Management and Organisational Behavior: Maintaining High Morale - Case Study Example

Organizational Change Scenario The advertising agency discussed in this report has had a difficult time in keeping employee morale high. Managementin the company has made several errors that need to be recognized and attributed, and management needs to begin revising its approach to its employees. There are several problems with the way management has been treating its employees. First, there are no offers for continuous training to promote not only interest in the work of the employees, but also to increase education. By training employees, they will become not only valuable to the organization, but will feel that they, themselves, are more useful and will probably feel motivated to use the new techniques they have learned in training (Arthur, 2001). By not offering any type of training, the company has struggled. In order to help with this scenario, the advertising agency needs to begin offering more training for its employees. However, this is not the only leadership issue that needs to be changed. Management does need to address a few more issues, and this has to do with their overall attitude towards their employees. There is also an uneven distribution of work in the environment, and this can also hurt employee morale. Those with more work feel overworked, and those with less work feel that they are being overlooked. This often also creates the problem of self-serving bias, and this can greatly harm the view of management toward employees. It is also important for management to begin trying to apply the concept of Theory X versus Theory Y when approaching their employees (Denton, 1999). McClelland’s Theory of Needs should also be considered by management, because these employees have a need for achievement and achievement would also help to increase employee morale. Another problem in this scenario is the lack of group dynamics in the company. Most of the employees are too frightened to speak up or go against management, and/or they are not motivated to do so. This means that they hide, and do not share their ideas, and that they simply go along with what management states, whether they want to or not. This also hurts employee morale, and thus management needs to change their approach to group meetings (Employee Productivity Increases Morale, 1999). Analysis of Scenario Leadership Approach Several leadership approaches could be used to help increase employee morale in this situation. Making sure employee morale is functioning properly is very important as far as the company’s long term goals are concerned. If employees are not happy, turnover rates will increase and productivity will decrease. In order to have management use effective leadership to solve the problem, it is important to have them consider Chris Young’s “Eight Strategies for Improving Employee Morale.” Young gives a very complete list with excellent definitions and ideas of how leadership can improve morale by using a few effective ideas. These concepts could be applied to the management at the advertising agency in order to help increase employee productivity and employee morale (Ginzbert, 1985). Young first mentions the concept of “negative energy.” What is this concept and what causes it? Several items actually cause it, and negative energy is an overall feeling of disgust towards certain aspects of the job. This negative energy hurts employee morale, and thus also hurts the company. Therefore, the advertising agency, which is clearly suffering from this concept, can use Young’s ideas to overcome this problem. Management Strategies According to Young, the first item to consider is that of the job fit. Basically, the problem could be as simple as this being the wrong person for the job—the job itself is not what the individual expected, or he or she just does not have the personality, drive, or interest to complete the job tasks (How Low Staff Morale Can Have Serious Consequences, 2007). Management needs to be able to assess individual’s abilities and personalities in order to make sure that they are a correct fit for the job they are doing everyday. Management could approach this by making tests for individuals to take, interviewing the employees, and also watching overall worker productivity. If it becomes apparent that an individual does not like his or her job, it may be a good time to have that employee reconsider the job properties, or find something else that the employee may enjoy doing. It may also be a good idea to reshuffle some ideas or responsibilities to make sure the individual is doing something he or she likes (Young, n.d.). Young then discusses another issue; that of job clarity. This is a very common problem in many organizations, including the advertising agency (n.d.). Many organizations are not very good with communication, and lack of communication can really harm a company and decrease employee morale (Johnsrud, 2000). If the employees do not know exactly what they need to be doing, they can feel very uneasy about their jobs. If they attempt to do something and do it incorrectly, and then get into trouble, they can feel very useless and their morale can thus deteriorate. Confusion makes people very anxious about their jobs because they do not know what they need to do in order to be an effective employee (Katzell, 1975). Therefore, management needs to make sure they are clarifying exactly what each individual employee needs to be doing, and they also need to be there to answer questions as they arise. The next issue to be analyzed is that of personal accountability (Young, n.d). The concept of personal accountability, or holding individuals responsible for success or failure, is an excellent practice for improving employee morale. Most people active in the business environment have the tendency to blame everything on everyone else, and not take any responsibility for their own actions. Management could achieve this goal by implementing a personal accountability approach in day to day work, and also providing a training for employees in order to hold them responsible for their own actions (Kennedy, 1995). Furthermore, inspiring employees can be a simple thing to do if management can ingratiate a feeling of passion for the work each employee does on a daily basis (Young, n.d). Since these individuals are performing their job responsibilities nearly everyday, they must be made to feel a certain passion or desire for what they are doing, or they will feel bored and useless. If the employees do not enjoy their work, they are less likely to be as productive as they otherwise could be (Levine, 2008). Doing this will take time and involvement on the part of management, but it should produce very good results. In order to get employees to feel passionate about their jobs, management must take into account the behaviors, values, and personal attributes of each employee team member. Therefore, this will mean getting to know everybody as an individual, and creating a sort of individual profile for each employee in order to know what inspires him or her. By getting to know the employee better, another advantage also develops; that of knowing how to communicate better with the employee. According to Young: “Passion does not come from talking about products and/or services and descriptions of benefits.  Instead,  passion comes as a result of understanding the positive emotional benefit of what your products and/or services do for the Customer.  When you turn your Mission, Vision, and Guiding Values into a cause, you create passion” (n.d.) Thus, the employee needs to know how he or she can help others, and the benefits he or she is capable of providing. This should make the employee feel good about what he or she does, and therefore increase employee passion (Lindsay, 1992). Power and Politics Issues The next item management needs to consider when attempting to revise employee morale is workplace politics (Young, n.d). Employees see their work relationships on a sort of political level, and if they feel that they do not matter much in this set of politics, their morale will ultimately be affected. Some organizations, like the advertising agency, have far too many politics present, and this is because of the other obvious employee morale issues present in the workplace. Thus, management needs to revise this issue and make sure that there are fewer perceived political issues in order to make sure that each employee feels useful (MacCurdy, 1943). Self-awareness is another important aspect of increasing employee morale (Young, n.d.). If an employee does not know that he or she is useful to the company on any level, this can certainly create questions and problems for that employee. If employees are not told where they stand, they may feel that they have to play games in order to discover what they mean to the company, and this can be both frustrating and exhausting. They may take on other assignments or swap work in order to find out what works best for them (Mccrea, 2002). When the do this, they hope for feedback from management. Management at the advertising agency is not successfully providing this, and this is becoming a major problem factor in reducing employee morale. Therefore, management at the advertising agency needs to start providing some kind of review structure for employees (Young, n.d.). The concept of quarterly reviews, implemented by many companies, in order to tell employees where they stand, what they have done well, and what they need to improve upon is one way to resolve this situation. Another item for management at the advertising agency to consider is interpersonal awareness (Young, n.d). Employees need to gain some kind of self awareness in order to understand how to adapt their behaviors to the environment around them. This can help employees with their own plans of self-improvement (Mcknight, 2001). Thus, building off of the concept of providing quarterly reviews for employees, management can also use these reviews to help employees with their interpersonal awareness in order to allow the employees to figure out what they need to change or adapt (Young, n.d.). If employees know what they need to do, they will most likely do it, and then feel that they are meeting the requirements of the company. This helps to increase employee morale. Employees must also feel that the people around them at work actually care about them (Young, n.d.). Management at the advertising agency currently does not demonstrate this characteristic. In fact, the management is known for being aloof, picky, and in some cases, unprofessionally mean. All of this can be overcome by increasing communications, and showing genuine care and concern for each employee. Getting to know the individual needs of each employee will make the employees feel more like people, and less like a number (Osigweh, 1987). Management can start showing care towards its employees with simple memos, or by just approaching individuals in the company on a daily basis, and asking the employees if they need assistance, if anything is wrong, and how management can assist them if they do need help. By doing this, management will not only open up communication lines between themselves and their employees, they will also show their care and concern towards their employees. Both of these factors should help increase employee morale (Young, n.d.). Conflict Resolution Company Culture discusses, on their website, ways to use the culture of the company in order to increase employee morale (n.d.). The website states: “collaboration—or lack of it—is a cultural phenomenon. You change a culture by creating a more collaborative experiences for people at work” (n.d.) At this level, management is going to have to change the culture of the company a bit and actually reach out to their employees. If this starts to happen, employees will feel that the communication lines are being increased, and the negative view of the management culture, which is currently held at the advertising agency, will become a thing of the past. How can management at the advertising agency initiate the idea of collaboration? Management can do this by initiating communication and insisting upon a response from employees. While this may be a difficult thing for management to do, considering its former behavior and the individual manager’s fear and dislike of criticism, it is necessary. The employees may be resistant at first because of the previous actions of management, but by reaching out to them a few times and making sure that they do provide a response, management can overcome this issue and thus start communicating and building successful relationships with employees. Employees will start to feel that they matter (Smits, 1992). If a project is on the table and needs to be completed, and many individuals may be affected by the project, take every individual’s own concerns about the project seriously. It is important to talk to each employee and to let the employees know that their individual concerns and opinions do matter. Management needs to stay open to the employee responses, and make sure that if a question is asked and they do not know the answer, they make sure to promise to eventually get an answer to the employee. They must not make up a false response simply to move on, as this may misinform the employee, hurt the company and communication, and also create an overall negative image overall, which is something management at the advertising agency needs to currently work hard to overcome (Company Culture, n.d). Company Culture and Design Company Culture makes a further good point about business collaboration (n.d.). Often in businesses, collaboration fails because leaders in the group seem uninterested in true collaboration. They may state collaboration in voice, but their signals demonstrate their feelings as otherwise. Management at the advertising agency has been guilty of this type of action, and although this action is not intentional, it is very common and it can hurt the communication status as well as understandings and relationships in the company. Sometimes, management, for instance, scares the employees away from participating by being overly harsh towards the employees’ suggestions (Topchik, 2001). This is not the correct way to approach the issue. In order to encourage all employees to participate, all employees who state an idea should be thanked, and whether or not the idea works, the idea should be considered—not immediately rejected. If it was not the right idea, simply explain why. This is usually enough to make the employee understand that there was a better idea out there. However, even if the idea did not work, the employee should still be thanked for stating an idea—by attempting to help, the employee is showing that he or she does care and does wish to provide helpful advice to the company (Company Culture, n.d.). Why is morale so important? Is it anything like motivation? Raymond Foster tells us that although many people make the mistake of considering these two items as one in the same, they are not (n.d.). This is because negative discipline cannot improve performance or morale. Negativity, however, usually has the opposite result—that of hurting productivity and employee morale. This is an important point for management at the advertising agency to consider, because they often see motivation and morale as one and the same, and thus treat it as the same thing (Watson, 1942). This is only hurting their company and their employees, and they need to come to terms with the concepts so that they can understand the differences. There is a clear link between morale and motivation, although the two are different concepts. For instance, high morale can help to motivate employees, and thus improve performance. But, this is only one area in which the two cross over. Management needs to begin to understand and approach the differences between the concepts, and approach them respectively (Foster, n .d.). Forster (n.d.) tells us that morale is traditionally defined as: “the mood of individuals in the workplace; attitude or spirit; how a unit feels about itself and its abilities; and even, a state of individual psychological well-being.” The grasp of these definitions seem to consider employees in the individual atmosphere, and the group atmosphere. Day to day personal attitude can have something to do with this. Sometimes people have a bad day with family or something else in their lives, and this can trickle over into their morale and performance (Whigham-Desir, 1993). In most cases, these issues are usually short term and temporary, but in the case of the advertising agency, management has created several long-term employee morale problems that need to be addressed (Foster, n.d.). In the case of the advertising agency, it is very important to take a close look at the morale of the groups that are involved in the employment and the issues at hand. Group feeling can affect the individual and create low or high morale depending on the feedback the individual gets from the group. For instance, if a new employee comes on board at the advertising agency and hears from others about why the employees have such low morale, that individual may start to doubt the job and thus form low morale on his or her own time. Groups may also find their status changed on short notice, and this can also hurt morale, because if they are demoted to doing something less important, they would immediately feel that their opinions were not really cared about as far as management is concerned. However, at the advertising agency, encouraging the employees to work in groups is a very good way to increase morale and also develop a solid working culture at the workplace. Getting the employees to form groups and seek out assistance helps the employees in a variety of ways. First, it revisits the idea of making sure people at the company care about the individual which , as stated earlier, can help to increase morale. Furthermore, this can provide the individual employees with the support needed if something does come up in their personal life and interferes with their ability to complete a project. If they are all working in groups, they should be able to find an employee that can help finish whatever project being worked on, because the employee may already have knowledge of the project. A type of trade off can then be established—when the other employee thus needs help, he or she can count on the employee he or she helped. This will help to create a very good and successful team-building attitude. Furthermore, it takes some of the pressure off of management because it encourages other employees to form relationships with each other. This way, a team atmosphere is successfully developed. Conclusion  In order to conclude this analysis and demonstrate how to solve the problem, it is important to review what has been covered in this study. First, the initial problem stated at the outset is the fact that the advertising agency has low employee morale overall. These problems have started because management seems to be unaware of how to handle and motivate individuals. While these created problems may be unintentional, they are still an obvious issue in the company, and they need to be addressed. In order to help the advertising agency overcome these problems, several items have been proposed. The use of these items should help management overcome its problems with employee morale. If management can use these ideas in combination, they should be able to create a successful, highly motivated team of individuals that are excited to work for them and willing to contribute to the job. Several concepts were presented throughout this paper in order to help management meet its goals of improving morale. Improving communication is one of these concepts, and covers many of the theories and ideas presented in this paper. Communication is key in so many aspects of employee morale. First, communication helps employees to know exactly what they need to do to meet the desires and demands of management on a day to day basis. Communication clarifies several issues and decreases the anxiety of the job. Management also needs to communicate when employees are performing well, and thus let employees know when they are successfully completing assignments. By doing this, management would be inspiring the employees to continue to work hard. It is also important to allow employees to formulate their own groups in the company and work together in order to form their own relationship bonds. This will help to assist both them and management in a few ways. First, they will not always have to depend on management for assistance and feedback. Second, they will know that management cares because of the increased communication, but they will also know that their group members care. The group members can support each other and look out for each other as needed. This will also help to lift anxiety behind the job if a stressful personal issue interfered with work. Therefore, by successfully combining these ideas, management at the advertising agency can create a successful, motivating culture, and make its currently existing negative culture a thing of the past. References Arthur, Diane. 2001. The Employee Recruitment and Retention Handbook. New York: AMACOM. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=111660692. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Company Culture, n.d.. “Building Collaboration.” Retrieved June 15, 2009, from http://www.companyculture.com/topics/collaboration.htm Denton, D. Keith. 1992. Recruitment, Retention, and Employee Relations: Field-Tested Strategies for the 90s. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=15319836. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Employee Cooperation Increases Productivity. 1995. USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), April, 7+. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5002225756. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Foster, R. n.d. “Morale: Whose Job is it Anyway?” Retrieved June 15, 2009, from http://www.pokerleadership.com/morale.html. Ginzberg, Eli, and George Vojta. 1985. Beyond Human Scale: The Large Corporation at Risk. New York: Basic Books. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=10379587. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. How Low Staff Morale Can Have Serious Consequences; LEGAL FINANCE. 2007. The Birmingham Post (England), 17 August, 22. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5022302927. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Johnsrud, Linda K., Ronald H. Heck, and Vicki J. Rosser. 2000. Morale Matters. Journal of Higher Education 71, no. 1: 34. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001161529. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Katzell, Raymond A., and Daniel Yankelovich. 1975. Work, Productivity, and Job Satisfaction: An Evaluation of Policy-Related Research. New York: Psychological Corporation. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=93924906. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Kennedy, Peter W. 1995. Performance Pay, Productivity and Morale. Economic Record 71, no. 214: 240+. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000381045. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Levine, Terri. 2003. 16 Ways to Manage Low Morale at Work. Public Management, August, 35+. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5002008941. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Lindsay, William M., George E. Manning, and Joseph A. Petrick. 1992. Work Morale in the 1990s. SAM Advanced Management Journal 57, no. 3: 43+. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001679269. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. MacCurdy, J. T. 1943. The Structure of Morale. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=924317. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Mccrea, Bridget. 2002. Boosting Morale: Just Because Times Are Tough Doesnt Mean the Workplace Has to Be Glum. Black Enterprise, April, 43. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000724000. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Mcknight, D. Harrison, Sohel Ahmad, and Roger G. Schroeder. 2001. When Do Feedback, Incentive Control and Autonomy Improve Morale? the Importance of Employee-Management Relationship Closeness. Journal of Managerial Issues 13, no. 4: 466+. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000933445. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Osigweh, Chimezie A. B., ed. 1987. Communicating Employee Responsibilities and Rights: A Modern Management Mandate. New York: Quorum Books. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=27540656. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Smits, Stanley J., and Larry A. Pace. 1992. The Investment Approach to Employee Assistance Programs. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23479254. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Topchik, Gary S. 2001. Managing Workplace Negativity. New York: AMACOM. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=113709625. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Watson, Goodwin, ed. 1942. Civilian Morale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=25267797. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Whigham-Desir, Marjorie. 1993. Strategies for Coping with Workplace Depression. Black Enterprise, September, 77+. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001666252. Internet. Accessed 16 June 2009. Young, Chris. 2008, Sept. “Eight Ways to Improve Employee Morale.” Retrieved June 15, 3009, from http://www.maximizepossibility.com/employee_retention/2008/09/five-ways-to-im.html Read More