Change is inevitable in the workplace. Change can either pose some threats or opportunities to the organization. Every organization has to adapt to change otherwise it will lag behind and would not be able to cope with the competition prevailing in the market. As a matter of fact, change is the only constant thing happening in the workplace and it happens in a very fast way even before the management and their employees can prepare for it (Certo, 2015). This implies that, for management to run organizations in an effective way, they have to come up with ways of helping their employees to cope up with change. Employees cannot do this on their own without the support of their seniors since it will make them feel neglected and lack of support. This is a big frustration for most employees since they fear to lose their job or even being transferred to unfamiliar places of work. This essay will, therefore, focus on describing the organizational context in McDonalds and the theory that will be applied in this context and the limitation of that theory before coming up with a conclusion.
McDonalds is one of the organizations that need to adapt change in the workplace and come up with ways of keeping or retain its employees to avoid such cases of its employee’s quitting their jobs for lack of support and goodwill from the management. Job is a young and ambitious manager who has great dreams of excelling in his career, but he had to quit his job for lack support from management and also for short of experience on how to address such challenges. He suffered immense frustration from deficient in knowledge on how to balance his work and school, the top management was not willing to support him and empower him to gain experience in his work and how to gain respect from his staff. Job had to quit since naturally, people expect life to be easy and everything to go their way and once this doesn’t happen, they will tend to feel frustrated (Certo, 2015). This is the reason as to why support from management is very important.
Employees need assistance especially in their places of work or in their new positions in the workplace. Job is very young in the management field and lacks that emotional intelligence on how to handle change. Before beginning the new roles, Job should have prepared himself psychologically on how to cope with such like challenges on the way (Certo, 2015). This is because managing changes require patience, time and focus. Different individuals adjust to change in different ways and rates.
The theory that fits best in this organizational context is that of Daniel Goleman on the emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability of individuals to have a full understanding of their emotions and of other people (Ealias & George, 2012). This will enable a person to understand his feelings and that of others as this will guide their behavior and how they think about other people in the organization. Individuals who are known to have high levels of emotional intelligence have mental health, good job performance in the workplace, good leadership skills. This, therefore, emotional intelligence plays a very big role towards determining the level of productivity of a person in the workplace. Emotional intelligence enables a person to perceive emotions, integrate these emotions into thoughts, and understand as well as regulating the same emotions so as to enhance personal growth.Figure 1: the figure above shows the components of emotional intelligence. It is, therefore; right to say that emotional intelligence is a tool that enables an individual to make sense and to be in a position to live well with the social environment. This model also understands the fact that people vary in their level of understanding and also the ability to digest information that is of emotional nature. Emotional intelligence has four kinds of abilities. The first one is that of the ability to perceive emotions (Druskat et al., 2013). This is the ability to be able to identify your own emotions and the emotions of others in their faces, voices, and pictures. Emotional intelligence also has the ability to use emotions so as to solve problems in the organizational. Consequently, emotional intelligence facilitates the ability to understand emotions.
This theory helps in the explanation of the organizational context since it will help in bringing a broader picture of how emotional intelligence could have helped in bringing harmony in the workplace and also help in facilitating change in MacDonald. Job was young and did not have the high emotional intelligence to help him deal with the challenges he faced in the workplace (Ciarrochi & Mayer, 2013). Emotional intelligence requires a person to be able to manage himself in the best way possible (Ciarrochi & Mayer, 2013). Job found it hard to manage his time in school and in the workplace. This shows that he was not ready for the task in the first place. He should have come up with a plan on how he is going to attend classes and at the same time meet the demanding needs of his job.
This theory on emotional intelligence helps in our understanding of organizational management in the sense that, organizations are made up of individuals that have different emotions. We are all different in the manner we react to situations (Ealias & George, 2012). There are those individuals who are social and others who are not social and, therefore, do not have the idea of how to build networks in the workplace and also win the support and respect from others. This theory helps us to understand that, organizations that have good management with greater emotional intelligence experience greater productivity. Individuals with greater emotional intelligence react positively to the environment and this will be reflected by the manner in which they go about work in the organization.
Consequently, organizations that promote emotional intelligence have peace and harmony. There are no conflicts experienced between and employees and between employees and management (Ciarrochi & Mayer, 2013). This results in the organization having a lower employee turnover. It provides a good environment for employees to build on their talents and avoid cases like that of Job of quitting the organization due to frustration.
Emotional intelligence can improve organizational performance since it promotes a positive environment for doing work. It creates good social relations especially during work performance and also in negotiations (Ealias & George, 2012). This is because it builds good social dynamics in the workplace as well that ability to negotiate well with others in addressing contingent issues. As we have seen before in this essay, greater emotional intelligence translates to greater performance in the workplace. This can best be explained by the fact that it brings psychological well-being in people as it ensures that there is higher satisfaction in life, self- esteem improves and it also lowers the level of job insecurity.
However, emotional intelligence despite having many advantages to organizations, there are also some disadvantages associated with it. This is because once people have perfected their emotional skills, their skills of manipulating others also increases (Ealias & George, 2012). Once a person has perfected their skills of controlling their emotions, it becomes easy for them to also disguise their true feelings. Getting to know what others are feeling, gives you the chance to motivate them to live or act against their own interest. Consequently, once a leader delivers a very strong message that is filled with emotions, people are less likely to take the message seriously. Leaders who have the capacity to master the emotions of other people, it becomes easy for them to rob their capacity to reason.
Edgar Schein, on the other hand, came up a theory of organizational culture. This theory best suits McDonald since Job needed to understand that, an organization cannot adopt a new culture in a single day but it is a process that takes time and employees need to be taken slowly through the culture change for them to accept the new culture to be part of them (Shafritz, 2015). Job faced resistance from his employees who went to a level of even not respecting him. He should have helped build a culture where employees can change their values and this would have made them change their attitudes and thoughts of young managers. This organization is lacking a strong culture that can model the values of all employees from management to the lowest employee in the organization.
This theory helps in the understanding of organizational management since every organization has its culture and they vary from one organization to the other (Shafritz, 2015). It is, therefore, upon the leaders of the organizations to come up with ways of using culture to bring change in their respective organization. If organizational culture is utilized well, it can improve the performance of the organization. But it can only improve the performance of the organization if the employees are involved in the change model. For excellent performance to be realized in the McDonald, the culture of the organization need to reevaluate so as to build a culture where employees respect their managers irrespective of their age, all employees are first trained before given new task and a culture where management recognize the role played by middle-level managers in the organization.
This theory also has its weakness since it views change in organizational culture as a factor that takes a short time to happen (Shafritz, 2015). There are some cultures that take years for them to be built and to be fully accepted by all employees. For an organizational culture to be effective it must have a strong foundation and it must be based on the vision of the organization.
Kotter’8 step model of leading change in an organization also best fits McDonald since it will equip the organization which methods and mechanism of embracing change. Both the employees and management in the organization are resistant to change. The first step in the theory of leading is creating urgency in the organization (Kotter, 2012). Job could have motivated his staff to embrace change and this can only happen if employees are shown the need for change. The second step is the formation of a powerful coalition; this could have helped Job in winning the support of both the staff and management so that they may support his leadership (Kotter, 2012). He had to quit his job for not being able to marshal all the staff to embrace his leadership despite his age. Kotter’s theory also explains that, for change to happen, vision must be created and communicated to all employees. Job being a young manager, must have created his own vision for change and this would have it easier for other employees to accept his leadership. Consequently, the theory could have improved the performance of the organization since it would have removed all obstacles to change that Job was facing. Consequently, there is a need for the organization to embrace change by appreciating the fact that young employees can also make good managers and no one should be victimized by their age.
However, this theory comes with its own weaknesses since it makes employees be objects of change and, therefore, they will be vulnerable to decisions that are only there to protect the interest of management and not all employees hence raising chances of dictatorial kind of leadership in organizations (Kotter, 2012). Additionally, this theory makes the change to look like it is a one-time event but as we all know; change is a process that takes time to occur.
Conclusively, change in the organization is inevitable and, therefore, it is upon the organizations to come up with ways and mechanism of integrating the change in their operations. One of these ways of dealing with change is helping their employee to cope with change. McDonald is one of those organizations that are yet to experience the change in its organizational culture and this is the reason as to why Job found it hard to fit in the organization. However, Job should have applied the emotional intelligence, Kotter’s change theory, and Edgar’s organizational culture theory to help him fit into the organization and win the support of management and that of his staff as well as managing his time well.
References
Certo, S. (2015). Supervision: Concepts and skill-building. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Ciarrochi, J., & Mayer, J. D. (2013). Applying emotional intelligence: A practitioner's guide. Psychology Press.
Druskat, V. U., Mount, G., & Sala, F. (2013). Linking emotional intelligence and performance at work: Current research evidence with individuals and groups. Psychology Press.
Ealias, A., & George, J. (2012). Emotional intelligence and job satisfaction: a correlational study. Research journal of commerce and behavioral science,1(4).
Kotter, J. (2012). The 8-step process for leading change. Kotter International. Shafritz, J., Ott, J., & Jang, Y. (2015). Classics of organization theory. Cengage Learning.
Shafritz, J., Ott, J., & Jang, Y. (2015). Classics of organization theory. Cengage Learning.
