Human Resource Management: Leading Teams

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

•1. Define organisational strategy

•2. Goal agreement

•3. Link rewards to goals

•4. Develop action plan

•5. Periodic reviews

•6. Review of performance

• Performance review/appraisal
• Feedback on performance
• Formal recording of (un)satisfactory performance
• Basis for reward decisions
• Basis for development decisions
• Motivating future performance

Behvaiorally anchored rating scale

Each value on a scale for a particular dimension is defined by a concrete behavior.

Difficulty: avoid confounding of criteria in the anchors.

Alternative: assess frequencies of concrete behaviors.

Absolute assessment per individual

Comparative assessment across individuals (rank order)

• Self-assessment
• supervisors
• subordinates
• peers
• customers

Rating error. : A central characteristic of a person determines the overall impression
 

Rating error: First and last pieces of information influence overall impression most
 

Rating error: Assumptions about correlations between characteristics based on the group a person belongs to

Rating error: : Sticking with an assessment despite information to the contrary
 

Rating errors: On rating scales we tend to choose values in the middle and generally also more positive than negative values

• Halo effect
• Primacy/recency effect
• Stereotypes
• Persistence of impression
• Central tendency and positive skew

Examples of attribution errors:
– Fundamental attribution error: overemphasizing the actor as a cause of events
– Protecting self-esteem: Underestimating person-related causes for ourselves especially for failure
– Underusing consensus information: little use of information from comparisons with others` behavior
– Confirming expectations: e.g. assuming person-related causes for behaviors that are atypical for a particular situation; assuming situation-related causes in highly structured situations

• Systematic preparation of performance appraisal interview
• Conscious reflecting of potential errors and their influences on the appraisal
• Use of structured assessment scales (BARS)
• Open communication climate that allows critical feedback on the appraisal by the appraised person

• Money
• Compensation
• Reward
• Incentive
• Recognition

• Base/fixed pay (task related)
• variable pay (person related, eg. performance, experience,..)
• Value of the work, market rate
• Task requirenments, qualification requirenments.

Job evaluations:

• Analytic evaluation: Evaluating a task/job by means of values on weighted criteria
• Summative evaluation: Assigning values to tasks/jobs based on a global assessment of what they are worth
• Job evaluations allow comparisons between different jobs

Company or team performance.

Systematic furthering of personal aptitude in relation to individual expectations and organizational requirements by means of
– Education/training
– Counselling/coaching
– Management by objectives
– Team development
– Job design

Group internal functions
– Task orientation/initiating structure: Set goals, distribute tasks, check work results etc.
– Employee orientation/consideration: Resolve conflicts, support/coach team members etc.

Group external functions
– Boundary regulation: Adjusting external demands in terms of group internal demands and possibilities
– Networking: Developing and maintaining contacts outside of own group as source of information, support, and influence

• Management by objectives
• Systematic performance management
• Standardized HRM processes for selecting, appraising, compensating, developing people

• Task
  • Complexity, novelty, coordination requirements, ...
• Group
  • Size, composition, climate, ...
• Organization
  • Sources of power, available leadership substitutes, ...

Leadership portfolios

Shared leadership

1. Knowledge and experience
2. Cognitive abilities
3. Leadership responsibility
4. Physical/emotional demands
5. Strenuous (=anstrengende) working conditions

1 – 3 get usually a high weight, 4 and 5 low weight => one reason why typical womens jobs are unterpayd

• Gratification power
  • Influence based on positive reinforcement through rewards or prevention of harm
• Coercive power
  • Influence through possibilities for punishment or taking away rewards
• Position power
  • Influence based on the position in the organization
• Expert power
  • Influence based on personal competence
• Charismatic power
  • Influence based on the followers' identification with the leader due to personal attraction

• Directive = issuing instructions and commands, assigning goals and maintaining control
  • crisis situations, team members with little experience/qualification, position or expert power
• Empowering = leading others to lead themselves by encouraging independent thinking and action, teamwork and selfdevelopment
  • complex and interesting tasks, highly qualified/experiences team members, good team climate
• Transformational = raising followers to higher levels of motivation through vision and inspiration
  • major organizational change, demanding/unpopular tasks, team conflict, charismatic power
• Transactional = motivating followers through the provision of material and immaterial rewards
  • routine tasks, high standardization, frequently changing team members, gratification or coercive power