Change The Way You Lead Change: Leadership Strategies That Really Work.

Change means that there are strong pressures on an organization to significantly move away from the usual way of doing things. Change is something started by a leader to achieve a desired objective by modifying peoples’ behaviors or routines. Models of change used to focus exclusively on how the organization should change. This book looks at: what needs to be changed, who will do the changing, what are the internal and external contexts of the change, and then examines how the organization should change. Employees resist change when they don’t understand it, when they don’t value it, and when they can’t meet the demands on them to change.

Source: Change The Way You Lead Change: Leadership Strategies That Really Work.By David M. Herold and Donald B. Fedor, 2008, Stanford Business Books, Stanford, CA, ISBN: 978-0-8047-5875-8.

Work Overload and Job Insecurity Can Increase Employee Substance Abuse

Managers would like their employees to show up for work free from the effects of drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately, many employees use substances before, during, and/or after work. For example, 73.6% use alcohol, and 14.1% use illicit drugs. The use of drugs and alcohol can negatively affect attendance, job performance, and workplace safety. Job stress can increase employee substance abuse. Work overload and job insecurity can be related to employee illicit drug use before work. Today’s best managers work with employees to reduce employee perceptions of job insecurity and work overload to help lessen substance abuse and improve job performance.

Source: Frone, M. R. 2008. Are work stressors related to employee substance use? The importance of temporal context in assessments of alcohol and illicit drug use. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 199-206.

Spending Bonus Money On Others Can Improve Employee Happiness

Managers used to believe that giving an employee a bonus for their hard work would make that employee happier. Today’s best managers know that employees typically are not happier when they spend their bonus money on themselves. However, employees tend to feel happier when they spend part of their bonus money on others. Even as little as five dollars spent on someone else can boost an employee’s happiness levels. Today’s best managers can help improve employee happiness by helping their employees give back and spend money to benefit others, rather than themselves.

Source: Norton, M. I., & Dunn, E. W. 2008, July-August. Help employees give away some of that bonus. Harvard Business Review, 27.

Three Major Team Processes Can Influence Team Effectiveness

Managers have often wondered why some teams are effective and some aren’t. Today’s best managers know that three major team processes help influence team effectiveness. First, transition processes involve analyzing the mission and setting goals and strategies. Second, action processes involve coordinating effort and monitoring progress toward team goals. Third, interpersonal processes involve managing conflict, motivating team members, building confidence, and handling team member emotions. Today’s best managers help ensure that all three types of team processes are running smoothly which can help improve team effectiveness.

Source: LePine, J. A., Piccolo, R. F., Jackson, C. L., Mathiew, J. E., & Saul, J. R. 2008. A meta-analysis of teamwork processes: Test of a multidimensional model and relationships with team effectiveness criteria. Personnel Psychology, 61, 273-307.

Tips To Attract and Retain The Best Talent At Your Company

Today’s best managers understand what it takes to attract and retain the best employee talent. Focus on employee careers with the company and not just on employees’ current job. Monitor employee goals and interests and let them know about projects that might help foster their career growth. Provide opportunities for your employees to change and be challenged. Don’t get angry when top performers leave. Instead, let them know that they are encouraged and welcome to return to the company should their new job not work out. Help less-desirable employees find new careers that will benefit you when they leave.

Source: Rice, C. 2008. Retain your best people: Focus on leadership development and results. Leadership Excellence, 25/7, p. 9.

Four Steps You Must Do To Create And Maintain Collaborative Employee Work Spaces.

Today’s best managers know that they need to create a space in which their employees can collaborate in order for organizational changes to occur. To create a collaborate space, managers need to enroll people who are open and willing to discuss the problems at hand. Next, managers help the enrolled employees to discuss and determine the issues, boundaries, and obstacles involved in solving the problems. Then, the managers help the group of employees to transform into a collaborative, functioning team. Lastly, managers support this newly open, honest, constructive team, where everyone is an equal participant, and there is free flow of ideas, deep reflection, testing, and challenging of each other to solve problems and find solutions.

Source: Yorks, L., Neuman, J. H., Kowalski, D. R., & Kowalski, R. 2008. Lessons learned from a 5-year project within the department of veterans affairs: Applying theories of interpersonal aggression and organizational justice to the development and maintenance of collaborative social space. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44, 352-372.

Don’t Force One Organizational Culture, Instead Help Subcultures To Thrive And Co-Exist

Managers used to believe that successful organizations have one, strong, dominant culture. Every employee was supposed to know and believe in the values of the one organizational culture. Today’s best managers know that organizations can have a mixture of many subcultures each with their own strong values and beliefs. Some of these subcultures support and some conflict with other sub-cultures, but that is OK. Today’s best managers don’t get in the way of these subcultures, but help them co-exist and that makes employees happier and more productive, and makes the organization stronger.

Source: Morgan, P. I., & Ogbonna, E. 2008. Subcultural dynamics in transformation: A multi-perspective study of healthcare professionals. Human Relations, 61, 39-65.

Time Management In An Instant: 60 Ways To Make The Most Of Your Day.

This book offers plenty of information, examples, and exercises for understanding time and using time more effectively in sixty short chapters. For example, delegate more effectively by giving tasks to others when the tasks are routine for you, when you don’t have time to do the tasks, and when the tasks would help others build skills. Create to-do lists, including a daily list, a monthly list, and a someday list. Prioritize your goals into three categories: urgent but not related to your goals, urgent and related to your goals, and goal-related but not urgent. If you keep putting off work, then do it, dump it, delegate it, or defer it till later.

Source: Time Management In An Instant: 60 Ways To Make The Most Of Your Day.By Karen Leland and Keith Bailey, 2008, Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ, ISBN: 978-1-60163-014-8.

Set Up a Learning Organization Where Everyone Continually Improves Their Skills

Today’s best managers know that their main responsibility is to help create organizations that will be successful today and tomorrow. A key way to make that happen is through organizational learning. An organization that learns is one in which everyone understands that we all need to continually develop new knowledge, skills, and abilities. Today’s best managers help remove obstacles that keep employees from learning, such as: set an example by taking courses yourself, communicate the importance of learning, provide opportunities for learning, help reduce anxieties about learning, and take courses with your employees.

Source: Harper, S. C., & Glew, D. J. 2008, March/April. Is your organization learning-impaired? Industrial Management, 26-30.

Employee Motivation Involves Assessing Ability, Devoting Resources, Then Reaching Job Goals

Today’s best managers know how employees tend to be motivated. First, employees assess their ability to perform tasks, then based on those assessments, they select performance goals that they believe they can achieve. Once goals are set, then employees devote energy and resources to achieving their goals. In this way, employees self-regulate their behavior and resources toward reaching desirable goals. Today’s best managers can help employees stay motivated by helping them set specific, difficult, yet reachable goals for their own individual knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Source: Vancouver, J. B., More, K . M., & Yoder, R. J. 2008. Self-efficacy and resource allocation: Support for a nonmonotonic discontinuous model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 35-47.

Employees With High Core Self-Evaluations Can Be High Organizational Performers

Today’s best managers know that a core self-evaluation (CSE) is how employees view themselves and their role in the world. An employee CSE is comprised of beliefs about four things: self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and locus of control. Self-esteem refers to what employees think of their own self-worth. Self-efficacy refers to an employee’s belief that he or she can perform a task. Emotional stability refers to how well an employee can stay calm and not react badly to commonplace, everyday occurrences. Locus of control refers to an employee’s belief that he or she can influence the environment and control outcomes.

Source: Johnson, R. E., Rosen, C. C., & Levy, P. E. 2008. Getting to the core of core self-evaluation: A review of recommendations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 391-413.

Work-Family Conflict Perceptions Tend To Be Stable Over Time

Today’s best managers know that work-family conflict means that the demands from work and from family collide with each other. The level of work-family conflict that employees perceive tends to be stable and unchanging over time, even over long periods such as six years. If demands on an employee’s time and energy are exceeded, then exhaustion and extreme tiredness can result. When employees become exhausted with their job, psychological stress and distress can result. Then, the distress can lead to parental stress at home. Employees of both genders tend to have these same experiences.

Source: Rantanen, J., Kinnunen, U., Feldt, R., & Pulkkinen, L. 2008. Work-family conflict and psychological well-being: Stability and cross-lagged relations within one- and six-year follow-ups. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 73, 37-51.

Innovation Benefits When Employees Network Across Company Boundaries

Today’s best managers know that company structure can get in the way of innovation that brings together ideas across departments. Managers can help innovation happen by bringing together people from different areas. Some employees have informal social connections that cross company boundaries. These employees are helpful at bringing about innovation. However, managers must help them by encouraging formal communication across company departments. Periodically bring together key people who typically don’t work together and encourage them to discuss their problems and potential joint solutions. Help employees build strong social webs that can generate new innovative ideas.

Source: Kleinbaum, A. M., & Tushman, M. L. 2008, July-August. Managing corporate social networks. Harvard Business Review, 26-27.

Strengthen Your Relationships At Work By Improving Trust

Today’s best managers know the importance of building trust with their coworkers. Two different types of trust are possible. Trust “from the head” refers to how you feel about someone else’s competence and reliability. Trust “from the heart” refers to how you view someone’s feelings and motives at work. This second type of trust involves expressing concern and care for another person’s welfare, and is more long-lasting than trust from the head. Today’s best managers look for trust gaps, and work to build better and more trusting relationships with employees they don’t yet fully trust.

Source: Chua, R.Y. J., Ingram, P., & Morris, M. W. 2008. From the head and the heard: Locating cognition- and affect-based trust in managers’ professional networks. Academy of Management Journal, 51: 436-452.

The Seven Minute Difference: Small Steps To Big Changes.

This book explores seven major ways to improve your life. For example, take the time to discover the purpose and passion for your life. Set six types of goals for your life: personal, financial, small, far-reaching, career, health, and leaving your legacy after you die. Believe in yourself and take time to practice dreaming. Expand the possibilities for your growth in small, seven-minute increments. Choose to be successful each day. Remember that life-changing actions require you to make life-changing decisions. If you don’t replenish your energy, then it will soon die out.

Source: The Seven Minute Difference: Small Steps To Big Changes.By Allyson Lewis, 2008, Kaplan Publishing, NY, ISBN: 978-1-4277-9794-0.

Individually Negotiated Employee Deals May Help Improve Organizational Outcomes

As organizations become more flexible and adaptable, it may become more possible for employees to negotiate individualized work arrangements with their managers. Some employees may make individual deals for unique work arrangements or shape their job to meet their individual needs and wants from the company. Today’s best managers know that individually bargained deals may help reduce work-family conflict and unpaid overtime, and can improve work attitudes and performance. Additionally, personalized deals made with managers have resulted in higher levels of organizational commitment and employee productivity.

Source: Hornung, S., Rousseau, D. M., & Glaser, J. 2008. Creating flexible work arrangements through idiosyncratic deals. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 655-664.

Employee Support Programs Can Improve Employee Commitment For Those Who Give Or Receive

Today’s best managers know that building employee commitment to the organization is vital. One way that managers can help build employee commitment is by establishing formal programs in which employees can contribute to an employee financial support program or foundation. The program should enable employees to give as well as receive funds. Tell employees how they can contribute to the program and show them the rules that are used to distribute funds to needy employees. The process of giving to help other employees can improve the commitment that employees have to their organization.

Source: Grant, A., M., Dutton, J. E., & Rosso, B. D. 2008. Giving commitment: Employee support programs and the prosocial sensemaking process. Academy of Management Journal, 51, 898-918.

Create Employee Performance Dashboards To Provide Instant Performance Feedback

Today’s best managers know the importance of having easy-to-read measures of employee success that provide instant feedback about employee performance. Many companies call such measures “dashboards,” which are named after the dashboard of a vehicle. The dashboard of a car provides the driver with instant information about all of the most important measures, such as fuel, speed, miles traveled, etc. Employee dashboards should also contain measures of the most important employee performance information and should be displayed in one, easy-to-see location so that employees will know when they are on track and when they need to pull over and fix a problem.

Source: Malik, S. 2008. Dashboards: Use them to create a culture of accountability. Leadership Excellence, 25/4, p. 16.

Employee Regret Over Choices They Made Can Influence Their Behavior

Today’s best managers know that employee regrets can influence employee behaviors over time. Employees may feel guilty about how they spent their time off and employees may regret the choices that they made about their leisure time. Employees who completely take time off from work to relax tend to regret not working through their breaks, but their regret fades quickly over time. However, employees who work through their breaks tend to regret doing so over time, but they also have ever-growing feelings of resentment about having missed out during their break. Help your employees lessen their feelings of resentment and regret no matter what choices they make.

Source: Keinan, A., & Kivetz. R. 2008, July-August. When virtue is a vice. Harvard Business Review, 22-23.

Efficiency Without Learning And Adapting Results in Company Failure

Managers used to believe that the way to success was doing things in the most efficient way possible. Today’s best managers know that this limited view can quickly lead to company failure in today’s business environment. Focus on finding the best information available and using that to improve your processes. Make information available to all employees and help them collaborate using the new information. Examine your processes and find out how work is actually being done. Study all of the data and combine it with your best information to create new ways of working that go beyond just being more and more efficient.

Source: Edmondson, A. C. 2008, July-August. The competitive imperative of learning. Harvard Business Review, 60-67.

Relying Solely on Intuition Can Result In Poor Managerial Decisions

Managers many believe that using one’s gut is just as effective as using one’s brain for making managerial decisions. Indeed, many movies and television shows portray a rebellious leader who uses only their gut intuition to determine a course of action. Today’s best managers know that intuition alone is not the best way to make decisions. The best way to make decisions is through a balanced blend of intuition, personal experiences, individual judgment, and thorough and careful analysis of reliable data.

Source: Clancy, K. J., & Krieg, P. C. 2008. Management myth #1: Your gut is not smarter than your head. Leadership Excellence, 25/4, p. 12.

Simple Principles: To Think Big And Achieve Success.

Success is different for everyone. What you define as success should be what you aspire to have and to become for your life. The book stresses that individuals should become people of increasing value. The book offers 200 simple principles for achieving success, and is written around three main areas: increased productivity, importance of networking, and taking the initiative and making things happen. Simple principles include: identify the skills that you have, then put them to use, never eat alone, write your own blog, be sure not to burn bridges, don’t wait to be told, make your voice heard, and don’t be afraid to break the mold.

Source: Simple Principles: To Think Big And Achieve Success. By Alex A. Lluch and Helen Eckman, 2008, WS Publishing Group, San Diego, CA, ISBN: 978-1-934386-07-1.

Flexible Work Arrangements Pay Off For Employees And For Employers

Today’s best managers know the importance of providing flexible work arrangements to increase employee productivity. More and more managers around the world are helping their employees rearrange their work schedule, and in return are getting happier and more productive employees. Although the Family and Medical Leave Act in the United States helps employees take time off to take care of a child or parent, there are no laws in the US requiring employers to provide flexible working hours. Today’s best managers are taking the lead and offering flexible working hours that meet the needs of both the company and the employee.

Source: What U.S. employers can learn about flexible work in other nations. HRfocus. 2008, August. Page 8.

High Team Quality Relationships Can Lead To Positive Emotions For Team Members

Today’s best managers know that TMX stands for team member exchange and refers to the quality of the relationship between team members. Team members who have high quality relationships with their team members tend to assist each other and share information more than teams with low TMX. Teams with higher TMX tend to have higher positive emotions, such as excitement, enjoyment, satisfaction, and enthusiasm, compared to teams with low TMX. This happens because over time teams become more experienced, and negative emotions are reduced due to familiarity and understanding among team members.

Source: Tse, H. H M., & Dasborough, M. T. 2008, April. A study of exchange and emotions in team member relationships. Group & Organization Management, 33, 194-215.

Employee View Of Self Can Influence Their Organizational Commitment

Today’s best managers know that an employee’s view of themselves can influence their organizational commitment. Some employees view themselves based on their membership in groups, and how much they adhere to the goals and values of groups to which they belong. These employees typically have an emotional attachment to their organization and are internally driven to work hard for the company. Other employees have a view of themselves based on their own advantage and well-being compared to others. These employees evaluate themselves based on their own personal goals, rewards, and successes, and they want to surpass other employees. These employees only stay with an organization when it provides them with rewards and benefits that they desire.

Source: Johnson, R. E., & Chang, C.-H. 2008. Relationships between organizational commitment and its antecedents: Employee self-concept matters. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 513-541.

Today’s Best Managers Help Employees Make Important Job Transitions

Work is an important part of society. At an early age, children are asked what they want to be when they grow up. Adults get-to-know each other by asking what someone does for a living. Having a satisfying and fulfilling job can help employees have better mental and physical health. On the other hand, not having a job, or being underemployed, can lead to poor mental and physical health. Today’s best managers know that employees make many decisions about their work, both voluntarily and involuntarily, and they help employees transition successfully from one job opportunity to another.

Source: Fouad, N. A., & Bynner, J. 2008, May-June. Work transitions. American Psychologist, 63, 241-251.

Organizations That Successfully Change and Evolve Will Out-Perform The Competition

Today’s best managers know that creating a firm that is resilient and sustainable is vital in today’s marketplace. Firms will be successful that are perceptive, vigilant, continuously lean, think differently from the rest, and anticipate change. Firms that are proactive, are aware of who they are, have strong leadership, make decisive decisions quickly, and are willing to be innovative, will perform well. Lastly, firms that know how to solve problems from the top down, and can get changes implemented, will out-perform the competition. Firms that don’t do these things will be left in the dust.

Source: Harper, S. C., & Glew, D. J. 2008, May/June. Become an ever-evolving enterprise. Industrial Management, 22-26.

Job Satisfaction Goes Up For Some Employees, But Not For Others, When They Help Other Employees

Some employees go beyond their job description and actively help other employees, which is called organizational citizenship behavior. These employees help others because they expect that those other employees will help them later in return. For these employees, their job satisfaction improves when they help others. Today’s best managers know that some employees may not help other employees solely because they believe they will be helped in return. Instead, these employees naturally have a high concern for others that enables them to be good corporate citizens without expecting reciprocal help in response. Unfortunately, job satisfaction for these employees may not go up as a result of helping others.

Source: Lester, S. W., Meglino, B. M., & Korsgaard, M. A. 2008. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 829-841.

Speak To Win: How To Present With Power In Any Situation.

This book offers a great deal of information about how to make excellent presentations in almost any situation. Great presentations require high levels of energy, vitality, enthusiasm, warmth, and friendliness from the presenter. Have fun while you present and enjoy what you are doing. Pretend that you are sharing great content with friends that you care about. Have a clear objective. Learn the language of the audience and their company. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse your presentation. Check out the room before you present. Keep your arms at your side and not up in front of you when you talk. Tell them stories. Use silence and pauses, smile, and give a wonderful presentation.

Source: Speak To Win: How To Present With Power In Any Situation.By Brian Tracy, 2008, American Management Association, NY, ISBN: 978-0-8144-0157-6.

Employees Tend to Focus on Negative Influences At Work Instead of Positive Ones

Today’s best managers know that employees can be influenced by both positive and negative sources. However, these two types of influences sometimes compete with each other. On the one hand, employees react to positive influences, such as praise, respect, and attention. On the other hand, employees can react to negative influences, such as criticism, anger, and frustration. Today’s best managers know that negative forces tend to overshadow the positive ones. So, be sure to give extra emphasis on positive aspects of employee performance to help encourage the positive influences for improving employee behaviors.

Source: Cameron, K. S. 2008. Paradox in positive organizational change. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44, 7-24.

Structure Teams So That Team Members Aren’t In Competition With Each Other

Managers used to believe that teamwork was always the way to structure employees in order to get optimal organizational outcomes. Today’s best managers know that sometimes teamwork can get in the way of good performance. Instead of unifying different groups, teamwork can sometimes have unintended negative effects on team member attitudes and performance. Negative teamwork results can happen when employees get rewards for being good, specialized, and individualistic performers, and at the same time get rewards when being good, integrated team players. Today’s best managers are aware of this potential problem and help structure rewards to lessen these conflicts.

Source: Finn, R. 2008. The language of teamwork: Reproducing professional divisions in the operating theatre. Human Relations, 61, 103-130.

Having A Short-Term Focus Can Get Managers Into Long-Term Trouble

Managers tend to focus on maximizing their short-term gains, and that tends to blind them from future events and surprises. Managers tend to believe that the future will always be rosy, so underestimate potential future disasters. Managers tend to be influenced more by the short-term, and aren’t willing to sacrifice now for potential future benefits. Managers make short-sighted decisions that advance them now, but hurt them in the long-run. Today’s best managers are aware of these dangerous tendencies and work hard to avoid predictable disasters. For example, make both short-term and long-term plans at the same time to limit future damage.

Source: How short-term focus contributes to future disasters. 2008, December. Negotiation, pp. 6-7.

Not All Rewards Are Valued By All Employees

Managers often wonder why rewards don’t always motivate employee performance. Today’s best managers understand that rewards can mean different things to different employees. Employees can fall in one or more reward categories: 1) employees who desire awards and trophies, 2) employees who value days off, flexible scheduling, and free meals, but not rewards that take them away from home, 3) employees who value cash and cash-equivalents, 4) employees who value flexibility, such as in scheduling, 5) employees who value praise, whether written or oral, and 6) employees who want to move up and be promoted above all else.

Source: Van Dyke, M., & Garlick R. . Recognition and reward: What are the top tenets and practices? Leadership Excellence, 25/1, pp. 17-18.

Let Your Employees Know What Is Expected Of Them

Today’s best managers get involved with their employees to help improve their working relationships and their performance. Get involved with your employees when their work is not up to par, when there are personnel problems, and when there is a serious conflict. Help employees generate ideas, by showing them that it is OK to speak up and voice their views. Give employees the courage to risk failure and try new, innovative ideas. Realize that the success of the company rests on future leaders, so help develop the leaders of tomorrow for your organization.

Source: Bossidy, L. 2008. What your leader expects of you: And what you should expect. Leadership Excellence, 25/2, p. 6.

Time Out Of Work Leads To Skill Depreciation And Lower Wages

Today’s best managers know about the importance of human capital on wages. Employees develop their knowledge, skills, and abilities, called human capital, then sell these to the organization that will pay them the highest wages. Employees can increase their human capital through work experience and time on the job. Unfortunately, time away from the job, such as for having and raising children, and when unemployed, can cause employee skills to depreciate. When employees lose skills, then they also lose human capital, and that tends to result in a loss of wages.

Source: Edn, P.-A., & Gustavsson, M. 2008, January. Time out of work and skill depreciation. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 61, 163-180.

Negotiating With Giants: Get What You Want Against The Odds.

This book examines how individuals can be as successful as major business players. The book explains how individuals can create power that helps them level the playing field with large companies that seem too large and too dominant to defeat. If you can’t beat them from the outside, then join their ranks and defeat them from the inside. Giants tend to stay away from the negotiating table, so you will have to find other ways to get in the door to get what you want. Giants rarely apologize. Don’t talk with just one person in a large organization, who may disappear.

Source: Negotiating With Giants: Get What You Want Against The Odds. By Peter D. Johnston, 2008, Negotiation Press, Cambridge, MA, ISBN: 978-0-9809421-0-1

Employees Accept Negative Feedback More Readily From Managers They Trust

Managers often give feedback to employees to help them change and improve their job performance. Today’s best managers know that employees may be resistant to change when they don’t have a good relationship with their manager. Employees tend to accept negative feedback when it comes from a person that they like, they trust, and who they think has good intentions. However, when employees don’t have a good relationship with their manager, they tend to resist change if the manager tries to force change or threatens them with punishment if they don’t change.

Source: Furst, S. A., & Cable, D. 2008. Employee resistance to organizational change: Managerial influence tactics and leader-member exchange. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 453-462.

Help Team Members Understand How Teams Develop For Better Team Performance

Today’s best managers know that teams develop and change as they mature. Time plays a critical role in this process. Teams develop over time through a series of episodes in which team members must perform different behaviors at different times depending on task demands. The context of the organization, the team, and the team members influence team performance and lead to team processes such as feelings of safety, potency, and belonging. These team processes then lead to team performance success or failure, which in turn leads back to shaping aspects of the organization, the team, and the team members.

Source: Mathieu, J., Maynard, M. T., Rapp, T., & Gilson, L. 2008, June. Team effectiveness 1997-2007: A review of recent advancements and a glimpse into the future. Journal of Management, 34, 410-476.

Fight All Four Types of Organizational Corruption For Best Results

Most managers actively try to stop corrupt behavior in the workplace, but may not be addressing all four sources of organizational corruption. Today’s best managers know the four types of corruption: 1) an individual acting for their own personal gain, 2) an individual acting corruptly for the company’s gain, 3) a group of employees acting for their own personal benefit, and 4) a group of employees acting corruptly to benefit the company. Stopping group behaviors, such as collusion, may be harder to stop than individual corrupt practices. Hiring more ethical employees and training all employees about the four types of corruption can help lessen corrupt behavior.

Source: Pinto, J., Leana, C. R., & Pil, F. K. 2008. Corrupt organizations or organizations of corrupt individuals? Two types of organization-level corruption. Academy of Management Review, 33, 685-709.

Avoid The Pitfalls That Keep Your Employees From Managing Up To You

The traditional view of management is that managers lead down to their employees. Today’s best managers know that effective management goes both ways: down to employees, and up from employees to managers. Help your employees manage up to you by avoiding the four most common things that prevent upward management. Employees have been conditioned to take orders and not provide instructions to their manager. Employees are often fearful that there will be negative consequences if they manage up to their boss. Employees may fear that bosses will judge them unfairly. Lastly, employees often feel that their boss’ ego will prevent him or her from listening to employee suggestions and advice.

Source: Antonioni, D. 2008, January/February. Lead your manager. Industrial Management, 19-22.

Help Employees Feels Indispensable To Help Improve Work Group Performance

Employees in work groups are usually very aware of how much their individual work efforts add to the overall performance of the group. When individuals in groups believe that their own work efforts don’t help the group perform better overall, then employees can sometimes work less hard. However, today’s best managers know that when employees are helped to see how their individual work helps the entire group perform better, then job satisfaction and work performance can drastically increase. Help your employees feel indispensable and their work efforts might increase too.

Hertel, G., Niemeyer, G., & Clauss, A. 2008. Social indispensability or social comparison: The why and when of motivation gains of inferior group members. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 1329-1363

Help Employees Set Realistic Expectations For Pay Increases To Get The Best Job Performance

Unfortunately, merit pay raises may not motivate employees to work harder. This is because employees’ pay for performance expectations can interfere with the value of getting a raise. If employees have too high of an expectation that they will get a pay raise, then they may feel let down if their pay raise seems too low. Additionally, if employees feel deceived about expected pay raises, then they can seriously lower their performance levels in response. Today’s best managers help set employee expectations for pay raises so that employees won’t have overly high or overly low raise expectations.

Source: Schaubroeck, J., Shaw, J. D., Duffy, M. K., & Mitra, A. 2008. An under-met and over-met expectations model of employee reactions to merit raises. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 424-434.

Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change And Changing Leaders.

This book offers the first sweeping review of followers and examines how followers relate to leaders. The author remarks that the usual focus on leaders at the expense of followers has distorted the real dynamic between leaders and followers. The book describes five main types of followers: isolates, bystanders, participants, activists, and diehards. The book describes the range of followers from the completely withdrawn to the fully engaged. The book explains how followers, who seemingly have no apparent power, authority, or influence, have an impact on leaders.

Source: Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change And Changing Leaders. By Barbara Kellerman, 2008, Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA, ISBN: 978-1-4221-0368-5.

Add Self-Coaching Supplements To Improve Training Results On The Job

Organizations are spending a tremendous amount of money to improve employee interpersonal skills. Unfortunately, classroom training alone has not been shown to be a very effective way to teach these skills. Today’s best managers know that training results can be improved by adding self-coaching supplements to classroom training methods. Self-coaching is a three-step process that is done solely by an employee. First, employees complete a checklist assessing how much they use their new skills on the job. Second, employees reflect on how they perform during interpersonal incidents. Third, employees set goals to help them maintain and enhance their interpersonal skills on the job.


Source: Tews, M. J., & Tracey, J. B. 2008. An empirical examination of posttraining on-the-job supplements for enhancing the effectiveness of interpersonal skills training. Personnel Psychology, 61, 375-401.

Some Business Activities Can Now Be Done Effectively Off-Site Via The Internet

Today’s best managers know that the internet can help them redesign their organizations and dramatically improve their productivity. Many business activities can now be done in other places via the internet rather than in the home office. Creating a service-oriented architecture, or SOA, for your business is kind of like putting building blocks together. Instead of doing a process yourself, take out the block, and put in one where the activity is seamlessly done for you over the internet. The key to using internet-based software components relies on carefully redesigning your processes and operations and figuring out where internet-based activities can be plugged in effectively.

Source: Merrifield, R., Calhoun, J., & Stevens, D. 2008, June. The next revolution in productivity. Harvard Business Review, 72-80.

People Are More Likely To Help Individuals Who Are Like Themselves Versus Helping Groups

Today’s best managers know the importance of employees helping other individuals in the workplace. Unfortunately, employees may help those who are similar to themselves more often than those who are different from them. Indeed, employees may be more likely to help a single individual in need who is in their same demographic group than they are likely to help an individual who is different from them. Today’s best managers might get more helping behavior if employees are given opportunities to help individuals who are demographically similar to them.

Source: Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. 2008. “One of us”: Outstanding willingness to help save a single identified compatriot. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 104, 150-157.

Invest In Employee Engagement, Health, and Well-Being, To Help The Organization Flourish

Employees who are engaged in their work feel energetic, dedicated, and are absorbed in their jobs. Employees who are engaged are also happier and healthier, which makes having engaged employees a sensible goal for managers. However, today’s best managers believe that having happier and healthier employees is a goal in and of itself, regardless of the impact on the organization. Improving employee health and well-being is no longer seen as a cost. Instead, it is seen as an investment in employees that will directly help improve the bottom line of the organization.

Source: Bakker, A. B., & Schaufeli, W. B. 2008. Positive organizational behavior: Engaged employees in flourishing organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 147-154.

Employee Attitudes Can Be Slow To Recover From A Company Financial Downturn

Managers would like their employees to be trusting, loyal, and committed to the organization. Unfortunately, many of today’s organizations are facing serious economic downturns which can have long-lasting effects on employee attitudes. Today’s best managers know that even if a company recovers from a serious down-turn and improves its economic performance, employee attitudes may suffer permanently and never fully recover. For example, even if the company returns to a previously solid state, employee attitudes, such as trust, loyalty, and commitment, may never recover from a downturn. Today’s best managers are aware of this phenomenon and work to improve employee attitudes long after they have helped a company to improve financially.

Source: Grunberg, L., Moore, S., Greenberg, E. S., & Sikora, P. 2008. The changing workplace and its effects: A longitudinal examination of employee responses at a large company. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44, 215-236.

Manage Your Own Life Well So That You Can Manage Your Work Well

Today’s best managers know that if they can’t manage their own life well, then they probably can’t manage their own work well either. Managers who manage their own life well: 1) forge their own trail in life, even if it means going in the opposite direction from everyone else, 2) realize that there is a direct correlation between how they view their life and how they view their work, 3) don’t think of work time versus private time, but know that the two are integrated, 4) take time to step away from the difficulties of work to rest, renew, and recharge, and 5) put other people first, such as family, friends, and community, and build great support networks.

Source: Gergen, C., & Vanourek, G. 2008. Life entrepreneurship: Start being the leader of your own life. Leadership Excellence, 25/4, p. 9.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull Of Irrational Behavior.

This book examines a number of interesting psychological phenomena that influence human behavior in seemingly irrational ways. The authors discuss loss aversion, or how people go to great lengths to avoid losing. They discuss a diagnosis bias in which people make a diagnosis, such as they like someone, then go out of their way to support that conclusion, and are unable to reevaluate or change that incorrect diagnosis. The authors discuss the chameleon effect in which people behave like their labels, such as a woman described as beautiful acting more beautifully as a result.

Source: Sway: The Irresistible Pull Of Irrational Behavior. By Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, 2008, Doubleday, NY, ISBN: 978-0-385-52438-4

Flexibility and Job Control Can Lead To Employees Having Good Mental Health and Low Absenteeism

Today’s best managers know that employees who have control over how their do their job can have higher mental health and lower absentee rates compared to employees who don’t have job control. Mental health and absentee rates can be even better for employees who have high levels of flexibility. Employees who are flexible have the ability to focus on the here and now, and to adjust their current actions in response to the present moment. Employees who lack flexibility tend not to “go with the flow.” Instead, inflexible employees try to alter, avoid, suppress, over analyze, or control their current situation at work.

Source: Bond, F. W., Flaxman, P. E., & Bunce, D. 2008. The influence of psychological flexibility on work redesign: Mediated moderation of a work reorganization intervention. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 645-654.

Employees Who Self-Enhance Their Knowledge and Abilities May Be Poor Team Performers

Today’s best managers know that employees may not often have accurate and realistic views of themselves. Some employees may exaggerate about their own skills and abilities to themselves and to others. This self-enhancement can lead to less career success for employees, but can improve employee health and well-being. Employees who tend to enhance their own views of themselves may not perform as well on team tasks. However, employees who tend to exaggerate their own belief about themselves may perform well on tasks that they can perform by themselves.

Source: Kwan, V. S. Y., John, O. P., Robins, R. W., & Kuang, L. L. 2008. Conceptualizing and assessing self-enhancement bias: A componential approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 1062-1077.

Getting Emotionally Involved May Be A Better Way To Cope When Giving Employees Bad News

Sometimes managers must do things that hurt employees, such as firing them, demoting them, or giving them bad news. Managers used to believe that doing these necessary but evil activities required managers to be cold, emotionless, and to deliver company-written scripts in an almost robot-like manner. Today’s best managers know that it can be better to show one’s feelings and to identify with the person receiving the bad news, rather than to hide from those feelings. Sharing the bad experience with the employee may actually help the manager cope better when performing necessarily evil behaviors in the workplace.

Source: Margolis, J. D., & Molinsky, A. 2008. Navigating the bind of necessary evils: Psychological engagement and the production of interpersonally sensitive behavior. Academy of Management Journal, 51, 847-872.

Improve Customer Service By Making a Blueprint Of Your Customer Service Process

Today’s best managers know the importance of providing excellent customer service, and work hard to continually improve it. Unlike physical goods, services are made up of a series of events or steps that unfold over time. Today’s best managers know that it is difficult to provide customers with a unique, or hopefully transforming, customer experience. One way to help improve customer service is by making a visual representation of the steps in your customer service process, called a blueprint, and then working on improving each step of that process.

Source: Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. 2008, Spring. Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review, 50, 66-94.

Motivate Employees By Helping Them Fulfill Four Drives

Today’s best managers know that employees have four main drives and employees rely on their managers to help them fulfill those drives. First, rewards should differentiate levels of employee performance from one another. Second, the culture should help create collaborative and sharing relationships and teamwork. Third, jobs should be meaningful and enable employees to contribute to the organization. Fourth, be fair in your processes and outcomes, and be transparent in your decisions. Employees will tend to rate a manager poorly if that manager does not help fulfill all four of the drives, even if three of the drives are fulfilled.

Source: Nohria, N., Groysberg, B., & Lee, L.-E. 2008. Employee motivation: A powerful new model. Harvard Business Review, 78-84.

Setting Goals Can Influence Employee Beliefs About the Reason For Their Success Or Failure

Today’s best managers know that employee participation in setting goals can influence employee beliefs about their own performance. Employees who participate in setting goals for their performance tend to believe that the cause of their performance is something outside of themselves, such as task difficulty, when they are successful. However, they tend to blame themselves when they are not successful at reaching their performance goals. On the other hand, employees who don’t help set their own goals tend to believe the opposite. They believe that success was their own fault and failure was the fault of something outside of them.

Source: Karakowsky, L., & Mann, S. L. 2008, February. Setting goals and taking ownership: Understanding the implications of participatively set goals from a causal attribution perspective. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 14, 260-270.

A Sense Of Urgency.

This book examines the importance of creating a sense of urgency in your employees. Something is urgent when it is critically important and is central to the success or failure of the organization. Identify critical issues and form strong teams. Teams with a sense of urgency feel the need to communicate relentlessly with other team members. Employees who feel the urgency will feel empowered to remove obstacles and find solutions. Some employees are urgency killers, and are more than just skeptics. Don’t waste time trying to win them over, but don’t ignore them. Instead, use peer pressure to immobilize them.



Source: A Sense Of Urgency.By John P. Kotter, 2008, Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA, ISBN: 978-1-4221-5230-0.

Help Employees Avoid The Four Main Types Of Negative Perfectionist Behavior

Today’s best managers know that employee perfectionist behavior can be positive or negative for organizations. Negative perfectionism results in employee behaviors that are compulsive and excessive and lower organizational performance. There are four main types of negative perfectionism: 1) compulsive behavior—repeats behaviors over and over because the performance doesn’t meet excessive standards set by the employee, 2) narcissistic behavior—attempts to reach impossible goals set by others and looks for constant positive feedback from others, 3) imposters—despite lots of evidence don’t believe that they caused their own success and continually have to prove themselves, and 4) neurotics—adopt impossible goals set by others and hold themselves accountable when they can’t reach the impossible goals.

Source: Leonard, N. H., & Harvey, M. 2008. Negative perfectionism: Examining negative excessive behavior in the workplace. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 585-610.

Help Your Employees Feel Less Miserable About Their Job

Today’s best managers want their employees to be happy about their work. Unfortunately, many employees feel miserable on the job. Some of the main causes of employee misery are feeling anonymous, irrelevant, and as if their work can’t be measured. Typical managers don’t help employees because they: 1) keep employees at arm’s length and don’t get to know them, 2) worry about being too touchy-feely, so avoid human issues, and 3) stay too busy to take an interest and invest in helping their employees. Today’s best managers try not to make these mistakes and work hard to lessen the misery of their employees.

Source: Lencioni, P. 2008. Job anonymity: It’s a leading cause of misery. Leadership Excellence, 25, p.4.

Help Employees Recognize and Avoid Burnout Before It Sets In

Burnout means feeling exhausted, overextended, and depleted. Employees who feel burnt out tend to have low job satisfaction, low organizational commitment, high absenteeism, high intentions to leave, and are more likely to quit their job. Today’s best managers know the warning signs of burnout. When employees start feeling hostile and angry about unfair organizational practices, and begin to lack faith that the organization will solve their problems, then employee burnout can set in. Today’s best managers help stop burnout from happening before it takes hold of employees.

Source: Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. 2008. Early predictors of job burnout and engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 498-512.

The Three Most Important Questions That Managers Ask

Today’s best managers know the importance of not squandering company resources, such as time and money. They avoid squandering by asking three important questions. First, what are we talking about? Everyone should know exactly and clearly the issue at hand that must be solved. Second, what are the stakes and does anyone care? Everyone should know the relevancy and urgency of important issues. Third, what are we going to do? Everyone should know the plan of attack that we are taking to solve the issue. Today’s best managers also demand that every employee ask these three questions as well.

Source: Call, D. M. 2008. Effective leadership: Learn to ask and answer three questions. Leadership Excellence, 25/4, p. 8.

Today’s Multicommunicating Employees Commonly Have Multiple Conversations At Once

Managers used to want total and undivided attention when communicating with employees. Today’s best managers know that employees are increasingly multicommunicating, rather than having one communication at a time. Multicommunicating means to have multiple overlapping and competing communications at the same time. Employees today may be talking, texting, and emailing, or more, all at once. Today’s goals for productivity and efficiency encourage employees to multicommunicate. Today’s best managers expect employees to multicommunicate, and know that employees may have divided attention and delayed responses during communications. However, managers may want to limit some multicommunications, such as when communicating with customers.

Source: Reinsch, N. L., Jr., Turner, J. W., & Tinsley, C. H. 2008. Multicommunicating: A practice whose time has come? Academy of Management Review, 33, 391-403.

Having Tacit Knowledge Can Be The Difference Between Success and Failure

Knowledge is important for managerial success. There are two kinds of knowledge: tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge is learned from experience and helps managers succeed with real-world problems. Tacit knowledge is believed to be more important for managerial results than is explicit knowledge. Even if managers have similar skills and abilities, they can have different levels of tacit knowledge. Today’s best managers can help employees build tacit knowledge by exposing employees to a wide range of learning situations that may be out of their regular norm for employees.

Source: Armstrong, S. J., & Mahmud, A. 2008. Experiential learning and the acquisition of managerial tacit knowledge. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 7, 189-208.

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else.

This book thoroughly examines why some people are world-class performers and the rest are not. The book refutes the idea that natural talent and hard work are required for people to be the best. The book offers the idea of deliberate practice as the way to become a world-class performer for any performance area. Deliberate performance requires a tremendous amount of repetitive practice to develop one’s skills and improve one’s technique. The best performers practice much, much more than lesser performers. The book continuously stresses how much hard work and lack of fun are involved in deliberate practice.

Source: Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else.By Geoff Colvin, 2008, Penguin Books, London, ISBN: 978-1-59184-224-8.

Team Role Knowledge Helps Team Members Be More Effective

Today’s best managers understand that team role knowledge is an important component of effective team performance. Team role knowledge means that team members know the different roles that they need to play for their team to be effective, plus they know when and where to play those roles. For example, a team member might play the role of coordinator when a team first starts, but then the team member shifts over to critic once the team starts designing a new product. Today’s best managers help team members understand and play the right roles when needed.

Source: Mumford, T. V., Iddekinge, . H. V., Morgeson, F. P., & Campion, M. 2008. The team role test: Development and validation of a team role knowledge situational judgment test. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 250-267.

Positive Employees Tend To Have Positive Emotions That Increase Attitudes And Performance

Today’s best managers constantly look for ways to improve employee attitudes and performance. Positive employee emotions can influence employee attitudes and behaviors. Four traits help determine whether an employee is positive or not: hope, efficacy, optimism, and resilience. Hopeful employees find multiple pathways to success. Employees with efficacy believe in their abilities to get the job done. Optimistic employees expect good things to happen to them. Resilient employees can recover easily from adversities. Being positive can influence positive employee emotions, and that can increase employee attitudes and behaviors.

Source: Avey, J. B., Wernsing, T. S., & Luthans, F. 2008. Can positive employees help positive organizational change?: Impact of psychological capital and emotions on relevant attitudes and behaviors. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44, 48-70.

Simple Steps to Help Employees Cope With Organizational Changes

Today’s best managers know that they need to manage change so that employee attitudes and behaviors don’t suffer as a result of the change. Employees who believe that they have been involved in a change process and who feel that they have been included in decision-making will cope more effectively with change than will employees who don’t feel this way. Keeping employees informed and consulted during changes helps create social pressure among employees, and that influences employees to support each other. Giving employees accurate and timely information helps them have a sense of predictability, which gives them more control, and helps them feel more capable during changes.

Source: Jimmieson, N. L., Peach, M., & White, K. M. 2008. Utilizing the theory of planned behavior to inform change management: An investigation of employee intention to support organizational change. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44, 237-262.

Expressing Emotions In Constructive, Productive Ways Can Improve Employee Performance.

Organizations typically have unwritten rules about when, where, and how much employees can display their feelings and emotions. Some organizations specially require employees to suppress, hide, or manipulate their emotions at work, in order to maintain a machine-like atmosphere. Managers used to believe that emotions got in the way of rational, logical business thinking and behavior. Today’s best managers know that such strict workplace regulations can hurt employee attitudes and performance. Instead, they adopt healthy and supportive rules that help employees share how they feel with each other in constructive and productive ways.

Source: Coupland, C., Brown, A. D., Daniels, K., & Humphreys, M. 2008. Saying it with feeling: Analyzing speakable emotions. Human Relations, 61, 327-353.

Conflict May Only Be Helpful Under Certain Organizational Conditions

Managers used to believe that conflict in the workplace would help employees make better decisions. It was thought that moderate conflict would help employees discuss options and not make decisions too quickly. Today’s best managers know that conflict is only helpful under a very narrow set of conditions. More specifically, the conflict is work-related, does not involve personal or political matters, should be moderate, and the team members feel safe and trust each other. In other types of situations, the benefits of conflict may not outweigh the negatives, so managers should lessen the level of conflict among employees.

Source: De Drue, C. K. W. 2008. The virtue and vice of workplace conflict: Food for (pessimistic) thought. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 5-18.

How To Delegate Effectively

Today’s best managers know how to delegate effectively to people who work for them. First, tell the employee exactly what it is that you would like them to do. Second, give them appropriate resources, guidelines, and expectations to get the job done. Third, tell employees exactly when the work must be finished. Fourth, if the due date is a long time away, then periodically follow up on the employee’s progress toward completing the assignment. Following up lets you see that work is being done correctly, and gives the employee opportunities to ask you questions.

Source: Berman, E. L. 2007, July/August. Know how to delegate. Industrial Management, 6-7.

The New Gold Standard: Five Leadership Principles For Creating A Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy Of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company.

This book explains the five main leadership principles successfully used by the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company. Employees should define and refine. Be sure that employees always smile and escort guests to locations rather than just point, and think safety first. Employees should empower through trust. They should create exceptional memories for customers. Employees should deliver a “WOW” for customers. Employees should also leave a lasting footprint. Customers might forget what an employee said, but they won’t forget how that employee made them feel.

Source: The New Gold Standard: Five Leadership Principles For Creating A Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy Of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. By Joseph A. Michelli, 2008, McGraw-Hill, NY, ISBN: 978-0-07-154833-5.

Positive Employee Moods in Groups Can Be Self-Reinforcing

When employees have positive moods and feelings (called positive affect) in the workplace, they tend to be better at helping others, solving-problems, and taking risks. When a group of employees has positive group affect, they tend to have more cooperation, less conflict, less absenteeism, and higher individual well-being than groups with low positive affect. Today’s best managers know that group positive affect can be contagious. Group members share their positive emotions and that leads other employees to feel more positive in return. Unfortunately, the positive mood can get much higher than it should, and that can hurt performance, so today’s best managers help employees keep a healthy level of positive affect.

Source: Walter, F., & Bruch, H. 2008. The positive group affect spiral: A dynamic model of the emergence of positive affective similarity in work groups. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 239-261.

Employees Who Help Others and Are Internally Motivated Tend To Have High Performance Levels

Managers want employees to be motivated to perform on the job. Today’s best managers know that some employees go above and beyond their typical job description and help others at work. Employees have higher levels of persistence, performance, and productivity when they desire to help others and when they have an internal drive to succeed. An internal desire to be successful can result in employees helping others more, and that enables higher performance in the organization. Today’s best managers can influence internal motivation levels by selecting applicants who have a passion for their line of work and a passion to work hard on the job.Grant,

Source: A. M. 2008. Does intrinsic motivation fuel the prosocial fire? Motivational synergy in predicting persistence, performance, and productivity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 48-58.

Reputations May Have A Weak Relationship To Actual Employee Behaviors

Managers know the importance of employee reputations. Reputations allow employees to find out about other employees’ performance, and help to reward good behavior and lessen bad behavior. However, today’s best managers know that there is often only a weak relationship between an employee’s reputation and his or her actual behavior. Reputations can be more accurate for employees who are more well-known and receive more social attention. However, reputations tend to be less accurate for less well-known individuals and those relatively unknown by others. Today’s best managers get to know employees personally rather than rely on possibly faulty reputation-based information.

Source: Anderson, C., Shirako, A. 2008. Are individuals’ reputations related to their history of behavior? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 320-333.

Employees Can Underestimate the Likelihood that Others Will Help, So Won’t Ask When Needed

Today’s best managers know that employees may be reluctant to ask others for help. This is because employees will estimate the likelihood that someone will help them before they ask that person for help. If the employees don’t believe that help will be given, then they never ask for help in the first place. Employees tend to underestimate how much others are willing to help them, sometimes by as much as 50%. Today’s best managers work to reverse this trend, and establish a trusting environment where everyone is comfortable asking for help when they need it, and providing help to others when they can.

Source: Flynn, F. J., & Lake, V. K. B. 2008. If you need help, just ask: Underestimating compliance with direct requests for help. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 128-143.

Watch Out For and Stop Corruption in Your Organization Before It Becomes Unstoppable

Corruption is an undesirable behavior where an employee willfully perverts rules, order, ideals, and trust in an organization. Today’s best managers keep an eye out for corrupt practices and stop them before they get out of hand. If corrupt behaviors are not stopped, then they can grow like a virus and can infect a workgroup, or even an entire organization. The result of unchecked corruption can be an organization with a culture of corruption that is deeply imbedded and transcends every process, and is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stop.

Source: Ashforth, B. E., Gioia, D. A., Robinson, S. L., & Trevino, L. K. 2008. Re-viewing organizational corruption. Academy of Management Review, 33, 670-684.

The Reasons Why So Many Newly Hired Executives Fail

Today’s best managers know that the failure rate of new executives is roughly 64%. Newly hired executives fail due to: expectations about the job don’t match reality, changes in the direction of the company caused by leaders who leave, dependence on old skills that were successful at their former job, failure to find out what is required in the new job, not finding out what the new company culture is all about, and not establishing relationships early on with key people in the new organization. To combat the failure rate, today’s best managers know that coaching new hires about the new company is vital.

Source: Butterfield, S. 2008. Onboard coaching: New leaders can contribute faster. Leadership Excellence, 25/3, p. 14.

The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask Your Organization.

This book explores five important questions to ask yourself if you want to transform your organization. A transformation means to move from where you are now to where you want to be. The five questions ask you to define your mission, customers, customer values, your results, and your plan. Your mission should be short enough to fit on a t-shirt. The mission should reflect your opportunities, competences, and commitment. Everyone in your organization should know your mission. The mission drives your goals, then your objectives, then your action steps, then your budget, then your appraisal process, which then drives your mission.

Source: The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask Your Organization. By Peter F. Drucker, Jim Collins, Philip Kotler, James Kouzes, Judith Rodin, V. Kasturi Rangan, and Frances Hesselbein, 2008, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, ISBN: 978-0-470-22756-5.

Voluntary Following Of Ethics Policies Is Better Than Forcing Employees To Be Ethical

Managers used to believe that compliance officers were required to enforce strict fairness and ethics policies. Managers used to spend large amounts of money on surveillance and oversight mechanisms to ensure employee compliance. Today’s best managers know that voluntary employee compliance is a better strategy, and more cost-effective approach. The same processes that managers need to use to obtain voluntary employee compliance also tend to result in higher levels of employee extra-role behaviors and citizenship behaviors, which is good for the company.

Source: Tyler, T., Dienhart, J., & Thomas, T. 2008, Winter. The ethical commitment to compliance: Building values-based cultures. California Management Review, 50, 31-51.

Ways To Make Employee Performance Evaluations More Accurate

Today’s best managers know that there is a weak relationship between actual employee performance and performance evaluation scores. Managers have tried to improve performance ratings by creating better rating scales, helping raters avoid making evaluation errors (such as rating everyone harshly), training raters to be more accurate, and using 360-degree feedback approaches. Today’s best managers know that the best way to help make performance ratings more accurate is by creating an environment where raters are fair, accurate, and neutral evaluators of employee performance.

Source: Murphy, K. R. 2008. Explaining the weak relationship between job performance and ratings of job performance. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 148-160

Only You Can Make Yourself A Success

Managers used to believe that their company or their managers would make them happy and successful. Today’s best managers know that they alone are responsible for their own career success. You start managing your own career by careful introspection that uncovers your passions, strengths, and weaknesses. Forget conventional wisdom and forget the path that everyone else is taking. Don’t worry about jumping hurdles that others have set. Instead, set up your own, unique hurdles for you to jump. Have faith in yourself, and have faith that your hard work will pay off.

Source: Kaplan, R. S. 2008, July-August. Reaching your potential. Harvard Business Review, 45-49.

Information From Personality Tests Found to Be A Valid and Reliable Employee Decision Tool

Some managers believe that employee decisions should not be based on personality measurements. These managers feel that personality tests can be faked, and don’t provide accurate, valid, or reliable information for managers to use. However, today’s best managers know that there is considerable evidence supporting the use of personality measurements for understanding, explaining and predicting employee work attitudes and organizational behaviors. Employee faking does not seem to ruin the validity of personality tests. In addition, today’s best managers use personality tests completed by employees and tests completed by observers of employees to get even better information.

Source: Ones, D. S., Dilchert, S., Viswesvaran, C., & Judge, T. A. 2008. In support of personality assessment in organizational settings. Personnel Psychology, 60, 995-1027.

Develop Your Employees Through Consciousness-Raising Experiences

Today’s best managers know that employees need to: develop their social awareness and interpersonal skills, work more effectively and sensitively with people of various backgrounds and ethnicities, and work more effectively in an ever-changing global environment. One way to help employees do these behaviors is through consciousness-raising activities. These activities raise employee consciousness of themselves, and deepen their understanding and awareness of others. Not all employees may be ready to have their consciousness levels raised as experiences are not what happen to employees, rather, they are what employees do as a result of what happens to them.

Source: Mirvis, P. 2008. Executive development through consciousness-raising experiences. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 7, 173-188.

Coach Employees To Help Improve Their Job Interview Performance

Today’s best managers are seen as individuals who want to help their employees succeed, such as by getting promoted. One way to help employees move up to better jobs is by coaching them to perform better in job interviews. Managers can help employees prepare for interviews, practice how to answer questions, and provide feedback about interview performance to further improve an employee’s chances for getting promoted. Coaching helps employees get better jobs and also helps the manager get better performance evaluations, which is a double-win situation.

Source: Maurer, T. J., Solamon, J. M., & Lippstreu, M. 2008. How does coaching interviewees affect the validity of a structured interview? Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 355-371.

It’s Our Ship: The No-Nonsense Guide To Leadership.

The author describes his approach to leadership from his many years of experience in the Navy. He offers many sound words of advice, such as the following. Train employees to go full speed ahead. Spend time in the sewer system and show every employee that no matter what job they do that they are vital. Be friendly, but don’t be a friend to your employees. Focus on what matters and ignore the rest. Sail close, and take the right risks. Disagree without disrespect. Love what you do, and be out front. Put your crew’s interests first. Hand out medals whenever you can.

Source: It’s Our Ship: The No-Nonsense Guide To Leadership. By Captain D. Michael Abrashoff, 2008, Business Plus, NY, ISBN: 978-0-446-1996-7.

Treat Employees Fairly To Help Improve Their Desirable Extra-Job Behaviors

An employee who is a good organizational citizen is one who does extra things beyond their job description to help the organization succeed. These extra behaviors include being courteous, being a good sportsman, and being conscientious on the job. Today’s best managers know that treating people fairly can increase good citizenship behaviors. Managers can improve feelings of fairness by treating employees with dignity and respect when interacting with them. Also, managers can use fair processes when allocating resources, such as pay decisions, to improve perceptions of fairness, and in turn help increase good organizational citizenship behaviors.

Source: Fassina, N.E., Jones, D. A., & Uggerslev, K. L. 2008, April. Relationship clean-up time: Using meta-analysis and path analysis to clarify relationships among job satisfaction, perceived fairness, and citizenship behaviors. Journal of Management, 34, 161-188.

Employees Who Are Loyal, Help Out, and Voice Their Views Often Get Higher Performance Ratings

An employee’s job performance should be related to that employee’s performance evaluation score. For example, the highest performing employees should receive the highest performance appraisal ratings. Today’s best managers know that items other than job performance can influence an employee’s performance evaluation. Employees who go beyond their regular job description to help out other employees may receive higher evaluations than employees who don’t help others. Employees who voice their views and offer good, constructive criticism, and who are loyal can also receive higher performance appraisals compared to employees who don’t voice their views, or who aren’t loyal. Today’s best managers use all of this information when evaluating their employees.

Source: Whiting, S. W., Podsakoff, P. M., & Pierce, J. R. 2008. Effects of task performance, helping, voice, and organizational loyalty on performance appraisal ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 125-139.

Monitor and Reduce Subtle, Selective, Uncivil Behavior In Your Organization

Today’ best managers are aware that underlying biases and prejudices may still exist in organizations, and that employees may express these views more subtly nowadays. Employees may be selectively uncivil, which means to cut off others mid sentence, ignore or overlook others, categorize or stereotype others, expect lower behavior from some groups, and to hold other employees at lower levels of esteem or status than they deserve. Today’s best managers educate new employees about civil behavior to all employees, emphasize that unacceptable behaviors include both obvious and subtle actions, and set good examples of civil behavior for others to follow.

Source: Cortina, L. 2008. Unseen injustice: Incivility as modern discrimination in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 33, 55-75.

Help Employees Express Their Needs Then Help Them Fill Those Needs

Today’s best managers know that successful organizations meet the psychological needs of their employees. Companies that encourage their employees to express their needs and help them find ways to meet those needs will be more successful than companies that don’t. Examples of employee psychological needs include: feeling included, being appreciated and recognized, being challenged to achieve, feeling trusted, being able to grow, and having meaning and purpose. Help employees to express their needs and take responsibility for meeting their own needs. Specifically hire employees who are needs-intelligent, and celebrate when employees meet their psychological needs.

Source: Glaser, J. E., & Jones, C. 2008. Meeting people’s needs: You can create a needs-intelligent workplace. Leadership Excellence, 25/3, pp. 13-14.

Compensation Is Still Important For Motivating and Satisfying Employees

Today’s best managers know that compensation is important, but that money is not the most important motivator for employees. Financial security is also important to employees. Employees tend to care about: their base rate of pay, getting pay that is competitive in their local marketplace, having opportunities for variable pay based on performance and merit, and getting stock options to supplement their income. Interesting, variable pay is often seen as more enticing and motivating to younger employees with less seniority in their companies compared to older employees.

Source: HRfocus. 2008, August. What do employees value in compensation? Page 4.

Problem- And Emotion-Focused Coping Can Help Employees Lessen Job Demands

Today’s best managers know that having control over one’s job helps employees to buffer difficult demands of that job. Employees tend to cope with their job in two ways: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. Problem-focused coping involves solving difficult job problems. Employees would be problem-focused coping if they had the power to rearrange a lunch breach in order to meet a strict deadline. Emotion-focused coping refers to regulating emotional distress and discomfort and seeking emotional support. Expressing emotions and feelings to others can lead to empathy and support, which can help employees cope with difficult job demands.

Source: Daniels, K., Beesley, N., Cheyne, A., & Wimalasiri, V. 2008. Coping processes linking the demands-control-support model, affect, and risky decisions at work. Human Relations, 61, 845-874.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

This book examines how people come together in an organized way without being in an organization. A trend of the age is for communication tools to bring people together and help determine who we are and what we do. Social tools allow many people to come together and communicate at a faster and faster rate, such as through “flash mobs” that occur, perform, and disband within minutes. Everyone can be a media outlet of information. Technology has lowered the cost of failure, so many people will try things that only a few people used to try.

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. By Clay Shirky, 2008, Penguin Press, NY, ISBN: 978-1-59420-153-0.

A New Definition of Employee Commitment to The Organization

Managers used to believe that employee commitment was defined as: a feeling of attachment to the organization, the perceived costs of leaving it, and a feeling of obligation to stay with the company. Today’s best managers know that commitment means that an employee is willing to go above and beyond their regular job and perform acts on behalf of the organization. Having organizational commitment means that an employee: 1) has an emotional attachment to the organization, 2) identifies with and agrees to organizational norms, goals, & values, and 3) is ready to serve the organization when called upon to do so.

Source: Solinger, O. N., Van Olffen, W., & Roe, R. A. 2008. Beyond the three component model of organizational commitment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 70-83.

Employees May Believe That They Are More Objective Than They Actually Are

Organizations should make decisions that affect employees based on data and facts. However, managers know that sometimes employees can make employment decisions, such as hiring and firing, based on personal biases and prejudices, instead of on real information. Today’s best managers know that the problem is even worse than was thought. When employees believe that their biases and prejudices are factual, then those employees are more likely to act on their erroneous beliefs. This means that today’s best managers should help employees rely on facts and figures, and not trust that their own personal views are accurate when making employee decisions.

Source: Uhlmann, E. L., & Cohen, G. L. 2008. “I think it, therefore it’s true: Effects of self-perceived objectivity on hiring discrimination. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 104, 207-223.

Employees Who Are Passionate About Their Job Would Take A Pay Cut

Today’s best managers know that the best job performance comes from employees who are passionate about the work that they do. Most employees in the United States and around the world, about 80%, say that they would take a pay cut if they could pursue their dream job. More and more employees are willing to forego pay in order to have more fulfilling and meaningful careers, instead of getting higher pay. This is especially interesting in that even with a struggling economy, employees are willing to get paid less in order to have a job that they are really passionate about.

Source: Many workers would take pay cut for the ‘dream job’. HRfocus. 2008, July. Page 9.

Employee Monitoring Of Other Employees Can Result In Successful Performance

Managers usually monitor their employees and make assessments about their job performance. Monitoring can be merely observing employee behaviors, or it can be advisory, in which the monitor corrects poor performance. Today’s best managers know that employee monitoring of other employees can successfully influence employee job performance, but only when done correctly. When employees are paid in a traditional, individual performance-based way, then employee observation-style monitoring of other employees can result in improved productivity levels. When employees are paid in a group-based manner, then advisory-style monitoring can also result in improved performance.

Source: Welbourne, T. N., & Ferrante, C. J. 2008, April. To monitor or not to monitor. Group & Organization Management, 33, 139-162.

Work Helps Employees Maintain Their Health And Well-Being

Today’s best managers know that work is important and plays a big role in determining employees’ psychological health and well-being. When large numbers of employees lose jobs, the result is neighborhood decline, increased crime, and declines in family relationships, and even increases in substance abuse, violence, and apathy. Work helps employees: have access to resources that help ensure survival, have access to social support and personal relationships, and determine their own course and direction in life. Today’s best managers know that work is more than just a job. Work helps in the development, expression, and maintenance of employee health and well-being.

Source: Blustein, D. L. 2008, May-June. The role of work in psychological health and well-being. American Psychologist, 63, 228-240.

Improve Employee Social Environment To Help Increase Employee Psychological Health

Today’s best managers know that they should spend a significant amount of time improving the quality of the social environment for their employees. Managers who would like to help improve the psychological health of their employees should pay attention to the quality of interpersonal relationships between employees and their supervisors. Managers should also focus on actions that enhance the interaction of team members and foster team work, such as helping employees bond through activities like common work breaks and offsite meetings and retreats.

Source: Rousseau, V., Aube, C., Chiocchio, F., Boudrias, J.-S., & Morin, E. M. 2008. Social interactions at work and psychological health: The role of leader-member exchange and work group integration. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 1755-1777.

Tribes: Why You Need To Lead Us.

This book examines tribes and how they need leaders. A tribe is a group of people who are connected to each other, who are connected to a leader, and who are connected to an idea. Tribes are all about faith, and belief about an idea and about a community. Lots of tribes now exist because of communication technology that connects the members. Tribes need leaders, so why don’t you lead one? Leaders of tribes help move shared interest to passion, provide tools for communication, and leverage the tribe to help it grow and gain new members.

Source: Tribes: Why You Need To Lead Us. By Seth Godin, 2008, Portfolio, NY, ISBN: 978-1-59184-233-0.

Tell Stories to Help Improve Employee Commitment To the Organization

Today’s best managers know that telling stories is an important indicator of employee commitment to the organization. There are two primary purposes for telling stories in organizations: grounding and instruction. Employees tell stories to point out and clarify key values, called grounding. Employees tell stories about how things are done, called instruction. Organizational commitment means that employees have strong feelings about and identify with the goals and values of the organization. The more frequently that employees tell stories about the organization, the more strongly committed they tend to be about that organization, and the better able to withstand turbulence at work.

Source: McCarthy, J. F. 2008, April. Short stories at work: Storytelling as an indicator of organizational commitment. Group & Organization Management, 33, 163-193.

Sales Volume And Customer Loyalty Can Make Small Businesses Profitable

Today’s best managers know the secrets for making a profit even when you are a small business with limited resources. The key is doing whatever it takes to build a loyal customer base. Use technology whenever you can to help cut costs and reduce errors. Standardize your process and practices, cut costs where possible, and train extensively. Work hard to develop relationships with your customers by immersing yourself in the lives of your customers. If you develop enough sales volume, then you can be successful, even if you don’t make much per item sold.

Source: Akula, V. 2008, June. Business basics at the base of the pyramid. Harvard Business Review, 53-57.

Mentoring Relationships Can Have Strengths As Well As Weaknesses

A mentor can be a great teacher for a protégé. However, today’s best managers are aware of potential problems that can occur between mentors and protégés. Three main categories of mentor-protégé problems have been identified: protégé performance problems, interpersonal relationship problems, and destructive relationships. Protégés have reported that their mentors neglected them, sabotaged them, and competed with them. On the other hand, mentors have reported that their protégés were: unwilling to learn, deceitful, jealous, and competitive. Today’s best managers balance the potential benefits with the potential weaknesses of mentor-protégé relationships.

Source: Eby, L. T., Durley, J. R., Evans, S. C., & Ragins, B. R. 2008. Mentors’ perceptions of negative mentoring experiences: Scale development and nomological validation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 358-373.

Motivation To Gather Information Results In Finding More and Better Information

Today’s best managers know the importance of information gathering for effective managerial performance. Managers who have access to more and better sources of information are better able to make sense of their environment, are more effective at spotting trends, and are more able to achieve higher levels of performance compared to managers without such information. The larger the social network, the more time managers spend looking for more information, and the more information they find. However, having a large social network is only helpful for managers who are motivated to take advantage of the information that is available from that network.

Source: Anderson, M. H. 2008. Social networks and the cognitive motivation to realize network opportunities: A study of managers’ information gathering behaviors. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 51-78.

Positively Coping With Change Can Lessen Employee Sick Time, Intentions to Quit, and Turnover

Today’s best managers know the importance of managing employees’ reactions to organizational changes. Sometimes employees view organizational changes as harmful and threatening. When employees have negative feelings about change, they can then have increased sick leave and higher intentions to quit, and can be more likely to leave organizations entirely. Today’s best managers discuss organizational changes with employees and that helps reduce uncertainty about change. They help employees to vent their feelings about the changes. They also show employees the positive side of changes, such as job security, and new opportunities for advancement, and that helps reduce negative employee reactions to change.

Source: Fugate, M., Kinicki, A. J., & Prussia, G. E. 2008. Employee coping with organizational change: An examination of alternative theoretical perspectives and models. Personnel Psychology, 61, 1-36.

The Six Characteristics of Great Executers

Today’s best managers know the six traits shared by people who are great at getting things done: 1) they carefully consider matters that come to them and make a decision, rather than avoid making decisions about difficult things, 2) they stay realistic about what they can and can’t accomplish with the time and money they have, 3) they set clear and accurate goals, 4) they reward people who perform well and don’t reward poor performers, 5) they coach and guide their employees, and 6) they know themselves well, such as what they can and can’t do.

Source: Bossidy, L. 2008. Executive orientation: Cultivate six characteristics. Leadership Excellence, 25/3, p. 9.

Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters.

This book explains how to create relevant brands and make your product matter. Relevance and success will come to those who listen more than talk, and who deliver more than just advertise their product. The author states that profit should not be your primary goal. Instead, make a relevant product and profit happens when you do everything else right. The book explains about relevant solutions, which are: insights, innovations, investment, design, experience, and value. The book describes how to control the conversation with customers, and provides an incredible amount of company examples.

Source: Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters. By Tim Manners, 2008, Portfolio, NY, ISBN: 978-1-59184-220-0.

Fair Processes and Focus on Others Can Motivate Employees to Take Charge at Work

Taking charge means to go beyond one’s job description and help bring about new and innovative change to an organization. Today’s best managers understand that employees who are more self-centered and strive to achieve tend not to take charge compared to employees who are less self-centered and less interested in striving to achieve. Also, when employees have a high sense of duty to help others, then they are more likely to take charge compared to employees with a low sense of duty. Employees may be more likely to take charge when they believe their organization uses fair processes to make employee decisions.

Source: Moon, H., Kamdar, D., Mayer, D. M., & Takeuchi, R. 2008. Me or we? The role of personality and justice as other-centered antecedents to innovative citizenship behaviors within organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 84-94.

Improving Perceived Customer Value Is The Key To Innovation

Managers used to believe that improving product value was the key to innovation. Today’s best managers know that altering value as defined by the customer is the new key to innovation. For example, recognize that when customers buy new software, they are taking home a CD, but what they are really getting is a new way to perform a desired task. Today’s best managers focus on improving customer value of performing the task and not on improving the value of the CD itself. Find new ways to identify and co-solve customer problems. Customer value is realized, or brought out, in the use of the product.

Source: Michel, S., Brown, S. W., & Gallan, A. S. 2008, Spring. Service-logic innovations: How to innovate customers, not products. California Management Review, 50, 49-64.

Employees Process Positive Information Faster Than Negative Information

Today’s best managers know that employees can process information at varying speeds. For example, employees will process, or think through and make conclusions about, information that is positive faster than they will process negative information. This happens because employees have much more positive information about themselves stored in their brains than they do negative information. When employees hear positive information, then this new positive information quickly matches up with the positive information that is already there. This employee tendency helps explain why employees rapidly absorb positive feedback, but then take more time to process negative feedback.

Source: Unkelbach, C., Fiedler, K., Bayer, M., Stegmueller, M., & Danner, D. 2008. Why positive information is processed faster: The density hypotheis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 36-49.

Sharing Expectations About Communication Can Improve Employee Satisfaction

Today’s best managers know that effective communication is important for employee satisfaction. When employees have similar expectations about the communication process, then they tend to have higher levels of satisfaction. For example, when employees understand how polite and how efficient communication should be, then they tend to be more satisfied on the job. Polite communication refers to being considerate and respectful of one’s co-workers. Efficient communication refers to how truthful, clear, and relevant someone is when they communicate.

Source: Park, H. S. 2008, February. Communication Research, 35, 88-108.

Establish a Plan That Measures Employee Performance

Today’s best managers understand the need for a plan that measures employee performance. The plan should help communicate the vision, mission, strategy and goals to employees. The plan should help define desired performance, motivate employees to perform, and help employees achieve their performance goals. An effective plan should: 1) identify and explain the performance criteria, 2) accurately measure actual employee performance, 3) be continually re-evaluated and updated, and 4) clearly let employees know what is expected of them.

Source: McCoy, J. 2008, July. Align performance with your strategy: Choosing the right team matters. Leadership Excellence, 25, p. 17.

Focusing On Implementation Activities Can Help Employees Make Sense Out Of Change

Today’s best managers want employees to react positively to organizational changes. One way to help make that happen is to involve employees in the change process. Letting employees participate in the change can help them make sense out of the chaos that can happen during large-scale changes. Having employees help create actions plans can get employees involved. However, limit the number of tasks to a few, such as helping with implementation activities, to keep employees focused, and to avoid creating even more chaos. Employee participation in plans that involve trial and error can be even more effective in helping employees make sense out of organizational changes.

Source: Stensaker, I., Falkenberg, J., & Gronhaug, K. 2008. Implementation activities and organizational sensemaking. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44, 162-185.

Creating Magic: Ten Common Sense Leadership Strategies From A Life At Disney.

This book examines the leadership strategies that made Disney great. According to the author, creative leadership leads to employee excellence, which leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to a strong business. The book offers many excellent Disney strategies, such as RAVE, which stands for respect, appreciate, and value everyone. Managers should treat their employees as they want them to treat customers. Managers should live their values, make their people their brand, eliminate hassles, learn the truth from their employees, create magic through training, and stay ahead of the pack.

Source: Creating Magic: Ten Common Sense Leadership Strategies From A Life At Disney. By Lee Cockerell, 2008, Doubleday, NY, ISBN: 978-0385523868.

Build Teams That Can Better Withstand Downsizing

Unfortunately, in organizations today layoffs and downsizing are often everyday events. For example, team leaders may be laid off and teams are left to fend for themselves. Today’s best managers know that some teams can cope better than others when team leaders are let go. Teams that are emotionally stable where team members are typically calm and even-tempered will perform better after a team downsizing. Also, teams where members have positive interaction, exchange information, and cooperate with each other will survive a leader layoff better than teams that don’t behave. In other words, create teams that are emotionally stable and extroverted and they may better withstand the loss of a team leader.

Source: DeRue, D. S., Hollenbeck, J. R., Johnson, M. D., Ilgen, D. R., & Jundt, D.K. 2008. How different team downsizing approaches influence team-level adaptation and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 51, 182-196.

Problems Caused By Employee Generational Differences May Be More Hype Than Reality

Managers tend to believe that employees may have different views, values, and/or differences in behavior due to their generational differences. Today’s best managers know that employees of all ages have more in common than they do differences. For example, some managers believe that older employees tend to work harder, be more loyal, and are more willing to pay their dues to the company than are younger employees. However, employees of all ages tend to agree that working hard is how people get ahead in companies today. Also, employees of all generations tend to agree about what they want, think, and believe in the workplace.

Source: Renn, M. T. 2008, March/April. Debunking generational differences. Leader In Action, 28, 23-24.

Knowing Who Your Employees Are And What They Do Can Increase Desirable Job Behaviors.

Some employees feel that they have no identity at work. This means they believe that nobody at work really knows who they are and what they do. Today’s best managers know that knowing the identity of your employees can help increase their performance, their creativity, their satisfaction, and lower their absenteeism on the job. Getting to know an employee’s identity means knowing things like their ethnic background, where they grew up, and what they do when they are away from work, such as serve on the Parent Teacher Association at their child’s school.

Source: Thatcher, S. M. B., & Greer, L. L. 2008, February. Does it really matter if you recognize who I am? The implications of identity comprehension for individuals in work teams. Journal of Management, 34, 5-24.

Turn Your Posers and Paupers Into Performing Employees

Today’s best managers know the importance of having the right people in their organization. There may be many great employees out there, but they may not have the right knowledge, skills, and abilities for your organization. There tend to be three types of employees: 1) performers are employees who love their job, have the right skills, and are effective and engaged in their work, 2) posers are mediocre employees, but they are very skilled at looking like the employee that different managers want them to be, and 3) paupers are neglected employees who feel alienated, cynical, and rejected.

Source: Lakhani, A., & Gazzara, K. 2008. People alignment: Throw the seats off the bus. Leadership Excellence, 25/3, p. 8.

Backing-Up Behavior on Teams Can Sometimes Help and Sometimes Hurt Team Performance

Many teams have someone who backs up or assists another team member when they need help to accomplish their tasks. Today’s best managers know that backing up another member of your team could be helpful or hurtful to the team’s effectiveness. When team members have uneven workloads, then the costs of backing up a team member when needed are not high. However, when team members have even workloads, then the costs of backing up a team member are high. So, be careful when assigning a backup for tasks where the workload is roughly equal for team members, as this may actually hurt, instead of help, team performance.

Source: Barnes, C. M., Hollenbeck, J. R., Wagner, D. R., DeRue, D. S., Nahrgang, J. D., & Schwind, K. M. 2008. Harmful help: The costs of backing-up behavior in teams. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 1299-1319.

Create Anti-Corruption Entrepreneurs In Your Company To Find and Destroy Corrupt Behavior

Managers know that most attempts to curb organizational corruption begin with enthusiasm and end with cynicism. Today’s best managers know that fighting corruption begins by getting rid of employees who guard the status quo to prevent change to the old corrupt way of life. Create anticorruption entrepreneurs in your company to help curb corruption. Give the entrepreneurs support and resources to help them create a new culture that seeks out and destroys corrupt employee behavior. Help entrepreneurs use economic, cultural, social, and symbolic resources to help change current corrupt employee mindsets.

Source: Misangyi, V. F., Weaver, G. R., & Elms, H. 2008. Ending corruption: The interplay among institutional logics, resources, and institutional entrepreneurs. Academy of Management Review, 33, 750-770.

The Encore Effect: How To Achieve Remarkable Performance In Everything You Do.

This book examines moving from routine performance to remarkable performance. Remarkable performance can result in money, influence, opportunity, recognition and exposure. Employees should work on becoming both a remarkable person as well as a remarkable performer, as they can’t do one without the other. Every remarkable performance results in other employees moving in positive ways to better places than they were before. The book describes the steps in the Pyramid of Possibility: potential, purpose, passion, principles, persistence, and personalization. Personalization is the highest expression of being remarkable. Employees should be the performance and connect with their audience if they want to perform remarkably.

Source: The Encore Effect: How To Achieve Remarkable Performance In Everything You Do. By Mark Sanborn, 2008, Doubleday, NY, ISBN: 978-0-385-51905-2.

Self Versus Team Assessments Of Employees Can Improve Diverse Team Performance

Today’s best managers know that managing diverse teams can be especially problematic. Traditional team-building activities tend not to work for diverse teams because they don’t handle the unique qualities and differences among diverse team members. Today’s best managers know that 360-degree feedback can help diverse teams improve. Compare team members’ assessments of themselves with the teams’ assessments of them. When using this approach be sure that teams have coaching available to help them. Without someone to guide and counsel team members, this approach can uncover old team wounds, and that could hurt, rather than help, team performance.

Source: Polzer, J. T. 2008, July-August. Making diverse teams click. Harvard Business Review, 20.

Seek Out New Methods and Take Advantage of Current Competencies to Be The Most Successful

Managers used to believe that companies could only be successful if they followed one of two learning activities. The first is called exploitation, which means to take advantage of abilities that the organization already has. The second is called exploration, which means to be adaptive to change and to seek out and discover new methods for the organization. Today’s best managers know that the most successful organizations follow both approaches, which means that they follow an ambidextrous approach to organizational learning.

Source: Raisch, S., & Birkinshaw, J. 2008, June. Organizational ambidexterity: Antecedents, outcomes, and moderators. Journal of Management, 34, 375-409.