Introduction
Managers can use an action plan as a mechanism of resolving both organizational and interpersonal challenges. This is mostly done by studying the behavior of how people interact with each other in the working environment, and the impact of such behavior on the organizational performance. Organizational behavior takes a close look at the human resource in order to understand what causes a given behavior. Organizational behavior also investigates on employee emotional aspects like; what can motivate employees to perform well and what causes their work to weaken. Mostly, what influences the state of an employee’s performance includes; teamwork, leadership factors, employee skills, beliefs on changes, working environment and collective believes on organizational leadership.
Teamwork
Teamwork among employees is a very important factor that should be highly valued by an organization as it brings about collaboration amongst the team members. A work team’s purpose is to produce goods or services, which requires commitment from their members. In this case, business success is attributed to a team rather than an individual. For an action plan that is effective, teamwork should be well strategized because of the following reasons.
Management needs effective communication system in order to ensure the organizational goals have been achieved. Through teamwork, the employees together with the management promote better communication. Efficient communication amongst the organization’s employees guarantees improved performance, and this brings benefits to the entire organization, which comes as a result of teamwork.
Cooperation among the management body and employees can be enhanced through team working. By adopting teamwork, the individualistic culture is reduced or completely eliminated. One of the disadvantages of an individualistic culture is that the action of one individualistic employee may block another employee from performing his/her task thus affecting the overall organization performance, which can be eliminated by teamwork. By adopting a teamwork culture, an organization can encourage cooperation amongst the team members in order to further the objectives of the team, which ensures that every employee places the team’s objectives first rather than individual interests.
Teamwork promotes work redundancy; it makes it possible for employees to learn and understand other team member’s functions as they work closely. When one of employees in the team gets sick, stops working for the organization or goes for a vacation; the remaining employees can quickly take and perform his/her responsibility. The work redundancy function also assists the management to get answers quickly from the team members instead of waiting for a specific individual who is not available at that time, and this makes management work easy. Therefore, the company’s action plan must adopt teamwork to avoid stopping operations when certain employee is not available.
Every organization’s objective is to reduce costs and maximize profit. Teamwork can be good for the organization in cost reduction. Through teamwork, expensive leadership or managerial position will not be required as team members often manage and lead themselves. Single managers may be able to lead several teams efficiently than when dealing with individual situations. Cost savings of considerable amounts can be achieved with few managers in a teamwork setting than with many managers, since leaders in an organization command high salaries than individual contributors.
Management teams have a responsibility to focus and ensure that core operational levels of production and services provision are accomplished according to the organizational objectives. Through teamwork, organization’s managers can be able to provide oversight to promote the culture of working as a team. Management can make changes to teams to make sure that team members who do not get along with one another are separated to enhance the effectiveness of units. Furthermore, teamwork does not ignore leadership responsibilities; leaders must set the organization objectives and set clearly defined goals for each team, which they should work towards achieving them.
Job satisfaction
Job satisfaction is the attitude of a person towards his/her job, which takes several dimensions such as; the work itself, pay promotion, supervision and co-workers. It can be measured by the level by which an individual performs the job or by the expectations. For an effective action plan, the organization management should consider several factors the influence employer performance in regards to job satisfaction.
The first is developing a good employee’s reward system. Job satisfaction has been found to be closely related to the reward system. As a form of motivation, an organization should make sure that pay benefits and employee promotions are fairly distributed. The nature of the work also plays a vital role in determining individual job satisfaction. This can be influenced by factors such as work flexibility, freedom and discretion that the management can put in place to boost employee job performance. Employees training can also act as a motivational tool for both managers and employees. Supervisors are bound to find it easy to work with motivated and skilled workers.
When employees believe that their managers or supervisors are considerate and competent, job satisfaction becomes high. Therefore, an action plan should ensure that only competent supervisors are selected to top positions. In real sense, supervisors should portray high levels of competence in order to win the trust of their junior employees. Working conditions has a direct influence on employee satisfaction; organization action plan should be developed to ensure that the working environment is comfortable, and address the issue of salary challenge, which must match the level of available resources. Employee’s salary must match the level of work, nature of the work and performance level.
In the organizational behavior action plan, effective management reward should be included in order to recognize employee efforts. Effective recognition of an employee reinforces actions and behavior that management will want to see an employee repeat. This is a powerful tool since it is simple and immediate. Employee recognition process should be developed in such a way that it is equally beneficial to the organization and employee.
Leadership
A good leader must possess qualities, which can be fully accepted and adopted by the followers (employees). Some of those qualities include; willingness to serve others first, result oriented and understanding of what other people say rather than just listening to them. In management, effective leadership is experienced when a manager is able to influence behavior of an individual or group regardless of the purpose of the act.
The organizational behavior action plan that an organization adopts should fully state the area of jurisdiction of a leader in relation to employees. This should ensure that leaders do not use their power to just punish employees than reward. Guidelines should be included in the action plan on how leaders should respond to an employee’s mistake. A better approach to conflict resolution acts as a form of motivation and will make employees take future punishments positively. Good leader should possess a high performance record, have good skills in problem solving and be able to acknowledge other people’s opinions.
Trust/ethics
Ethics is the accepted code of conduct. Some managers take advantage of their position to reward themselves in the expense of the effort of low-waged workers. This will cause the low-waged workers commitment to decline. This can be considered as an unethical action by managers and supervisors.
The organizational behavior action plan should have strict rules that ensure that the rightful persons are rewarded for their efforts, that is, the employees. Managers and supervisors who reward themselves should be held liable for their action and remedies for such actions should be present. By doing this, employees will be motivated if they learn that their efforts are not used to reward their supervisor. Organization action plan should provide opportunities over which employees can participate in problem solving.
Conclusion
A good action plan can ensure that organizational performance has improved and the employee’s motivation ensures total commitment to achievement of company’s objective. Furthermore, the company can achieve cost reduction and proper resource utilization.
