Organization and Behavior Design - Essay Example

Organization and Behavior Design Name: University: Tutor: Date: In a diverse organisation as the case with the Regency Grand Hotel, no matter the level of experience we have, sometimes managers and directors forget to capitalise on diversity among employees. In other words, if managers can capitalise on effective diversity management then such cases as witnessed in this hotel can be minimised. To begin with, one of the major issues within this organisation is lack of proper communication. John Becker, having served for ten years as a manager wanted to try something new as far as changes within the organisations is concerned. Being strong believer of empowerment, he altered channels of communication and aspects of managements to something he believed could motivate employees. Such was giving front-counter employees freedom to make some decisions without necessarily consulting their managers. And so was giving front-line employees more authority to make decision contrary to what the hotel was used to. Unfortunately, these changes led to critical issues in the hotel. Having discussed one major issue in the case study, it will be important to analyse whether there are missing information before suggesting suitable framework for analysing the issue. One key model of communication as suggested by Robbins et al. (2011, p.312) is that organisation ought to put in place mechanisms of managing communication. Among strategies laid out by Becker, the case study fails to outline how the organisation would be dealing with information workload. And as a result, the manager spent most of his time attending to such. To factor in the lacking information, the analysis will assume the theory of demographic diversity in the sense that even though Becker failed to strategise on how to manage information, an organisation may still have increased productivity if the group has employees comprising of highly intelligent, conscientious and interested people as witnessed in this case. As this issue remains to be seen, the hotel has witnessed devastating consequences. Management consultants argue that values espoused by top managers in organisations carries with it certain implications and such will be reflected at the long run. Relating this to a case study in this hotel, organisational theory as suggested by Robbins et al. (2011, p.466) argue that every organisation has its own prescribed culture and trying to alter that might bring turbulence in such organisations. Therefore one way in which the issue stated above links together is that employees in the Hotel are no longer able distinguish between a major and a minor issue. From the case, this was brought due to situations where senior employees were able to reverse decisions made by their juniors rather than advising them on such. Again, Mr. Becker realised that there were a lot of consultations coming to him than he earlier anticipated. Contrary to his attempt to motivate and empower his team of workers, the decision to reduce bureaucratic rules resulted in resignation of some of his workers. Therefore a comprehensive framework to be used in the analysis of the issue is to understand the models and theories related to organisational behavior. As cited by Robbins et al. (2011, p.468) Alain de Bottom in his recent book, The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work explains that every organisation has its own codes of conducts such organisation is used to and trying to change such from its management might make such organisation to tumble. On the other hand, the author describes organisational behavior as a study of what people does in an organisation and how their behaviors affect general performance of the organisation. To analyse the issue based on this framework, it is important to compare the kind of organisation Mr. Becker was dealing with vis-à-vis models and theories of organisational behavior as described in the book. To begin with, Becker inherits an organisation with employees having set practices they ascribe to. The Hotel has a total of 700 employees with some benefits associated with it. There are already behaviors these workers are used to and trying to bring changes such as making his managers and departments not to consult him more often or even altering roles and powers of front-counter employees was already too much change to handle within that short period. Relating these to the model and theories of organisational behavior we can argue that sometimes a manager irrespective of the experience and knowledge in a particular job needs right people at the right time to do a particular job. And in as such as that must be changed, an extensive and elaborate sets of metrics needs to be put in place before implementing changes as seen with Mr. Becker. Another thing that Mr. Becker fails to integrate in the hotel and which is has culminated into the issue above is the theory stating that we can only find few absolutes in organisational behavior. Though this organisation has total employees of 700 all enjoying workforce diversity, organisational behavior as a model reminds us that human beings are complex, and few, if any, have universal principles. The theory also holds that within a pool of workforce, people are not alike and their abilities to make simple judgment also differs and thus living every decisions on hands of employees as the case with Becker results in what this book terms as “sweeping generalisation”(p.12). It is not my wish to argue that Becker did not make valid predictions especially if we consider his vast experience and how he successfully managed to integrate other newly acquired hotels in United States. However, I argue that concepts of organisational behavior need to reflect situational, or contingency, conditions. In an organisation such as this hotel, Becker failed to understand that situation y can only lead to x, but under certain conditions as specified in z. This provides the reason why organisational behavior scholars avoid general concepts such as everyone likes general and challenging work and this is the reason why when Becker advised his managers and department heads not to consult him about minor decisions. And the result was the case study describes as, “Several mangers and department heads told him that they liked the idea and would support it, while others simply nodded their heads…” Solutions to the situation in the hotel can be generated in different ways. Becker generalised personalities and values of his employees before carrying out changes he did. For instance, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) explains that within a pool of workforce there can be different kinds of people such as the extraverted versus the introverted, sensing versus intuitive, thinking versus feeling and judging versus perceiving. Since personalities and values mentioned above predict behaviours at work, the solution to the issue would be to advice Mr. Becker that before overhauling everything in an organisation, there are Big Five personality models (extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to experience) that even underlie aforementioned kinds of people as suggested by The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Research on the relationship between the Big Five models and job performance shows that in an organisation as big as Regency Grand Hotel, overlooking personalities and values ascribed by different employees undermines performance of jobs that requires significant interpersonal interaction. Even though the Big Five model has proven to be relevant to organisational behavior and so a tool in solving problems witnessed in the hotel, relying on this model may be tricky since there are other traits that can still define an individual and such are the Narcissism and Machiavellianism models. The other solution to the current problem is to understand team work. Based on the model of team work as prescribed in the book, there are two assumptions made; teamwork is preferable to individual work and the assumption that model tries to generalise across all varieties of teams and that we should avoid applying predictions of teams to all teams. Relating this to the situation in the company, there are divisions among employees and spirit of teamwork has gone down. For instance, those who displayed good decision making skills failed to be recognised by their seniors. Similarly, Becker realised that there were increased consultations on his desk meaning that there was lack of coordination and unity between junior and senior employees. Before implementing such changes, Mr. Becker ought to have put his team of employees in different categories so as to ensure teamwork. First was to ensure availability of process variables that influences variables. Second was to avail contextual variables that influence effectiveness of a team and finally, the team composition. The biggest challenge to the above solution is the notion that diversity within a team of workers is beneficial owing to the fact that the organisation will enjoy differing perspectives. However, the proposed meta-analytic reviews of the research literature show that there could be no relationship between demographic diversity and team performance. In other words, diversity in function can sometimes be related to team work but their effects might not be felt. And to add on to that is the theory of general dependency postulate of power. The theory suggests that creating too many team players in an organisation becomes risky as it will not reduce the power that others wield since other junior members in the team will not access opportunities and resources. It will be wise to mention that issues facing Mr. Becker are out of his hands and such need comprehensive strategies to provide solutions for. And this will involve the model of conflict and negotiation as postulated by Robbins et al. (p.398). Regency Grand Hotel is experiencing stressed and defiant employees since the introduction of what was supposed to be ‘practice of empowerment.’ Some of negative changes that have been witnessed are the strained working relationships, absenteeism and high rate of employee turnover. And so, Mr. Becker has no option but to embrace the simple model of the negotiation process. The best choice to make is the integrative bargaining rather than distributive because the former has the ability to provide outcomes that will satisfy all members negotiating since it views the process in terms of: a. Preparation and planning b. Definition of ground rules c. Clarification and justification d. Bargaining and problem solving and e. Closure and Implementation And in doing so, other factors needs to be put into considerations and these includes considerations of individual differences and personality traits in the process of negotiation. One big lesson that can be learned from the case study of Regency Grand Hotel is how well managers can enforce turbulent change. Unfortunately, no single company out there can resist change, even the ones with strong market share experience shifts; radical ones. Take for example power shifts between Vista and Microsoft. And to gauge how Microsoft will shake off the wave, both short and long term changes are inevitable. Therefore as managers, we should be ready to deal with unplanned changes. These can be done by following Lewin’s three-step model and Kotter’s eight-step plan for implementing change. The other lesson is that as leaders or managers, we need to learn how to deal with work stress and extend such to other employees. From the case study, stress level of employees in the hotel has gone up due to many complains voiced by customers regarding services they receive in the hotel. And the same was with Mr. Becker after learning that newspapers were running negative stories about the hotel. There are two levels that stress can be managed; individual and organization approaches. Lastly, learning to manage diverse group is another lesson managers can borrow from the situation facing Mr. Becker. Looking at the situation at hand, there were more than three categories of employees disagreeing on various issues. In the hotel there were managers and heads of departments who from the onset did not like the idea of being block from the autonomy they were enjoying before. Then there were front-counter employees displeased with the reduced bureaucratic procedures. Troubled were also front-counter managers who now forced by the system to be submitting reports justifying various reasons. Robbins and the group seem to be strong believers of group diversity but if organisations experiences situations similar to Regency Grand Hotel then when we mention advantages of diversity we need to know that implementing diversity management strategies should be a priority. For instance, if Becker could have taken little time to learn the diverse group of employees he was having before introducing the changes everyone in the Hotel will be made more aware of and even sensitive to different needs of others. Instead, what we are seeing in the Hotel is a diverse group believing that pulling together is for the benefit of the selected few. Reference Robbins, S., Judge, T., Millett, B. & Boyle, M. (2011) Organisational Behaviour; Sixth Edition, Pearson, Frenchs Forest Read More