, 2011). On the other hand, performance-based bonuses will also encourage the individuals comprising the team to cooperate and to be deeply involved in conceptualizing and executing tactics to reach their target scores. In the AMO framework, teamwork may sustain the ability, motivation and opportunity aspects of rewards. In this scenario, both the team leader and his members play the important role in accomplishing their common objective. Members are motivated to support each other and look out for those who are having difficulties or challenges to answer their emotional needs of self-fulfilment. Since this is a team effort, employees will likewise experience the opportunity to get involved and collaborate first hand. Lastly, employees’ ability may be enhanced brought about by empowering informal learning amongst co-workers (Cox, Higgins, and Speckesser, 2011). As a final point, this philosophy of reward management is based on long term concerns of human resource management on letting their employees know that they are valued by the company. It is necessary to put emphasis on the impact of “considering all aspects of reward as a coherent whole which is integrated with other human resource initiatives designed to achieve the motivation, commitment, engagement and development of employees” (Armstrong and Stephens, 2005). Therefore, reward strategies should be unified with other human resource management concepts to fully apply it on good people management. There are several other theories and concepts of organisational behaviour that human resource managers can utilize to apply the ability, motivation and opportunity framework. While some theoretical models cannot entirely deliver the contextual and situational elements that impact behaviour, the AMO framework has effectively resolved these issues in linking the individual behaviours of ability, motivation and opportunity to organisational level (Boselie, Dietz, and Boon, 2005). Since the AMO framework is mainly intended to perform of individual workers, human resource managers pick up these learning experiences from individual levels, consider them as employee voice and bring them into a collective level. Human resource systems assist in improving trust in management and among co-workers by enhancing the organisation’s social capital or the quality of relationships within and across teams. Both individual and collective levels are considered as interrelated for the reason that the quality of resources, trust and cooperation and in the workplace influences employee performance opportunities and motivations (Boxall and Macky, 2009). Nonetheless, the AMO framework is a complex but significant structure in influencing the behaviour of employees and the whole organisation to perform effectively and efficiently. Employee performance may be greatly enhanced depending on the theories of the AMO framework to be applied as needed in the situation or organisational atmosphere. Essentially, each organisation is unique, composed of different values, structure and people, so there is no fixed solution in every circumstance. The success of policies and strategies of human resource managers rely on appropriately adopting organisational behaviour concepts and theories of the AMO model in the workplace. For these reasons, the implementation of human resource management policies should be in the basis of quality rather than the need to have one to ensure a successful outcome. References Armstrong, M., & Stephens, T. (2005). A handbook of employee reward management and practice. Kogan Page Publishers. 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