Influences on Employee Behavior PDF

INFLUENCES ON EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOR Lesson 2: Major categories of employee behavior 1. Task performance - those relating to performing the critical tasks associated with a given job 2. Organizational Citizenship - a culture of innovation and initiative-taking, team-building efforts that promote coop...

INFLUENCES ON EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOR Lesson 2: Major categories of employee behavior 1. Task performance - those relating to performing the critical tasks associated with a given job 2. Organizational Citizenship - a culture of innovation and initiative-taking, team-building efforts that promote cooperation and teamwork, coaching or mentoring efforts Work environment that affect employee behavior 1. Outcomes: types and effect on motivation 2. Supervisors: leadership and performance expectations 3. Characteristics of the organization itself: reward structure, organizational culture, and job design 4. Coworkers: control of outcomes, norms, group dynamics, and teamwork/trust/cohesiveness Outcomes occur as a result of a given employee behavior. can be personal or organizational in nature. Personal outcomes are those that have value to the individual, such as pay, recognition, and emotions. Organizational outcomes are things valued by an organization, such as teamwork, productivity, and product quality. These outcomes are what an organization would ultimately hope to achieve by the collective efforts of all organizational members. The word VALUE should not imply that outcomes are always positive or desirable. Behavior can also result in outcomes that employees fear or dislike. Embarrassment, disciplinary actions, transfers, loss of pay or privileges, and ostracism are all possible unpleasant outcomes of employee behavior. Supervision and Leadership An immediate supervisor plays an important role in the employee’s work life, delegating tasks and responsibilities, setting expectations, evaluating performance, and providing (or failing to provide) feedback, rewards, and discipline. Even with the shift toward greater use of teams, including more self-directed work teams, supervisors continue to play a critical role in the success of most organizations. a. Self-fulfilling prophecy or the Pygmalion effect, shows how the expectations a supervisor establishes can influence a subordinate’s behavior. First demonstrated in classroom settings, self-fulfilling prophecy states that expectations of performance can become reality because people strive to behave consistently with their perceptions of reality. If supervisors (or trainers) expect good performance, their behavior may aid and encourage their subordinates (or trainees) to raise their own selfexpectations, increase their efforts, and ultimately perform well. The opposite can happen if supervisors or trainers expect poor performance. b. Leadership Leadership is the use of noncoercive influence to direct and coordinate the activities of a group toward accomplishing a goal. There are almost as many definitions of leadership and theories about it as there are leadership researchers. Two examples serve to demonstrate the effect a supervisor’s leadership may have on employee behavior: 1. Robert House’s Path-Goal theory - a leader’s role is to identify goals and clarify paths employees may take to reach these goals. If this is done, then motivation, job satisfaction, and employee performance are predicted to increase. Research has supported the theory’s predictions regarding job satisfaction. 2. George Graen’s Leader-Member-Exchange (or LMX) model of leadership (earlier called the vertical-dyad linkage approach) observes that supervisors tend to develop different quality relationships with different subordinates. Subordinates look to their managers for cues about appropriate and inappropriate behavior. If a manager or supervisor speaks and behaves in ways that indicate training and development are unimportant, employees will likely have little enthusiasm for these activities. Alternatively, if managers and supervisors take these activities seriously and reward employees for learning and using new skills, techniques, and attitudes, HRD efforts will be more effective, and ultimately the employee, manager, and organization will benefit ------ The Organization The organization itself can influence employee behavior through the following: 1. Reward structure 2. Culture 3. Job Design 1. Reward structure focuses on: the types of rewards an organization uses (material, social); how rewards are distributed (e.g., equally to all, relative to each individual’s contribution, or on the basis of need); the criteria for reward distribution (results, behavior, or nonperformance issues, such as seniority or tenure). It is important for supervisors and HRD professionals to understand what an organization’s reward system is intended to do, how it is put into practice, and how employees respond to it. Some performance problems may be solved simply by adjusting the reward system. It must also be understood that a major reason why many employees become involved in HRD programs is to obtain valued rewards, such as promotions, pay increases, and more desirable work assignments. 2. Organizational culture - a set of values, beliefs, norms, and patterns of behavior that are shared by organization members and that guide their behavior. Individuals who understand an organization’s culture are better able to accurately interpret organizational events, know what is expected of them, and behave in appropriate ways in new or unfamiliar situations. Organizations that have a strong culture try to perpetuate that culture by selecting individuals who already share the culture 3. Job design is the development and alteration of the components of a job (such as the tasks one performs, and the scope of one’s responsibilities) to improve productivity and the quality of employee work life. As proposed by Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, when jobs contain factors that satisfy employees’ personal growth needs or provide elements that generate feelings of responsibility, meaningfulness, and knowledge of results, employees will be more satisfied and more productive. Implications of job design: 1. the way an organization chooses to construct its jobs can affect an employee’s behavior and attitudes. 2. to improve an employee’s performance and attitudes, the focus can be on altering the job rather than the employee. Coworkers and Team Coworkers, and especially team members, can exert a strong influence on an employee’s behavior in at least three ways. 1. Coworkers control some of the outcomes valued by an employee and can use those outcomes to influence the employee’s behavior. 2. Norms, or informal rules for appropriate behavior established within work groups, can serve as guidelines for appropriate behavior, if the employee chooses to comply. 3. Because HRD programs are often administered to groups of employees and employees must perform newly-learned behaviors in group settings, HRD professionals need to understand the effect of group dynamics on behavior Group dynamics Group dynamics influence the way an employee may behave when interacting in a group. Dynamics such as groupthink and social loafing show that the performance of individuals within groups can differ from how they behave alone. a. Groupthink occurs when group members are primarily concerned with unanimity and make poor decisions by failing to realistically assess alternatives. b. Social loafing is the tendency for group members to reduce their effort as the size of the group increases. The implication of dynamics such as social loafing and groupthink is that consideration must be given to how employees will behave when they are in group settings c. Teamwork - both amplifies the importance of coworkers’ influences on individual behavior and brings other dynamics to the forefront. c.1 Trust has to do with expectations that another person (or group of people) will act benevolently toward you. Research demonstrates strong links between interpersonal trust and employee performance (including citizenship behaviors), problem solving, and cooperation. c.2 Cohesiveness is the members’ sense of togetherness and willingness to remain part of the group. Given team members’ high level of interdependence, they must trust one another and feel a sense of cohesiveness if the team is to work together and be successful. ------- Motivation: A Fundamental Internal Influence on Employee Behavior “the psychological processes that cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of voluntary actions that are goal directed ( (Mitchell) 1. Motivation to work should be understood first and foremost as a voluntary behavior 2. Motivation focuses on several processes affecting behavior: 2.1 Energizing—the generation or mobilization of effort 2.2 Direction—applying effort to one behavior over another 2.3 Persistence—continuing (or ceasing) to perform a behavior 3. Motivation at work is usually seen as an individual phenomenon because all people have unique needs, desires, attitudes, and goals. Approaches to Explaining Motivation Need-Based Theories of Motivation Needs are deficiency states or imbalances, either physiological or psychological, that energize and direct behavior. Henry Murray proposed that humans experience a large number of needs, such as aggression, affiliation, autonomy, and achievement. Although needs are internal states, they can be influenced by forces in the environment. Cognitive Process Theories of Motivation Expectancy theory, first proposed by Victor Vroom, assumes that motivation is a conscious choice process. According to this theory, people choose to put their effort into activities they believe they can perform that will produce desired outcomes. Expectancy theory argues that decisions about which activities to engage in are based on the combination of three sets of beliefs: expectancy, instrumentality, and valence. 1. Expectancy beliefs reflect an individual’s judgment of whether applying (or increasing) effort to a task will result in its successful accomplishment. Stated another way, people with high expectancy believe that increased effort will lead to better performance, but people with low expectancy do not believe that their efforts, no matter how great, will affect their performance. 2. Instrumentality, is a judgment about the connection the individual perceives (if any between task performance and possible outcomes. Making an instrumentality judgment entails asking the question, “If I perform this task successfully, is it likely to get me something I want (or something I don’t want)? 3. Valence refers to the value the person places on a particular outcome. Valence judgments range from strongly positive (for highly valued outcomes), through zero (for outcomes the person doesn’t care about), to strongly negative (for outcomes the person finds aversive). Goal-Setting Theory contends that performance goals play a key role in motivation. The theory proposes that goals can mobilize employee effort, direct attention, increase persistence, and affect the strategies employees use to accomplish tasks. Goals influence an individual’s intentions, which are defined as the “cognitive representations of goals to which the person is committed.” This commitment will continue to direct employee behavior until the goal is achieved or until a decision is made to change or reject the goal. Social Learning Theory by Albert Bandura proposes that outcome and self-efficacy expectations affect individual performance. An outcome expectation (similar to the concept of “instrumentality” in expectancy theory) is a person’s belief that performing a given behavior will lead to a given outcome. Self-efficacy can be defined as “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances. It is concerned not with the skills one has but with judgments of what one can do with whatever skills one possesses.” The major prediction of the social learning theory is that a person’s selfefficacy expectations will determine 1. whether a behavior will be performed, 2. how much effort will be spent, and 3. how long the person will continue to perform the behavior Equity Theory suggests that motivation is strongly influenced by the desire to be treated fairly and by people’s perceptions about whether they have been treated fairly. As a theory of work motivation, it is based on three assumptions: 1. People develop beliefs about what is fair for them to receive in exchange for the contributions that they make to an organization 2. People determine fairness by comparing their relevant returns and contributions to those of others 3. People who believe they have been treated unfairly (called inequity) will experience tension, and they will be motivated to find ways to reduce it Reinforcement Theory is rooted in behaviorism, which attempts to explain behavior without referring to unobservable internal forces such as needs or thoughts. Behaviorists seek to explain behavior by focusing only on things they can directly observe: the behavior itself and environmental events that precede and follow the behavior. Reinforcement theory argues that behavior is a function of its consequences. This is based on the law of effect, which states that behavior that is followed by a pleasurable consequence will occur more frequently (a process called reinforcement), and behavior that is followed by an adverse consequence will occur less frequently. According to reinforcement theory, a manager or trainer can control an employee’s behavior by controlling the consequences that follow the employee’s behavior Reinforcement theory can be applied using a set of techniques known as behavior modification. Behavior modification suggests four choices for controlling an employee’s behavior: 1. Positive reinforcement refers to increasing the frequency of a behavior by following the behavior with a pleasurable consequence 2. Negative reinforcement increases the frequency of a behavior by removing something unpleasurable after the behavior is performed 3. Extinction seeks to decrease the frequency of a behavior by removing the consequence that is reinforcing it 4. Punishment seeks to decrease the frequency of a behavior by introducing an adverse consequence immediately after the behavior Other internal factors that influence employee behavior 1. Attitudes 2. Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) Knowledge is defined as an understanding of factors or principles related to a particular subject Skills are often categorized as psychomotor activities (whereas abilities tend to be more cognitive), and skills are typically measured in terms of the ease and precision evident in the performance of some task. Increasingly, skills are being studied and addressed using the broader term of “competency.” Abilities develop over time through the interaction of heredity and experience and are long-lasting. Skills are similar to abilities, but differ in that they combine abilities with capabilities that are developed as a result of training and experience.