Motivation

In this part of the course we focus on the motivation and the importance of this in the organization, as a managerial skill.

The Washington University defines motivation as: “the set of forces that cause people to choose certain behaviors from among the many alternatives open to them”. It´s important to underline that motivation is a goal oriented force.

Given its importance in human life, experts have developed several theories to explain the role of motivation in individual’s behavior, how to predict behavior through motivation, and how to influence the actions of one person with this tool. These theories are:

• Maslow's need hierarchy
• McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y
• Herzberg's two-factor theory
• Alderfer's ERG theory
• McClelland's need theory

The Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory assumes that individuals are motivated if their needs are met. This theory shows how the satisfaction of needs is given in a progressive manner, as shown in the pyramid (image 1):

The McGregor's Theory X and Theory talk about two types of hypotheses, the theory X and the Theory Y. Theory X talks about lazy employees that dislike work and responsibility. The employees describe by this theory are also self-centered and individualistic. On the other hand, the Theory Y assumes that the employees enjoy to work, seek responsibilities and are self sufficient. Both theories recommend how to deal with the workers. The Theory X recommends that these kind of workers need money as a motivation, while theory Y explain that the perfect motivation with the workers is to convert the goals organization into individuals needs.

The Herzberg's two-factor theory tries to explain how to manage the work satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Herzberg also introduced the hygiene factor. If an organization fulfills all the needs related with the hygiene factor, avoid the employee dissatisfaction, but this does not indicate that the employee will be satisfied.

The Alderfer's ERG theory comes from the criticisms of the theory of Maslow. The main difference is the idea that the needs can be met at the same time, so various levels of need can cause motivation simultaneously.

The last one theory is the McClelland's need theory. McClelland's explained that individuals manifest 3 needs. The need of achievement, the need of power, and the affiliation need. According to the needs, the author recommends how to motivate the person.

Questions

1. What are the Hawthorne Studies? Explain its importance for studying motivation at the workplace and its influence over diverse motivation theories. (Include key findings and limitations)

The Hawthorne Studies began as an experiment to measure if the lighting of the workplace increased employee productivity. This experiment result showed that illumination could affected the productivity improvement, concluded that workers improved their performance thinking they were being observed.

This effect is demonstrated as working conditions influence the behavior of the individual in the organization. This experiment showed how there are factors that motivate employees, and like The Herzberg's two-factor, other factors that involve only the employee to work without disgust but not with pleasure. Features such as lighting, moments of rest, and water, give comfort to the individual in his work area, but are not motivators, while the need for recognition, of belonging and empowerment are.

Another important finding relates to the role of manager or supervisor as a leader. That employees feel they are being studied can lead to two types of results, feel depressed or who feel they are a fundamental part of the organization. Everything depends on how the leader to communicate with subordinates.

The Hawthorne Studies are also related with the McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y. Cause understand what kind of workers integrated the organization is a fundamental key factor. Not all workers are motivated by the same things. As Elton Mayo discovered in the Hawthorne effect, pay is a relatively low motivator.

2. Based on the class activity about "Flight 001: Motivating Employees", please answer the following question: ¿Which motivation theory do you think has the most relevance for understanding the behavior of Griffin and fostering her motivation at work?

According to the "Flight 001: Motivating Employees" the theory that could explain better the success in the way that the organization is motivating their employees is the McGregor's Theory Y.

Emily Griffin is the perfect example of an employee that already fulfills the lower order needs, and is trying to fulfill the higher order needs. Ms. Griffin seeks for responsibility, new challenges, and the opportunity to improve her knowledge, and is totally capable of contribute to the organizational goals. That is why she is enjoying working in Flight 001.

As is described in Theory Y, the main source of motivation, for employees like Ms Griffin, is to contribute to the goals of the organization using their knowledge. Such workers enjoy meet their empowerment needs.



References

• http://courses.washington.edu/inde495/lece.htm



• http://www.envisionsoftware.com/articles/Hawthorne_Effect.html



• Viorel, Lefter, Manolescu Aurel, Marinas Cristian Virgil, and Puia Ramona Stefania. 2009. "EMPLOYEES MOTIVATION THEORIES DEVELOPED AT AN INTERNATIONAL LEVEL." Annals of the University of Oradea, Economic Science Series 18, no. 4: 324-328.

Image taken from:

• http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f338/sikereninoel/BLOG/Hierarcyofneeds.jpg

Personality, perception and attribution

In the last week we started an interest topic relating with the behavior in the organization.
Perception, personality and attribution are characteristics that influence in a direct way the organizational behavior.

Perception is often compared with a pair of glasses, cause each individual understand, feel and see the world in a particular way. The perception is reflected in the way that a person act and behave. As Peter Lindsay and Donald A. Norman said in the book Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology: “Perception is the process by which organisms interpret and organize sensation to produce a meaningful experience of the world… perception in humans describes the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience.”

Frequently, the perception distorted the reality. People tend to leak information about events or situations experienced by selecting information from their environment. This leads the individual to change reality.

Personality, on the other hand, is defined as "An individual's pattern of psychological processes arising from motives, feelings, thoughts, and other major areas of psychological function. Personality is expressed through its influences on the body, in conscious mental life, and through the individual's social behavior." (Mayer, 2005)

Psychologist Fritz Heider (1896–1988) defined attribution in his 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relation as: “what people perceived and believed about what they saw dictated how they would act, even if their beliefs about what they perceived were invalid.”

A worker could attribute their performance in the organization to external factors in the environment or internal factors like knowledge. Judge the performance of a worker based only in one of these factors can have negative results in the motivation of the employee and in the organization.

References

• Peter Lindsay & Donald A. Norman: Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology, 1977.
• Mayer, J. D. (2005). A classification of DSM-IV-TR mental disorders according to their relation to the personality system. In J. C. Thomas & D. L. Segal (Eds.), Comprehensive handbook of personality and psychopathology (CHOPP) Vol. 1: Personality and everyday functioning. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
•http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/A-Bud/Attribution-Theory.html#ixzz0wKaWdKPI
• Heider, Fritz.The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations.New York: Wiley, 1958.
• Takao Inamori, Farhad Analoui, "Beyond Pygmalion effect: the role of managerial perception", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29 Iss: 4, pp.306 – 321

Attitudes and values

Attitude is “a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (Allport, 1935). This mean that attitudes are formed, the individuals are not born with the attitudes. Also means that our attitudes are reflected in our actions and reactions.
That is why attitude is related with evaluation, cause based on past experiences and a social learning, individuals evaluate a current situation an behave according to that evaluation.

Based on how we form our own attitudes is appropriate to say that another of the characteristics is that attitudes may change. Experiences in future situations and persuasion can change a person's behavior.

The Organizational Behavior studies are concerned with work-related attitudes and behavior. The employee’s attitude toward work can affect the job satisfaction, and the commitment with the organization.

Values are the set of ideas and beliefs of a group or a society. Values contain judgmental element as to what is right or not. Organizational values set standards of behavior in an organization, developing norms or guidelines.

Values provide the foundation for understanding a person’s attitudes, perceptions and personality, that’s why, is an important issue that explains the behavior of a person.


References

• http://users.ipfw.edu/bordens/social/attit.htm
• Gregorio Martín-de-Castro, José Emilio Navas-López, Pedro López-Sáez, Elsa Alama-Salazar, (2006) "Organizational capital as competitive advantage of the firm", Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 7 Iss: 3, pp.324

Questions

1. Please explain, using your own words, the concept of Pygmalion Effect. What are the potential implications, uses, or challenges that this effect may pose for organizations engaging into international operations that require the understanding of diverse cultural contexts? Can you use this concept to explain the relationship between national and organizational cultures?

The Pygmalion Effect tries to explain how expectation interferes in the relations between the perceiver and the target. In other words, and applied to organization, when managers put their faith in an employee and believe that this organizational member could achieve something great, the person is more able to achieve a goal in a big way.

The theory also takes us automatically to think in the importance of trust as a motivational tool, cause managers play an important role in the organization, act as leaders, if they believe in their employees they are helping them to have a better performance. The Pygmalion Effect phenomenon talks about how people try to adapt their behavior to others expectation.

This phenomenon is easy to see in a work setting. “An employee’s quality of work and mind-set toward challenges depends on understanding what is expected of the employee. Understanding comes through example. Just as a new employee adapts and performs based on observing behaviors that are rewarded, existing employees will do the same in a culture-change initiative.” (Kathleen Goolsby, 2006)

In today’s international environment, organizations are more competitive, and success is more critical than ever. Leaders are the responsible of the environment and the team work results, that’s why motivation is a key factor.

In an international context different cultures meet, it happens in organizations. Making cultural differences do not affect the environment in the organization depends on what employees believe that their superiors expected of them.

As has been said by many, organizations have a special feature, are constantly changing, more so in an international environment. Workers must adapt to different circumstances almost every day, and understanding the Pygmalion Effect can make a difference. The way, in which organizational leaders communicate, motivate, and encourage their team work affect the work environment.

The Pygmalion effect also can explain the relationship between national and organizational cultures. An easy way to understand this is analyzing what happens when an employee is new to a company. The employee adapts its behavior according to what he/she see in the organization, although their performance is not that which dictates their national culture.

But, as the expectations you have on employees can be good, can also be bad. A negative expectation on the performance of subordinates may also affect the working environment. Also, the manager’s positive expectation does not enhance the performance of the worker. Those two cases lead the worker to feel discouraged and assign the result of what happened to external wedges.

As a personal opinion I believe that the expectations you have about someone and how that is communicated must be clear. Set high expectations and believe that a person can perform better than their capabilities allow them to, is a big mistake. As indeed is expected very little from someone who can give more.



References


Kathleen Goolsby, (2006) “Leadership Behaviors Can Hinder Corporate Goals”, Partnering Intelligence newsletter.

Takao Inamori, Farhad Analoui, "Beyond Pygmalion effect: the role of managerial perception", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29 Iss: 4, pp.306 - 321

Organizational behavior + National and Organizational Culture

Organizational Behavior

For the second Module of the Organizations and cultures course we were introduced to the Organizational Behavior.

Organizational Behavior (OB) is not just a term, is a reality impulse by the globalization, the workforce, de raising diversity of the work teams, and the demand of ethical behavior at work.

For an accurate understanding of the meaning of OB is useful to split the term by words.

Organization is defined by the authors of Organizational Behavior: the Real World and You as a group of individuals interacting in an organizational setting.

An interesting definition of culture could be “a set of common understandings, manifest in act and artifact. It is in two places at once: inside somebody’s head as understanding and in the external environment as act and artifact” (Bohannan, 1995, p. 47).

OB study all the factors involve in the interaction of individuals in the organization, but in order to identify those factors it is useful to interpret the human behavior and the organizational context.

Understand the human behavior allowed us to explain individual actions in the organization. That is why Debra L. Nelson and James Campbel Quick expose two perspectives of the human behavior, at the book Organizational Behavior: the Real World and You, the internal and the external perspective.

The internal perspective considers the history and personal values to understand the behavior, and the external perspective examines the environmental forces and the surrounding of the person.

Debra L. Nelson and James Campbel Quick also propose to see the organization as an open system meaning that the components of an organizations, such us task, technology, people and structure, are elements that constantly interact with the external environment, trespassing the organizational boundary and been affected by the changes of external factors. This view can help us to perceive the context.

There are other futures of the organization that also determines the context, the organizations has two faces, the formal and the informal organization.

The formal organization is the group of goals, objectives, policies and procedures that define the way that employees should act inside the company. And the informal organization is the set of beliefs, assumptions, values, attitudes, feelings and perceptions that determine the way in which workers of a company actually behave.

Understanding the behavior of an organization requires skills and an objective knowledge in order to analyze what are the reasons that determine the actions of the members of an organization.

References

• Nelson, D.L. & Quick, J.C. 2010. Organizational Behavior: Science, The Real World and You. South-Western College Publication, 7th. Ed. Chapter 1.


• T Ashraf. Dissemination and Net Working: Organizational Behavior. Chapter 14. Jawaharlal Nehru University Publication.


• Bohannan Paul. 1995. How culture Works. Vol. 10, pp. 47

National and Organizational Culture

In order to understand this interesting topic it is important to define key concepts like national culture, and organizational culture.

• National Culture: involves characteristic of a specific territory, such us values, understandings, assumptions and goals. Those characteristics are shared by the members of a society and passed through generations. Hoftede defines the national culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or people from another".

• Organizational culture: Organization members interpret the behavior and language of others through their own culture, culture inside organizations plays an important role. One helpful definition offered by Edgar Schein of MIT’s Sloan School of Management is: “a pattern of shared basic assump¬tions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”

Geert Hofstede exposed five dimensions as bases that help us to understand and differentiate cultures. The dimensions are:

• Power distance index
• Individualism
• Masculinity
• Uncertainty avoidance index
• Long term orientation. (1)

Hofstede’s dimensions are a useful tool that not only gave us an objective perspective of a culture; also bring us a way to compare specific characteristics.

References

• (1) Hofstede, Geert. Cultural dimensions. http://www.geert-hofstede.com/


• Mead, Richard. 2004. International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions London: Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 1.


• Hofstede, G. Cultures and organizations: software of the mind. New York: McGraw- Hill, 1991.


• Schein, E.H. Organizationalculture and leadership. Sanfrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.

Questions

1. Find and explain 2 real life examples about the business implications of national and organizational culture.

First example: Colcafé

Organizational culture: I did my internship at Colcafé, the leader company in the coffee industry at Colombia. In Colcafé the working environment is a priority; organizational culture revolves around the welfare and development of employees. That is why Colcafé has been awarded as the third best company to work in Colombia. As a result of this culture the average employment time is 16 years and approximately 30% of employees have 20 years of service with the company

National culture: To continue with the previous example, during my internship at Colcafé I had the opportunity to understand how National Cultures typically include a national language, and other distinctive cultural practices. Since the Colombian coffee is known for its quality in the rest of the world, marking products with a label that says 100% pure Colombian coffee helps increase sales. In some Latin American cultures the word "pure" has a negative connotation associated with the drug. From this analysis we conclude how important it is for a company to understand and analyze the national culture of the markets where it operates.

Second example: Carrefour

In this example is easy to see how important is to integrate national and organizational culture.

Carrefour is a French international hypermarket chain and the world’s second-largest retailer and the largest in Europe.

In 1995 Carrefour entered the Chinese market. This feat was described by the president of the retail chain, Jean Luc Cherau, as a clash between two cultures. One example is the display of fish in supermarkets. In areas close to the coast, fish is shown live, because only so is considered cool. But, in the Midwest areas, frozen fish is displayed, otherwise nobody would buy it.

The way of eating and even buying demonstrate the difference between national cultures. So Carrefour had to adapt its working methods. Moreover, in order to adapt to the culture Carrefour is surrounded by local partners and employees.

Hofstede Says: “National cultural values are learned early, held deeply and change slowly over the course of generations” (1) that is why is important to analyze the national culture especially for companies who are trying to settle in new markets.

References

• (1) Organizational Culture and National Culture: What’s the Difference and Why does it Matter?. http://www.itapintl.com/whoweare/news/146-organizational-culture-and-national-culture-whats-the-difference-and-why-does-it-matter-.html?lang=


• Lessons from a global retailer an interview with the president of Carrefour China, the mackenzie quarterly. 2006. Special edition.

2. Essay

The corporate culture is much more evident in larger organizations. In small companies that are in a growth stage, the corporate culture is not very common or easily to identify.

Corporate culture is often defined as: “something that managers have to establish and run all the way through a business, with clear values and beliefs, successful business principles and operations, and a suitable emphasis on human resources and customer satisfaction.” (1)

But in all the organizations the corporate culture is implied. Every action, goal and decision speaks for the values and the culture of the organization. The human behavior is closely related to organizational culture, because is the way that workers act that create and modified the workplace environment.

So even when the company size is small, the employees and managers are creating or living the corporate culture.

But, is it possible to change the organizational or corporate culture? Dr. Geert Hofstede says that the organizational culture includes general guidelines that are born in organizational practices learned on the job; as a result changing organizational culture is not easy and takes time, but is possible to change it.

The organizational culture has been formed for years among employees and workers, and they are the key of the change.

As mentioned above, the behavior of individuals is the root of the corporate culture. That is why change the way that the company members behave is changing the corporate culture. But this change does not happen overnight, it requires deep understanding and analyzing the organization, its values, beliefs and experiences. Just whit a clear vision of the actual organization, it can be planned what the organization should be.

After knowing and understanding the current organizational culture, it must be define the appropriate culture for the company, and what are the necessary changes to be made. At this point it is advisable to establish the mission and vision of the organization. The mission and vision function as a framework.

As a last step, the communication between managers and employees should be clear. Communicate what is expected of a company, clarify doubts and define policies, is to ensure that members of an organization are aware of its important role.

In conclusion, all organizations are equipped with the corporate culture and it can be changed, although it is difficult and requires an objective analysis, an active steering and an open communication between workers.

References

• (1)http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/business-management/corporate-culture.php


• http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture_change.htm

Images taken from:

• http://finaldownload.com/graphicsfile/screenshotimages/changing_organizational_culture_software-93589.jpg