The Primary Role of Psychology of Management - Essay Example

Management Psychology Management Psychology Introduction The call center is one of the fastest-growing sectorsin the service industry. Employees in the call center have increased three times, and it is predicted this figure will double by 2015. Various studies on the demanding nature of call center work have identified that it is characterized by high workloads, rapid technological, work overload, and product and service changes (Swart, 2006). This may result in stress, anxiety, poor performance, and absenteeism. In response to these, call center need to utilize psychological management because it has a significant impact on positive work-related attitudes and behaviors. Psychological management has shown to play a crucial role on desired work-related outcomes including improved attitudes to work engagement, as well as organizational commitment in the workplace. According to Holdsworth and Cartwright (2003), call center job is one of the most stressful jobs in the world. The employees stress can result in serious problems for the organization and its clients. Managers will have difficulties in staffing workplaces overwhelmed with high absenteeism turnover. In the end, the customers will lose valuable time and energy because employees have been narrowly trained how to answer questions. The primary role of psychology of management is the human factor. It studies the person in the conditions of activities of psychology; the managers are faced with numerous problems that require development of work, as well as the individual who performs it. These problems include leadership, selection of personnel, leadership, and motivation. Motivation is the satisfaction gained from work activity. Leadership arises during the group activity. The group activity efficiency is determined by understanding. Interpersonal relations are shown in a form of communication. Selection of personnel is guided by demonstrating the necessary characteristics, abilities of an individual for the satisfactory performance of the assigned task by using psychological techniques. Motivation Call center jobs are associated with repetitive activity in which employees are expected to handle the same calls throughout the day. This monotonous and routine activity has been linked with high rates of psychological strain such as depression and anxiety, as well as musculoskeletal disorders (Holman, 2002). Research indicates job-related stress can be reduced by work diversification where the staffs are given an opportunity to develop and use wide range of skills. Job satisfaction is the judgment that an employee make in a working environment, which is reflected in his thoughts and feeling. The job satisfaction can be assessed using the global effective experience or as a cluster of approaches towards diverse aspects of the job such as payment, variety, working condition, autonomy, supervisory and promotion prospects. The job satisfaction is determined by job characteristics. There is evidence that repeatedly performing the same task is associated with job dissatisfaction. However, some employees do not respond well to job complexity, therefore, personal factors are very relevant. Additionally, supportive supervisors and co-workers and rewards show a significant relationship to job satisfaction. The management can train employees so that they can handle all customers’ requests such sales, customer service, and billing. The employees should be able to manage all types of call one employee rather than multiple experts. This will result in customers’ preferring to deal with one employee rather than multiple specialists. This led to increased work complexity and makes the organization to become more flexible in tracking other calls depending on demand and location (Seyidov, 2000). Giving employees more control than their ordinary work can help to reduce strain by helping them to deal effectively with job demand. Research shows that people personalities influence reactions to life, which can affect job experiences. Average level of job satisfaction in an organization is linked with company performance. Satisfied employee performs better than less satisfied employee. These organizational relationships take into accounts the coordination between coordination and cooperation between employees. When employees are generally satisfied and well treated, they are more likely to cooperating with employees from other department and encouraging one another to perform efficiently. Interpersonal Relations Call center staff are expected to follow tightly scripted messages when communicating with customers. In addition, they have minimum control over their working schedules or during breaks. It is evident that call center management is accompanied by high work-related stress. Giving employees more control over the content of their work can reduce strain by helping to deal with jobs demands. When employees start their work, they learn about their new jobs, the work environment and how they are required to behave attending their duties on time, dressing appropriately, and using a particular language. They learn to integrate their job values with those of the organization. Many commercial organizations emphasize customer service as vital, and require employees to adopt the values, attitudes and behaviors that support such a service strategy. It is evident that with time the employee personality, values, as well a cognitive functioning changes with their job. Jobs complexity increases intellectual functioning. People normally start without strong career orientation, but later become more job-oriented when they start working. In time, people tend to value overtime, pay, challenges, and devalue things such antipathy to rules. The call center employees should bee given guidance on how to respond to various types of call without following a scripted message when interacting with the consumers. The schedules should also be requested earlier enough to allow request matching with staffing needs. Changes in call volume should be adequately managed so that the staff can be notified to come earlier or leave later. When call volume reduces, they should be given off. The employees should have control over whether to come earlier or leave late or negotiate any changes in their supervisors. Training Call centers management can monitor and measure the employee performance a full range. The data in regularly fed back to the staffs, and failure to meet the set performance target can lead to dismissal. The intense discipline to monitor performance can result in increased stress and anxiety. These problems can be reduced by adopting a strategy to monitor, in which performance information is used to identify the competencies required and provide the employee with resources to develop the skills needed. Training is a learning process that is designed to raise the level of performance of an employee. Due to the changes in the call centers working environments such as ways of working and changes in responsibility, it is paramount to develop and maintain staff competencies through training. Additionally, due to the advancement of technology, call center employees will require continuous training in order to update their skills. However, training is often done in many organizations. Psychology in management will offer a lot in relation to how training will be best used to fit between a call center employee and his job. Organization must undertake a training need assessment in order to identify the employees that require developing more knowledge and skills in order to interact properly with the customers. This can be done through observation, interview and group discussion. The training methods are coaching, simulations, lectures and case studies. Training of the call center employees will transfer to the job performance if the management ensures there is supervisory support. Generally, training should be assessed to determine whether it has met the desired objectives. This can be whether the call centre employee enjoyed the training, their customer interaction was affected and the overall organization productivity. Research indicates that training results in improved customer service. The organization call center should be no electronic monitoring to access the individual performance data and how it is used. The talk times, sales numbers, and service scores should be reported at team level. Team leader should them give feedback to employees on how they dealt with customers and where they need additional training and resources in order to improve performance. They both evaluate the kind of training and development measures that should be adopted. This performance evaluation should not be used to dismiss employee because they enjoy job security. Leadership Call center staff have little influence on the organizational work design, as well as performance monitoring. Employees should be involved in the decision-making process, for example, designing the performance targets can help them to accept targets. Also, perception that the performance objectives are achievable and consistent can reduce stress associated with monitoring. The leadership style enables the leader to exercise diffuse and intense influence on the beliefs, values, behavior and performance of others. Leaders tend to be dominant and self-confident in order to influence others, and still believing in their values. They communicate their in a clear and consistent manner, and have high anticipations that the employees will perform. A socialized leader emphasizes fairness, serving collective interests rather than self-interest, and developing and empowering others. They are selfless, self-controlled, follower-oriented, and work through legitimate authority and established systems (Holdsworth & Cartwright, 2003). Good leadership will allow the involvement of the employee in major decision-making. Organizations should devolve decision making to teams, team cooperates across their boundaries, the teams are well lead, and the top management support team working. The challenge is to transform the organization into a team-based organization. In a call center, the incentives system that is attached to monitoring should be a team-based to give the employees an opportunity in the design and review of the performance goals. The earnings should be pooled at the center to allow equal distribution across the teams. This will allow the team to get a portion of the total based on their performance. The management should also recommend team based goals, which are then discussed with the team leaders. Selection of personnel The call center resource deployment decisions create schedule that minimizes the costs while achieving waiting time distribution (Smith & Robertson, 1993). In other words, the targeted staffing levels for each scheduling period result in rostering problems. These targets depend on the call volume, number of times, and how fast the call center seeks to serve the customers. Once the forecast and waiting time objectives are established the evaluation measures are used to determine the number of resources deployed. The actual performance obtained depends on the problem of allocating the incoming calls to the resources deployed. Staffing formulations helps to determine the number of employees that are needed given an objective function and some constraints. The most widely used strategy is a staffing cost minimization objective with service level constraints. The shift scheduling problem determines an optimum collection of shifts to be worked, seeking to minimize costs while achieving the labor requirements. The rostering problem provides the actual matching between employees and rosters. The routing problem involves assigning incoming calls to specific agents and then scheduling calls when several are waiting for the same agent pool. The people psychology as the primary participants in the process of management shows the practical significance of psychological factors in management. If psychological aspect of selection is led by showing the important characteristics, qualities and abilities of an individual successful performance of the particular task in the call center using a psychological method then it is a means of revealing people by means of professional capabilities. For this reason, it is crucial to use both strategies to select personnel to ensure adequate and productive use of the available resources to achieve the planned purposes. Research indicates successful leaders with excellent track record of human resource management practices use recruitment and selection strategy in order to respond labor markets to maintain a competitive position. Assumptions on the individual There is much evidence that individuals behave in ways that are consistent with their goals, and that the environment information assumes meaning sue to their personal goals. Employees are active seekers of information on various issues that are related to their goals in an organization such as networking, job advancement, and career competences. Psychology of management is a goal oriented process whereby the employee tries to establish agreement on the organizational objectives. Transactional are relational goal are the motivators of information seeking. Relational motivators include interpersonal environment, job security, and growth and development opportunities. Transactional motivators consist of pay and benefits. Individuals will continuously monitor environments by incorporating environment information into existing goals. Management psychology involves not only monitoring, but also attempt to negotiate an agreement that is consistent with the employment goal (Gilbreth, 2005). Individual are more likely to generate information based on the external environment because they are likely to recall incomplete information. In other words, the individuals will incorporate some of the existing information into environment and then derive in unique ways. Conclusion Call centers employs a large number of employees across various industries as the central point of contact between the organization and its clients. However, these jobs are not commonly referred as good jobs. This is because callers have a bad reputation associated with poor working environments and high turnover rates. This paper has evaluated the importance of psychology management in managing the call center staffs. Psychology management is an important field which has considerable grown over the last few decades to improve the management of people at work. It has made significant contributions in the call centers including personnel selection, training, employee motivation, communication, interpersonal relationship, and good leadership. Even though, many organizations have continued to seek for technological advancement or cost reduction, management of employee has remained a crucial component of organization success. Psychology management provides skills to create an organization that is effective, as well as supportive environment where people work. References list Gilbreth L. M. (2005). The Psychology of Management; The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste, pp. 1-21 Holdsworth,.L ,.& Cartwright,.S.(2003). Empowerment stress and satisfaction: an exploratory study of a call center. Leadership & Organization Development Journal,.24(3),.131-140 Holman,.D.(2002).Employee wellbeing in call centers .Human Resource Management Journal ,.12(4),.35-50. Seyidov S.I. (2000) Psychology of Management, Baku: Chashioglu, pp.12-50 Smith, M., & Robertson, I.T. (1993). Systematic Personnel Selection. London: Macmillan. A comprehensive text on personnel selection issues Swart, J. (2006). The relationship between job characteristics, work wellness and work-related flow of call centre agents in an insurance company. Mini-dissertation. Industrial Psychology Honours. Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University, Potchefstroom. Read More