Group 3 Governance, leadership and motivation
Group 3: Governance, leadership and motivation
Assignment: B
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Change process being multifaceted intricate undertaking that is dependent on involvement of wide-ranging stakeholders and the availability of accurate information about the desired outcomes, needed resources and what should be done among other things, the key stakeholders steering the change process must have dynamic leadership skills in addition to good communication skills; so that they clearly and consistently communicate the details of the change process including the progress. Additionally, resistance to change is naturally expected to occur and this is likely to affect the ability of the organisation to meet its objectives if it goes on for extended period. Another skill is good organisation and management skills. These skills entail the manager being able to manage the resources available to him/her and these include time, space and words
Without doubt change resistance is a serious issue that an organisation has to deal with and this calls for proper leadership strategy to ensure the change process is achieved smoothly and successfully. Change process being a complex process to the organisation, a number of skills and strategies from the organisational leadership and other stakeholders are needed to steer the change process for the organisation to achieve the desired objectives. This report lays emphasis on the role of leadership through possession of proper communication skills, good organisational and management skills and astute resource management skills.
The role of leadership through a change process
In order for the organisational policy changes to be effective, there are some leadership challenges that have to be overcome. The right leadership qualities and style are needed in order to steer the desired changes to success (McGuire 2003). With respect to this a leadership style that can propel the policy to success entails one that is flexible enough to accommodate dynamic nature of the demographic landscape, be able to deal with the sensitivity associated with racial and ethnic matters and have the ability to influence everyone toward accepting that the change is needed and necessary. Such is the quality of transformational leadership. A transformational leader will be able approach change with flexibility that is needed hence handle resistance properly.
Explains how groups and teams support organisational performance
Groups and teams are important to the organisational performance because teams and groups are entrenched in an open yet enclosed system comprising multiple levels. This broader organisational system sets top-down control on team functioning. Concurrently, team responses are multifarious bottom-up occurrences that emerge in due course from individual cognition, affect, behaviour, and interactions among members within the team framework. Consequently, groups and teams have a considerable impact on the performance of the organisation from four different yet related aspects. First, based on the above identified perspective through which teams and groups interact with the larger organisational system, teams display and embody task and workflow interdependence and this implies that the performance of one individual in the group or team is as good and essential as the performance of the entire group. In addition, the performance of the entire organisation depends not just on the performance of the various groups and teams but on the performance of the specific individuals in those teams and groups.
The second factor relates to contextual creation and constraint. In this aspect, it can be seen how teams are embedded within an organisational setting yet the team itself endorses a context for all the members within the particular team. Moreover, there are a number of aspects that characterise the broader organisational setting and these include leadership, organisational structure, the prevailing organisational culture, technology and climate which collectively or individually constraint teams and influence their responses. This cannot be overlooked because while the team members operate in an enclosed interactive setting, they in part contribute to the creation of the interactive context in the system by virtue of the responses they elicit, their interactions and attributes. Dynamic team processes to some extent generate contextual structure that limits subsequent team processes. As a consequence, the team context is a shared product of both top-down and bottom-up interactions.
The third factor that also shows the importance of employee engagement in connection to groups and teams is the aspect of multilevel influences. While it is not with doubt that organisations teams, individuals and groups are attached as one in a multilevel system, teams do not behave but individuals do. Nevertheless, individuals behave in fashions that create team level phenomena. Individuals are nested within teams, and teams in turn are linked to and nested in a larger multilevel system.
Lastly, teams and groups support organisational performance through their developmental lifespan such that teams and groups are formed; they mature and evolve in due course. While team members in the group may have good cognitive ability that supports team performance directly and by extension the performance of the entire organisation, as the team matures and team members develop more specific cognitive ability that is directed to dynamics within the organisation, the entire organisational system realizes greater performance.
However, for groups and teams to effectively support organisational performance, there are a number of factors that must be put into consideration. First, it must be borne in mind that it is not possible for people to work together successfully without having effective communication in place. Yet, effective communication closely relates to trust. Therefore, the organisation must install communication and an atmosphere of trust to build work relationships that are hinged on trust so as to make teams work more effectively based on the developed trust.
Another aspect that must be considered is change management and innovation. After an atmosphere of communication and trust has been created and people are now working effectively in teams or groups, there is need to apply their collective skills so that they can deal with change more effectively. Through this approach employees are not only encouraged to espouse constant change that is driving force upon them, but they are also asked to create change, by producing innovative fresh ways of making the quality of products better, improving service delivery and quality of processes. This point implies that as the employees are provided with skills necessary to manage change, the package includes skills that are needed to manage the stress associated with change process and how to play part in the innovation process.
Leadership is another important aspect that must be incorporated into the equation to ensure that teams and groups contribute maximally to the performance of the organisation given that they are now communicating effectively and they have trust amongst them. As a consequence, each member of the team or group must be able to contribute as much as possible. This implies that they now transform into individuals that act on that vision to create change and this inculcating leadership skills and abilities to achieve the vision of the organisation.
Explains the function and process of motivation in organisations
Employee motivation plays a significant role in the organisation because it directly touches on employee job satisfaction hence productivity. Moreover, motivation serves an array of functions in the organisation. First, it guarantees proper utilisation of production factor since it is the mechanism through which members of the organisation are stimulated to make better use of the production factor and this leads to increase in general production and productivity. Motivation also boosts willingness of the members of the organisation to work hard and helps in creating interest into achieving better performance. In order to achieve the organisational goals and objectives effectively, many things are involved in the process and these include machines, finances, equipment, technology and human resources. All the other factors are used by the human resources of the organisation with the main of attaining the set goals and objectives. Without motivation, human resources will not effectively put these resources to proper use hence wastage or unachieved goals. Motivation works by ensuring that the people given responsibility of using the resources are amply motivated to use the resources effectively and aim at the common organisational goals. Another function of motivation relates to change. Change as can be seen, is inevitable in the organisation and change resistance is a significant problem to effecting change successfully. Through motivation, employees can be made to easily accept change. Employee absenteeism can lead to reduced production and this can become a serious problem where employees are dissatisfied or less satisfied with their jobs. Employee motivation plays a major function of reducing employee absenteeism. Still related to employee presence in their work stations, picketing and strikes are likely to harm organisational activities. Motivation comes in as an important tool that can be used to reduce the amount of disputes in the organisation hence reduce strikes and picketing. Lastly, motivation plays the role of guaranteeing better human relations in the organisation and this is important because it creates a good and friendly working environment within the organisational setting.
Intrinsic or Extrinsic Motivation
There are many factors that affect behaviour and behaviour change. Within social learning theory, each major behaviour such as cigarette smoking is seen as having a large number of counter-balancing factors, many factors helping to perpetuate the behaviour (“restraining factors”) and other factors having the potential to help change the behaviour (“enhancing factors”). For example, the price of cigarettes to smoker will serve to perpetuate smoking if it is too low or may encourage cessation if the price goes up substantially. If short-term and ultimately long-term behaviour change is to occur and/or continue, it will become increasingly necessary to “unbalance” the set of factors which constrain a healthier behaviour change or support the new healthier behaviour (Chapman, 2005).
The process of unbalancing requires that we increase the factors that would lead to a change to a more healthy behaviour while eliminating as best we can the factors that help maintaining something as unhealthy as tobacco use. Incentives may be seen as one tool for the purposeful modification of those “restraining” versus “enhancing” behavioural factors. As individuals gain success with modifying these restraining versus enhancing factors, they also increase their “self-efficacy” or confidence in making decisions and taking action to improve their personal health. As the individual gains a sense of confidence in making these behaviour changes, he/she gains further efficacy to make new changes. It then becomes a self-reinforcing process (Chapman, 2005).
Thus, the manager has a great responsibility and duty of clearly understanding the behaviour of the entire workforce yet this might not be a pragmatically achievable feat in practice. For these reasons, the manager is further challenged with the task of not only understanding what motivates the employees but also about the diverse theories that have been developed to help in deciphering employee motivation. Gottschalg and Zollo (2007) also point out that engaging the workforce also goes alongside motivation and empowerment and doing all these helps in aligning the interests of the employees with those of the organisation and helps in achievement of greater competitive advantage.
Process of Motivation
Essentially, the process of motivation involves five basic stages. These stages begin with activation of unsatisfied needs and motives. As the first stage, this phase encompasses activation of a need in an employee and this might comprise either internal stimulus or external stimulus that makes the employee or employees develop a perception of deficiency. For example an employee or group of employees may feel the need for more challenging work or gain more recognition among colleagues.
The second stage comprises tension and it is at this stage that the unsatisfied needs create tension in the employee. The tension may come in various forms including psychological, sociological or even physical and this makes the employee or group of employees endeavour to develop objects that will satisfy the identified needs.
After tension has built up in the individual, the next step is the action to satisfy the identified needs and motives. Since tension created in the previous stage leads to strong internal stimulus which necessitate action to be taken, individual employees or members within the organisation will engage in activities that are intended to satisfy the motives and needs. The action may entail a simple change of behaviour aimed at gaining recognition or even working harder to get promotion.
The forth stage encompasses goal accomplishment. At this stage, appropriate actions are taken to satisfy needs and motives hence accomplish specific goals. To achieve this, reward and punishment can be invaluable tools. When members of a team, group or organisation engage in actions according to the tensions, some members are rewarded while others are punished and goals are eventually accomplished.
The last stage is feedback. This is an important phase of the motivation process as it allows initiators of change to have information that will enable them to make necessary revision, improvement or modify the needs and motives and this is done depending on the success rate of the goal accomplishment.
Explain the function of leadership and management in organisations
The function of leadership can be looked at on the perspective of stakeholder pressures; the outlook brings out a number of strategies that can be used to deal with these pressures. Responsible leadership is one of the ways of effectively dealing with the ever-present and conflicting stakeholder pressure. For this responsible leadership to help business organisations in dealing with stakeholder pressures, a balanced approach is needed which ensures a proper combination of leadership capabilities and strategies that are sustainable in terms of ensuring corporate social responsibility approach that is future-oriented. The management should institute a people approach that is sustainable and future-oriented. This means that the manager will be able to give it a social approach as well as put into account the economic aspects that bring all these stakeholders into a business relationship. The leader will therefore be able to handle stakeholder pressures by balancing the existing and emerging relations and the economic aspects tied to them. Managers need to devise control mechanisms that include proper financial rewards, reasonable share bonus schemes and other mechanisms. Managers should also use relationship-based collaboration to balance the pressures of stakeholders as underpinned in the stewardship theory. All these can only be achieved by combining proper leadership skills with
In addition, through the various functions of management of among them organising and controlling, the management ensures that resources are put to use for effective achievement of organisational goals and objectives and this includes setting objectives that are achievable in the short-term but aligned to the long-term organisational objective.
Explains the role of employee engagement
The issues of employee engagement and retention have become more intense because most companies now cannot afford to pay more to attract or retain quality employees, nor can they afford to lose talented employees with experience (Markos & Sridevi 2010). Employee engagement is an all-encompassing positive attitude toward work and it has various sub-components.
Sets out the role and function of the Board to the organisation
For the change process to be achieved successfully, the role of the Board of Directors cannot be ignored. The board of directors is responsible for overseeing the operations of the organization on behalf of the shareholders. The board of directors is also responsible for approving the corporate body’s strategic plans and key objectives. Besides this, the board is also responsible for supervision of the implementation of the strategic plans and key objectives. As is evident, this mandate implies that the board of directors is answerable if and when the company’s strategic plans and objectives are not steering the company in the right direction. By and large, the board is thus culpable when a corporate body fails because it has an approval and a supervisory role in the formulation and implementation of the strategic plans as well as the objectives. Among the roles and functions of the board mandated by corporate governance regulations, the board must lay down a comprehensive plan for the corporate body or company, detailing the main work plan and the strategy regarding management of any risk, review and revision of such policy. Determination of capital structure is also part of what the board is mandated to take care of and this includes establishing the accompanying financial objectives and then approval of annual budgets. This aspect of the role of board of governors shows that even financial failure of the corporate body shall ultimately cast culpability on the board. Coupled with the fact that the board is also mandated to supervise the main capital expenses and the acquisition or disposal of assets, it implies that almost everything that happens in the corporate body is in the limelight of the board and it is culpable when almost anything goes bad. Nevertheless, it is also important to point out that the roles of the board are governed by regulations stipulated by legal frameworks of various countries hence the extent or nature of role may vary from country to country (Al-Matari et al 2012).
Explain the contribution of corporate governance codes of practice to the change process
Corporate governance codes of practice are fundamental to providing direction to the change process by helping in defining the ethical approach and set of rules that govern the corporate governance practice. For that reason, corporate governance code of practice helps in defining ethical approach by defining the organisational culture and paradigm. In addition, code of practice ensures balanced objectives by ensuring congruence of goals of all concerned parties. Moreover, corporate governance codes ensure that each party plays his or her role and this is achieved by defining the roles of all key players and this includes owners of the organisation, directors and all other staff. The codes of practice also embody the prevailing decision-making process and give weight to all stakeholders.
Lastly, codes of practice help in defining accountability and transparency within the organisation and this encompasses all the stakeholders. This means that the corporate codes of practice will help in defining the accountability and responsibility of all stakeholders during the change process. Change process needs effective strategies, alignment with organisational goals, proper reporting and effective strategic management. This is the point where corporate governance comes in handy to ensure that the change process incorporates appropriate goals arrived at via the establishment of a suitable stakeholder decision-making paradigm that is aligned to business goals. Moreover, it is also at that point that strategic management is incorporated into the change process and this should integrate stakeholder value. Reporting systems are also structured based on the prevailing corporate governance code of practice and ethics to ensure transparency and accountability.
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