Fluent Essays

Recent researchers stated that “[c]ompanies with an established organizational culture that includes strong capabilities for change, a commitment to innovation and a high level of trust have a significant advantage” (Eccles, Perkins, & Serafeim, 2012, p. 44) when attempting to adopt a strategy of broad-based corporate sustainability. In fact, according to the National Business Ethics Survey (ECI, 2013) results, building strong corporate ethics cultures are paramount and leaders must continue this work to ensure progress. Organizational leaders should have a strong incentive to identify and address any disparities that exist between their organization’s current culture and a productive, healthy one. They must understand the impact they can have as leaders in facilitating an organizational culture, determining the necessary steps to build that culture, and taking the necessary action to create a healthy organizational culture. Leaders must also be able to utilize principles of positive social change to enhance both their leadership styles and overall organizational culture. For this Assignment, you will continue to familiarize yourself with Dr. Craig Marsh’s challenges and those things he must consider as he builds a new corporate culture. Imagine again that you have similar challenges, but before building a new corporate culture, you must become familiar with relevant research to make the appropriate decisions. To prepare for this Assignment, review the “Leading a Virtual Organization” videos and Case Study Guide in this week’s Learning Resources, and consider the insights gained by Dr. Marsh in his journey as an organizational leader.   By Day 7 Submit a 7- to 10-page comprehensive scholarly analysis of the role leadership plays in establishing an organizational culture that includes a focus on positive social change. In your analysis, do the following: Analyze Dr. Marsh’s challenges and their influence on an organization’s culture. Summarize the leadership style you would adopt to influence the organization’s culture and why. Explain the organizational change or cultural change model or steps you would take to change the culture. As a global change agent, explain how you would infuse positive social change into your leadership style and organizational culture. Describe the incremental steps you would take given your selected model to ensure success. Explain how these steps will influence each of the challenges you face and the mitigation plan to eliminate the challenges. Delineate the key concepts you would include in your vision statement. Note: Be sure to use the APA Course Paper Template to complete this Assignment. Also, refer to the Week 7 Assignment Rubric for specific grading elements and criteria. Your Instructor will use this rubric to assess your work. Please Note: For each page of your paper, you must include a minimum of two APA-formatted scholarly citations. © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 1 of 9 DDBA 8151 Case Study Guide Part 1: Theoretical Foundations Employee Engagement: Researchers’ Perspective Kahn (1990) approached the issue of employee engagement by drawing on theory of self and how different selves interact with the roles people need to play at their workplace. He postulated that “People can use varying degrees of their selves, physically, cognitively, and emotionally, in the roles they perform, even as they maintain the integrity of the boundaries between who they are and the roles they occupy. Presumably, the more people draw on their selves to perform their roles within those boundaries, the more stirring are their performances and the more content they are with the fit of the costumes they don” (p. 692). Kahn drew on research from various perspectives, such as interpersonal, group, intergroup, and organizational research, and combined them with the job-design perspective developed by Hackman and Oldham (1980). Kahn’s assumption was that as job design determined the roles individuals need to play within a work setting, it was a key determinant of the “self” elicited from the employees who play those roles. Job design was hypothesized to be instrumental in determining whether an employee will use an engaged or disengaged self in role. He defined the two opposite types of engagement as follows: “Personal engagement [is] the harnessing of organization members selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances. . . . Personal disengagement [is] the uncoupling of selves from work roles; in disengagement, people withdraw and defend themselves physically, cognitively, or emotionally during role performances” (1990, p. 694). Thus, according to Kahn, engagement is a psychological reaction to the job role people are required to play in their work, and it comprises three aspects of such a reaction: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Rothbard (2001) had a more focused take on the issue of employee engagement and proposed two critical components that distinguish an engaged from a disengaged employee: attention and absorption. Specifically, attention was defined as “cognitive availability and the amount of time one spends thinking about a role”; while absorption “means being engrossed in a role and refers to the intensity of one’s focus on a role” (p. 656). This perspective lays more emphasis on the cognitive component of engagement and is more akin to the concept of psychological presence, dedicated focus on the job, and being away from any mental distractions that may lower job performance. Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter (2001) had a different take on the concept of engagement and viewed it as the positive end of a continuum, with job burnout on the negative end. According to them, as burnout is characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy, engagement is its polar opposite with characteristics of energy, involvement, and efficacy. Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker (2002) went on to define engagement as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (p. 74). To them, such a heightened © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 2 of 9 state of vigor, dedication, and absorption is neither a momentary high, nor target specific, but a highly persistent and pervasive affective cognitive state. Thus, we see that besides the obvious similarities there are slight but extremely significant differences in which the above-mentioned researchers have conceptualized the construct of engagement. For Kahn (1990), job engagement is pretty role specific, and it is in fact the role that determines what type of self will be elicited (engaged versus disengaged). The state of engagement or burnout is pretty diffuse and long lasting (pervasive and not targeted) according to Schaufeli et al. (2002). However, they agree on the belief that bad job design may be the contributing factor for disengagement (according to Kahn) or burnout (according to Maslach et al., 2001). To compound the problem, various definitions of engagement do not take enough care to distinguish the concept from other similar constructs such as job involvement, job commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). There are questions regarding whether engagement is an attitude (having three components of cognition, affect, and behavior and similar to the concept of job satisfaction) or whether it is more akin to motivation (a heightened state of goal-directed behavior as in vigor). Practitioners do not have too much problem with the issue as long as the construct can be reliably used to predict and manage team or organizational performance. In the following section, we will see how some of the practitioners in this field have defined and used the construct of engagement. Employee Engagement: Practitioners’ Perspective When it comes to measuring and defining engagement, the foremost name in the practitioners’ world is Gallup, Inc., which developed the Gallup Workplace Audit (GWA, popularly known as the Q12), a questionnaire used to measure employee engagement. It comprises 12 questions, plus an overall satisfaction question making it a 13-item questionnaire. The questionnaire items were found to have a highly significant relation to unit-level measures of a company’s performance (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002). Thus, rather than being driven by theory, Gallup’s approach has been more empirical. The items in the questionnaire are a measure of attitudinal outcomes (satisfaction, loyalty, pride, customer service intent, and intent to stay with the company) and measure issues that are within the remit of a supervisor in charge of a given business unit. Gallup compiled rich data of employee surveys for over 30 years, and based on their understanding of employee behavior that had maximal impact on a firm’s performance, they defined engagement as “the individual’s involvement and satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work” (2002, p. 269). Based on their national survey of U.S. workers using their engagement questionnaire, Gallup put forward three types of employees (Krueger & Killham, 2006):  Engaged employees work with passion and feel profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the company forward. © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 3 of 9  Not-engaged employees are essentially “checked out.” They are sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work.  Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work, they are busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish. Perrin (2007) has also preferred to rely on survey data and define employee engagement in terms of the preferred characteristics that engaged employees exhibit as different from the non-engaged employees. Perrin highlights three key features of an engaged workforce:  Rational/cognitive understanding of the organization’s strategic goals, values, and their “fit” within it (also known as the “Think” sector)  Emotional/affective attachment to the organization’s strategic goals, values, and their “fit” within it (also known as the “Feel” sector)  Motivation/willingness to do more than the minimum effort in their role (i.e., willingness to invest discretionary effort, to “go the extra mile”) for the organization (also known as the “Act” sector) Perrin’s view of employee engagement is similar to that of Gallup in one major way: aspects of employee characteristics (cognitive, affective, or behavioral) that have been found to enhance the performance of a given business unit. Some other well-known research and consultancy organizations too have defined engagement along similar lines and emphasized the importance of discretionary effort as the key outcome or distinguishing feature of an engaged employee. The Institute of Employment Studies defined engagement as follows: A positive attitude held by the employee toward the organization and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organization. The organization must work to develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employer and employee. (Robinson, Perryman, & Hayday, 2004, p. 2) The Conference Board offers a synthesized definition that sees employee engagement as a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work (Gibbons, 2006, p. 5). This definition of engagement is derived from the common scale items used by its various clients to measure the engagement level of their employees. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (n.d.) holds similar views on employee engagement and refers to it as “a combination of commitment to the organization and its values, plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organizational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be required as part of the employment contract.” © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 4 of 9 We may say that all the practitioner and consultancy views on engagement are largely driven from their respective survey data and are much more empirical when compared with how the researchers have approached the construct. The practitioners look for key differences in employee surveys between high- and low-performing business units, and the items that significantly related to performance form the core of what they call engagement. There are two major problems with this approach: 1. Most of these survey-based research tend to infer causality from their survey data in a way that their engagement items are presumed to “cause” performance, not merely correlated with it. However, there is very little in their research design to make such a strong assertion. 2. There is little “construct validity” behind these items being clubbed under a single name of engagement as the scale items are not embedded in theory in the first place. So, though all the above-mentioned consultancies use slightly different items in their measures, they all label it as “engagement.” Performance Management Performance management has been regarded for several years now as a core management best practice (Osterman, 1994; Pfeffer, 1998). Den Hartog, Boselie, and Paauwe (2004) define it thus, making clear the relevance of an integrated approach to performance: “Performance management” has come to signify more than a list of singular practices aimed at measuring and adapting employee performance. Rather, it is seen as an integrated process in which managers work with their employees to set expectations, measure and review results, and reward performance, in order to improve employee performance, with the ultimate aim of positively affecting organizational success. (p. 556) It is remarkable, however, how little is still known of the effects of performance management techniques on the individual employee (Farndale & Kelliher, 2013). This has been a space often referred to in the literature over the years as the “black box” of the HR/organization performance relationship (Legge, 2001). One reason for this relative dearth of information is the limited amount of research directed at understanding implementation of performance management techniques (Guest, 2011). Boselie, Dietz, and Boon (2005) argued that most studies of the impact of performance management practice orient toward the macro, or “managerialist,” perspective, with a dearth of studies of the role of the immediate line manager or supervisor “in the enactment process” (p. 74). They recommended research oriented increasingly toward micro analyses which seek to understand in much greater depth “employees’ actual experiences of performance management” (2005, p. 82). It has also become increasingly recognized that the role of the first-line manager is crucial in successful implementation of performance management practices (Nehles et © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 5 of 9 al., 2006) or “unlocking the black box” as these practices are increasingly delegated to line managers to implement in the modern organization (Purcell & Hutchinson, 2007). One such technique of performance management is performance appraisal, one in which first-line managers have a central role to play, and one which is a constant source of dissatisfaction among managers and employees, despite its widespread use (Dusterhoff, Cunningham, & MacGregor, 2014). Employees perceptions of fairness and procedural justice play a key role in employee outcomes considered crucial to organization success, such as decision making (Goksoy & Alayoglu, 2013) and commitment and engagement (Cheng, 2014). The immediate supervisor of the employee is a key factor in the success of the process of performance appraisal, and a critical influence on employee perceptions of fairness and justice (Byrne et al., 2012; Sumelius et al., 2014). Part 2: Leading a Virtual Organization Dr. Craig Marsh is a business executive with over 25 years of experience in organizational leadership, development, and change, across a number of industries. In this case study, Craig will present a real-world leadership challenge based on his professional experience that will allow you to place yourself in the same situation and to explore in-depth some of the questions that inevitably arise: Would you have made the same decisions? What does the case tell you about the nature of the modern organization and its opportunities for value creation, as well as its limits? And what are the questions it raises for both senior and frontline leadership in the 21st century? The Case Five years ago, I took over a business unit that consisted almost entirely of people working virtually. I had nearly 500 people working for me who lived all over the world and worked remotely. They were all directly customer facing, and—most significantly— they were not employed directly by my organization, but were contracted to us, mostly on a part-time basis. To provide some context, our organization had grown rapidly over the previous 4–5 years and was confronting a classic consequence of that growth—a start-up culture now requiring scalable structures and processes to ensure that growth and service standards were maintained consistently. As a leader, I inherited very little structure, other than some early attempts at putting in place performance indicators and quality standards, as well as established central units for monitoring service quality. I also had a small group of divisional directors reporting to me, each of whom were in charge of a subunit of my structure with specific and differentiated customer value propositions. One of my biggest challenges, however, was the very “loose” structure of contracted service professionals who provided the main value work to our customers. These © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 6 of 9 service professionals were highly educated and experienced, multinational, working remotely from anywhere in the world, were mainly part time, and had a tenuous connection to the company. Legally, there were strict constraints on treating them as employees, for fear of violating local tax laws. Because of this, it was very challenging to promote employee engagement and build trust across the team, accurately evaluate performance for all staff, and establish an appropriate leadership structure for this unique situation. I faced a number of questions and set myself the following three key challenges: 1. How do I introduce a culture of engagement? 2. How do I create an effective process for performance management? 3. How do I build a leadership structure appropriate for my particular circumstances? © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 7 of 9 References Boselie, P., Dietz, G., & Boon, C. (2005). Commonalities and contradictions in HRM and performance research. Human Resource Management Journal, 15(3), 67–94. Byrne, Z. S., Pitts, V. E., Wilson, C. M., & Steiner, Z. J. (2012). Trusting the fair supervisor: The role of supervisory support in performance appraisals. Human Resource Management Journal, 22(2), 129–147. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (n.d.). CIPD—Championing better work and working lives. Retrieved from http://www.cipd.co.uk/ Cheng, S. Y. (2014). The mediating role of organizational justice on the relationship between administrative performance appraisal practices and organizational commitment. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(8), 1131–1148. Den Hartog, D. N., Boselie, P., & Paauwe, J. (2004). Performance management: A model and research agenda. 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Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1980). Work redesign. Reading, MA.: Addison- Wesley. © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 8 of 9 Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: a meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 268–279. Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692–724. Krueger, J., & Killham, E. (2006). Why Dilbert is right. Gallup Management Journal, 9. Legge, K. (2001). Silver bullet or spent round? Assessing the meaning of the high commitment management/performance relationship. Human Resource Management: A Critical Text, 2. Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 397–422. Nehles, A. C., van Riemsdijk, M., Kok, I., & Looise, J. K. (2006). 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Administrative Science Quarterly, 46(4), 655–684. doi:10.2307/3094827 Schaufeli, W. B., Salanova, M., González-Romá, V., & Bakker, A. B. (2002). The measurement of engagement and burnout: A two sample confirmatory factor analytic approach. Journal of Happiness Studies, 3(1), 71–92. © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 9 of 9 Sumelius, J., Björkman, I., Ehrnrooth, M., Mäkelä, K., & Smale, A. (2014). What determines employee perceptions of HRM process features? The case of performance appraisal in MNC subsidiaries. Human Resource Management, 53(4), 569–592.