Human Resource Management: Leading Teams

• Friction
• Conformity
• Levelling of individual performance
• Diffusion of responsibility
• Devaluation of other groups

• Social comparison theory
  • Need of assessment of ourselves
  • We favor comparisons with people similar to ourselves
• Bystander-effect
  • The more people are present the less likely individuals are to take initiatives => diffusion of responsibility
• Conformity
  • As soon as three or more group members express an opinion that is different from the opinion of another single member, there is a strong tendency for that member to adapt his/her opinion.
  • Pressure to conform can lead to a change in the publicly expressed opinion without necessarily changing the privately held conviction
• Group think

• Forming (Orientation phase):
  • All new
  • insecurity
  • Test behaviors
  • Search for acceptable behaviors
• Storming (Conflict phase):
  • Fight for roles/positions ("Hackordnung")
  • Power struggles
• Norming (Organisation phase):
  • Agreeing on team rules and cooperation forms
  • Developing a sense of belonging together
• Performing (Performance phase):
  • Constructive task distribution and flexible role behavior
  • Energy is focused on task completion and goal attainment

Common task
– Complexity higher than individual competencies
– Clear performance criteria
– Collective decision competence
– Positive goal coupling

Group composition
– Adequate group size
– Different perspectives on the task
– Shared language

Team processes
– Development of group rules
– Support for team development (form, storm, norm, perform)
– Handling conflicts between individual and collective autonomy
– Explicit moderation of critical team meetings

• Demographic diversity: differences in observable attributes such as age, gender
• Psychological diversity: differences in underlying attributes such as abilities, personality, attitudes, values

• Demographic change (e.g. problems in recruiting personnel)
• Globalization of business (international supply chain relationships and mergers/acquisitions/international cooperations)
• Increasing service orientation (e.g. responding to special needs in regional markets and of particular target groups)
• New concepts of organization (increasing mix of functions/professions in work teams)

• Diversity management: Increasing heterogenity in the organization in order to increase team and organizational performance

• Positive relationship between age/gender diversity and firm performance especially in innovation-focused firms
• Mixed results on relationship between team diversity and team performance

• Team decisions assumed to be better than individual decisions due to more knowledge and different perspectives
• However, team research shows
  • Team decisions are rarely better than individual decisions
  • Available knowledge pool is rarely fully used
  • Possible reason: Inadequate management of information sharing

• Leadership style – Mostly particpatory leadership, directive leadership only if leader has crucial information
• Expert roles – Assign expert roles and promote knowledge about specific expertise
• Diversity of opinions – Promote conflict as part of constructive dialogue
• Moderation – Introduce „Advocatus Diaboli“ and clear structure in discussion

• Measures aimed at changing individual attitudes and behaviors towards diversity
  • training
  • feedback on behavior
  • directly experiencing other cultures (national, socio-ecomomic differences etc.)
  • building minority networks
• Selection and training for intercultural management

1.    Employment security

2.    Selective hiring

3.    Self-managed teams and decentralization

4.    High compensation contingent on organizational performance

5.    Extensive training

6.    Reduction of status differences

7.    Sharing Information

• Coherent company strategy
• Building individual capabilities for achieving
difficult goals (job design, personnel
development)
• Sufficient control over goal achievement by
workers themselves (transparency, predictability,
means of influence)
• Supportive leadership instead of command-andcontrol
• Systematic and participative goal agreement and
performance measurement
• Rules for handling conflicts

1. Biographical Data
2. Psychometric Tests
3. Work Samples
4. Assessment Centers
5. Job Interviews

• Goals are clear and accepted
• Individual and team goals melt together
• Responsibilities are clear and change depending on
situational demands
• Leadership is seen as a shared responsibility
• Conflicts are dealt with
• Team learns and develops
• Contributions are recognized and valued
• Communication is open and engaged
• Group processes are reflected upon and discussed

• Job analysis and design: simple vs. complex tasks, specific vs. generic job description
• Recruitment and selection: external vs. internal, specific vs. general skills
• Training and development: current vs. future skills, train few vs. all employees
• Performance management and compensation: internal vs. external equity, input=>behavior=>output control
• Labor and employee relations: GAV vs. individual contracts

All these functions require strong involvement of line management at an operational and strategic level. Shows relationship to strategic management, since this are strategic choices!

Motivation, Satisfaction and Performance

1. Static relationship: Person and job stay the same, fit has to be established once.
   Aims for and assumes stability in the organization
2. Dynamic relationship: Person and/or job change continuously, continuous adaption needed
   Aims for and assumes flexibility in the organization
   Integration of "fit task to human" (job design, job crafting) and "fit human to task" (selection, training)
   Need for systematic career management

(Mostly employees) altering their jobs to better suit their skills and interests to increase their job satisfaction

Motivation = valence x instrumentality x expectation

1. Which goal do I want to achieve? (valence)
2. Does the particular action help to achieve this goal? (instrumentality)
3. How likely is the success of this action? (expectation)

Everyone has different kinds of needs, e.g., autonomy, competence, affiliation, power, achievement, security

Basic assumption: need for autonomy, competence, and belonging.

Giving extrinisic motivation to an action a person is already intrinsically motivated, cab reduce the overall motivation.

• Adequate for task / goal
• Directly unfluencable by assessed person
• reliability, validity, objectivity
• constructive feedback

Linking motivation, satisfaction and performance through goal-oriented leadership

Systematic alignment of individual and organizational goals

• Cascading strategic goals down to all operational levels
• Participative agreement on SMART goals for everyone
• Objective feedback and performance appraisal
• Link goal attainment with pay-for-performance systems and personal development

• Individual versus group goals:
  • If tasks highly interdependent exclusive use of individual goals should be avoided.
• Learning versus performance goals:
  • For very complex tasks, learning goals are more effective than performance goals.
• Behavior versus outcome goals:
  • Behavior goals are more difficult to measure, but are more concrete and can be influenced more directly by the individual than outcome goals

+ More autonomy in goal setting and in operational goal attainment

+ Recognition of personal effort¨

- Direct impact of market and customer pressures

- Danger of quantitative and qualitative overload

• complement and superimpose legal employment contracts
• contain reciprocal, but not necessarily matching expectations and offers between employer and employee
• may be based on verbal agreements and/or observation of behaviors, norms, and customs in the organization

• Explicit and matching expectations are core to sound psychological contracts
• Coherent communication of employer expectations
• Continuous monitoring of discrepancies in expectations

1. Planning HR needs: needs due to fluctuation or strategic developments, internal (training) vs. external (recruiting)
2. Recruiting: the better the job description the higher the probability to attract fitting candidates
3. Selecting employees: predictive validity, costs/benefits, ...
4. Hiring: agree on contract