Managers and their Employees - Research Paper Example

 The purpose of the paper was to find out the relationship between the behavior of Chinese managers and the employee categorization criteria. The results of the study revealed that the employees who had better terms with the managers were rewarded more by the manager. Vice versa, the research also indicated that loyalty and competence of employees also influenced the reward allocation decisions of the managers. Reward allocation is a central issue in the organizations today because it influences the organizational efficiency and working attitudes of the employees. The previous researches have indicated that the managers are concerned about the fairness in rewards distribution. The decision is also affected by personal relationships of the employees with the resource allocator. It has also been revealed in previous studies that the managers categorize their subordinates into favorable and unfavorable groups. The style of management differs in the Chinese environment from the Western organizations. According to the article, the Chinese managers categorize their workers according to three criteria. The first being personal relationships, second is the loyalty and the third being competence of the individuals. Previous researches have studied this relationship but none has ever expedited upon the effect of this categorization on reward allocation. Therefore this study is focused on reward allocation and categorization behavior of the managers. The interaction of the Chinese managers with different categories of workers differs as they categorize the workers based on relationship, loyalty and competence. The employees having distant relationship with the managers, having lesser degree of loyalty with the organization and having low performance are not treated fairly and vice versa. The author presents his hypothesis in the article that the relationship, loyalty and competence, each will have a different affect on the reward allocation of the Chinese managers. A Chinese manager tends to favor their relatives even if a non-relative employee is more competent than the relative employee. The employees who are very close and loyal to the manager tend to get more rewards than those who are not. When an employee is loyal as well as highly competent, they can earn high level of trust as well as high rewards. The second hypothesis presented by the author is that the three criteria will interactively affect the decision of the manager’s reward allocation. The third hypothesis says that compared to a public context, the effects of relationship, competence or loyalty on reward allocation will be greater in private context. The participants in the study include 87 managers from 70 companies in Taiwan, China. Eight employee profiles were designed based on the three criteria defined earlier and Hammond’s policy capturing approach was used in conducting the research. The participants were directed to assume themselves as sales managers and that their sales goals have been successfully achieved. Now the task of the participants was to distribute the awards among the sales team consisting of 8 employees. The number of hours of work for each employee was kept constant. Each participant had to decide the share of the bonus in a public as well as private context. The participants answered these three questions for each of the eight employees on a five point scale ‘I have a close relationship with the employee’ ‘The subordinate is faithful to me’ ‘The employee has the capability to complete the tasks successfully’ The t-test was used to calculate the relationship results of the manipulations. The results illustrated that the difference between close and distant relationships was significant. The variation between high and low loyalty and between low and high level of competency was also significant. The results showed a consistent sequence in both the public and private contexts. It was also indicated in the results that regardless of the loyalty to the manager or relationship, the reward percentage for the competent employees was greater than the overall mean. On the other hand, the rewards percentage for incompetent employees was lower than the average. The results illustrated that the three criteria had distinct affects on decision regarding reward allocation. The correlation results also showed that the demographic variables such as education, seniority and position were significantly related to the reward percentage. The first hypothesis was fully proved as the allocators distributed a higher percentage of rewards to the employees with close relationship, high competency and high loyalty. The results showed that the distance of the relationship with the employee and the degree of his loyalty influenced the decision of reward allocator. If the relationship was close, the effect of loyalty on reward distribution was stronger and vice versa. The interaction between competence and relationship was also noticeably large. This suggests that the effect of competence on the reward distribution was changed as the level of relationship changed between the manager and the employee. The results illustrated that the augmented influence of competence on rewards allocation was higher when the relationship was less distant. The interaction between the loyalty and competence was also strong as shown in the results. According to the competence, the effect of loyalty on reward allocation was varied. If the employee was competent as well as loyal, the reward he received was greater. This implies that the effect of competence on the reward allocation was higher when the individual was more faithful to the manager. Therefore the second hypothesis also holds true for the research sample. The results of the research demonstrate that the allocation context, either public or private, was highly regulating the effects of relationship, loyalty and competence on reward distribution. In a private context, when the reward distribution was not visible to all the employees, the difference between close and distant relationship was larger than public context. This was also visible as the employees with a higher level of loyalty were rewarded a lower percentage in the public than in private context and vice versa. Therefore the third hypothesis is also fully supported by the experiment results. The results have therefore supported the proposition that the Chinese managers treat their employees according to the level of relationship, loyalty and performance. These results indicate that the managers do care more about their favorable employees. No matter if the subordinate was loyal or not or the relationship with the manager was favorable or not, if the employee was competent, the reward percentage was higher than the average. This proves that competency is the most important criteria for the Chinese managers when deciding the rewards disbursement. The importance of allocation context for the influence of the three criteria was also confirmed by the results. The results also proved the managers tend to support their favored employees in private context than the public context. This means that the effects of loyalty, relationship and competency were reduced in the public. In contrast, in the private context, the concerns of social pressures and public image were eliminated and the effects of loyalty, relationship and competency were higher. The managers posted more rewards for the insiders, those who were close to them, showed loyalty or were highly competent. This study has presented two contributions to the field of organizational behavior research. The first one is the research itself because the issue was highlighted by many individuals but only a few managed to perform a result on biasness in reward distribution by the Chinese managers. The second, research previously done on this topic has not examined the interaction between the relationship, competency and loyalty on reward distribution. This study in the article is the initiator in the line of enquiry. This article also represents first ever attempt to jointly examine the allocation context and categorization criteria on reward distribution by the Chinese managers. Read More