Ways of Increasing the Quality of Leadership and Improving Teamwork Success - Coursework Example

Management and Organizational Behavior: ways of increasing the quality of leadership and improving teamwork success Introduction Organizational behavior can be defined as "it is the study and application of knowledge about how people as, individuals, and groups act in organizations" (Mullins, 2007). However according to the modern changes and development of the business organizations organizational behavior has been revolutionized and expanded in broad areas such as organizational culture, leadership, change management and organizational ethics. Thus organization behavior is based on basically on management philosophy, values, vision and goals which would drive the organizational culture. Basically the organizational culture is determining by the leadership style, communication and group dynamics of the particular organization. In fact employees would perceive this as the quality of work life which directs on final outcomes as employee performance, motivation, individual satisfaction and personal growth and development in the organizational environment. Business organizations are those legal entities that engage themselves in the production of a good or service with the intention of selling it for a profit and are much more focused on the long run survival in achieving organizational goals such as profitability, shareholder satisfaction, market share and share price growth, corporate governance, sustainability, market leadership and so on. Google being an internet search engine is focused on serving customers worldwide by managing its organizational functions in the light of its strategically advantageous position over the years by understanding of the main components of competitive advantage and how to sustain it and analysis of the behavioral challenges faced by the company in modern business environment. Analysis Google indeed adopted some far reaching management practices to achieve organizational goals. The most powerful motivator of the workforce was the requirement to become shareholder of the company in addition to being an employee. Google's all employees served as equity holders with employee ownership. Next the company encouraged team work in which 3 to 4 employees were teamed together so that time waste in coordinating work effort could be reduced and employees would be motivated by team spirit. In addition to these employee friendly work practices and motivators a number of others were also adopted. In fact at Google, work teams tended to be smugly satisfied with their own performance in the absence of standards of reference. Performance of work teams has to be measured against relative performances of others and this requires common standards to be set up on a priority basis. Broader level of employee participation, minimal hierarchy, in-house expertise and problem solving and job rotation practices were good measures but they were not backed by a system of performance-based metrics. However, with the ever increasing threat of competition in the market, management practices at Google were oriented towards creating a pleasant work environment with a set of well defined corporate goals. Despite Google's growth, its management is constantly considering and encouraging employee interaction and the exchanging ideas among all level of employees and across the departments. However effective management practices must be aligned with organizational outcomes such as internal value chain enhancement, productivity and motivation parameters. Google is being practicing this kind of alignment in its strategy and policy with focusing on rewarding system for individuals and teams. HRM is a functional strategy that needs a freer organizational environment to develop into a code-based framework or model of convergence. Google's management practices were inherently flawed though it made some convincing efforts to identify workplace discontent issues and their implications for organizational outcomes. Organizational outcomes or/and corporate goals need to be clearly defined in order to achieve at least some of them in the long term (Buller, & Schuler, 2003). Google have focused on the strategic HRM practices such as job enrichment and job enlargement rather than job rotation and job sharing. Its ability to come to terms with employee motivation and communication interconnect would have been one of the biggest strengths at Google despite the shorter and flatter management and organizational structures. This link serves as a paradigm for the entire organization irrespective of its internal management and organizational structures' efficacy. In other words the functional HRM related tasks at Google were paid attention by its top management. Google's management philosophy was centered on a hybrid model of the time, i.e. a good admixture of performance-based incentives, people orientation and share ownership in the company would motivate the average employee to perform better. However Google could have done better by creating proper channels of communication for continuous feedback of information, especially from the lower layers. Secondly employees could have been encouraged to take part in service 'quality improvement circles'. People orientation is basically a concept associated with democratic organizational structure and management style (Burns, 1978). Thus Google's management has identified the positive outcomes related to the persistent practice of encouraging employees on the classical lines of motivation. Endogenous variables such as value chain and x-efficiency (i.e. related to management) could have received much greater emphasis against the backdrop of fast evolving regulatory frameworks in the US. There were only a few higher level management layers in the hierarchy the support for communication feedback was increased (Teubner, 2001). Passive communication networks exist in organizations at times. However Google managed to initiate positive management practices that emphasized the use of communication strategy for the successful implementation of procedural rules. Managers' styles keep on changing with time and circumstances. Thus it's very rare to see organizations being run strictly in accordance with the textbook theory. Google's acquisition of the social networking site You Tube is a well calculated strategic move in anticipation of intense rivalry from Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft. However Google would focus on brand equity creation by building up customer-centric service quality points. Quality points aren't physical positions but some service related structural focal points where employees are positioned to meet appropriate demands of customers with a near approximation to perfection. Indeed it's true that perfection doesn't exist in the provision of either a good or a service. But nevertheless perfection in itself is a near approximation or a relative standard of reference for the HR management personnel to achieve in the long run (Ledwidge, 2007). Modern theories that have been developed to meet the ever increasing demand for better and more articulate theories of motivation include those expectancy and contingency theories. According to expectancy theory it's difficult to align people's behavior with their goals unless there is a clearly defined approach to motivation. Expectancy theory places emphasis on the link between performance and reward. However unlike the earlier theories it recognizes the ability of the individual worker to reach goals. Thus leaders and managers must be able to identify those values possessed by individual employees and reward them accordingly. On the other hand contingency motivation theories place emphasis on the leadership and its contextual relevance to profiling skills and categories of employees. This is in fact related to job description that is routinely carried out at Google. However mere job description doesn't help in identifying employees' skills and assigning them with suitable jobs. According to this theory leadership styles must be able to recognize particular skills and utilize them according to respective situations, thus motivating them to achieve goals. Therefore organization performance is both strategically determined and operationally interconnected. Organizational culture succinctly defined as a system of beliefs, values, norms and concepts commonly shared by the members of an organization, is typically the basis of many management styles. Google has a very positive organizational culture based on an equally positive system of customer-centric values. People orientation is basically a concept associated with democratic organizational structure and management style. Team work thus presents the best alternative against possible antipathy to change by individual employees (Narasimhan, 2005). Total Quality Management (TQM) and Kaizen approaches have enabled the modern business organization to create teams or circles among employees to effectively perform such tasks as quality improvement and productivity targeting. The system is intended to measure such variables as quality, service and people by using standard metrics. This system has enabled the company to identify and benchmark areas of improvement though such metrics depend exclusively on available data which could be influenced by bias and prejudice. Excessive reliance on financial metrics can be highly misleading because the process of modern innovation is invariably targeted at customer value creation, external supply chain management, internal value chain, international HRM practices, better employee relations, quality improvement and process and technology improvement. Organizational goals are rarely obvious to average employees when they are isolated into teams. Indeed employees can be considered as an important resource in any organization. Employee relations or labor relations have to be executed by the manager in such a manner that his management gals are compatible with organizational goals. The manager ought to have the kind of negotiating skills to deal with employees' representatives such trade union leaders. In the performance of the HRM function the manager is not only a leader but also an executioner of strategy, i.e. the proper management of the HRM function depends on his personal skills. The ability to develop the hidden skills of his subordinates and to train them in the latest techniques matters as much as the ability to sustain the workforce at its peak level in competition against rivals matters. Figure 1: Leadership & Teamwork practices at Google Skills development Coaching Continuous Re-investment Source: Writer's own diagram As demonstrated by expectancy and contingency theories of motivation Google's strategy as a recruiter can be subject to a contingency analysis (Girard, 2009). Given the theoretical perspectives of these modern theories the psychological bias is obvious. In fact the average employee assesses series of expectations including ability to adjust to the work environment, capabilities to identify and respond efficiently to day-to-day problems in the workplace. Thus these theories focus on the individual's performance and the corresponding reward. According to contingency theory employees are motivated depending on the leadership style. In other words modern motivation theories are increasingly based on leadership theories. For instance transactional and transformational leadership theories have been made use of in order to identify particular characteristics of employee behavior in the work environment. In other words contingency theory identifies the existence of a positive correlation between leadership style and employee motivation. This is not a new idea though. This link has been there for number of years. However Google's increasing performance can be attributed to the total monetary and non-monetary compensation for employee efforts rather than the time specific performance curve's decline. In other words Google's management efficiency in recruiting the right type of respondents might be the result of a purely cyclical tendency to match the immediately available skills with the company requirements (Smith, Wiley & Williams, 2009). Therefore the modern theories based on expectancy and contingency models of employee behavior can be exclusively applied to interpret Google's increasing performance. However its strategy can be partially explained with reference to these theories because HRM function is exclusively determined by the nature of the work environment and company requirements. Google's horizontal democratic organizational structure has invariably supported staff empowerment programs at every level of the hierarchy (Diliello, 2006). Exclusively pay based compensation does not work in knowledge based industries. Therefore Google has successfully adopted a mixture of monetary and non-monetary incentive to achieve the current level of organization performance. In other words the HRM function must be reorganized to facilitate a flatter and shorter hierarchical departmental structure so that communication feedback from lower level employees would be more efficient. VRIO - value, rarity, inimitability and organization - framework enables the organization to build up its resource base in a unique manner so that its rivals might not be able to copy those resources. Google has been able to strategically push its product portfolio in the internet search engine market at a very competitive level. Competitive strength of the organization is determined by its business strategies including the marketing strategy. For example Google as a service provider would have to initiate its business strategy of satisfying the consumer with a range of services so that competitors would be compelled to match its own strength or adopt a different policy approach such as lower prices to attract customers. How best Google would be able to match its competitors in this environment of stiffer competition depends on the inner organizational strengths such as leadership style and motivation of staff. Conclusion Organizational performance at Google has been described in a variety of terms by analysts and the related learning outcomes such as productivity, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, customers' impact on organizational goals, internal value chain and supply chain management, HRM practices and policies, quality management, VRIO applications and domain maintenance have been subject to a rigorous analysis here. Google's organizational performance related metrics like productivity have been cited by researchers as one of the best in the world with added emphasis on value added services on its portals. Particularly the functional parameters associated with HRM and employee motivation at Google have undergone a rapid transition. Such parameters have increasingly been redefined by modern theorists to improve a variety of work environment based practices. Independent analysts have identified a completely different set of variables that directly affect employee motivation. The strategic significance of these modern approaches depends on a number of factors such as organizational and management structures, culture, leadership style, corporate goals, stakeholder satisfaction and external environmental pressers, especially related to competition. Particularly the functional parameters associated with leadership and teamwork skills have undergone a rapid transition. Such parameters have increasingly been redefined by modern theorists to improve a variety of work environment based practices. However Google's existing strategic management initiatives and policies have substance but they lack direction because employee motivation and welfare, proper leadership style and teamwork enhancement programs do not produced results in the short run. In other words Google must adopt a very long term strategy based on targeting not only employees but also re-orienting them to meet overall management challenges both in policy design and implementation. REFERENCES 1. Mullins, LJ 2007, Management & Organisational Behaviour, Financial Times Management, Essex. 2. Buller, PF & Schuler, RS 2003, Managing Organizations and People: Cases in Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, 7th edn South-Western College, Illinois. 3. Burns, JM 1978, Leadership, Harper & Row, New York. 4. Diliello, TC 2006, 'Maximizing organizational leadership capacity for the future: Toward a model of self-leadership, innovation and creativity', Journal Managerial Psychology, vol.21, no.4, pp.319-337. 5. Girard, B 2009, The Google Way: How One Company is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It, Starch Press, San Francisco. 6. Ledwidge, J 2007, 'Corporate social responsibility: the risks and opportunities for HR: Integrating human and social values into the strategic and operational fabric', Human Resource Management International, vol.15, no.6, pp.27-30. 7. Narasimhan, K 2005, 'International Handbook of Organizational Teamwork and Cooperative Working', The TQM Magazine, vol.17, no.4, pp.375-376. 8. Smith, BE, Wiley & Williams, R 2009, Google Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey. 9. Teubner, G 2001, 'Flattening the organizational structure: Encouraging empowerment or reinforcing control,' Research In Organizational Change and Development, vol.13, pp.147-168. Read More