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.