Description of Job and Organization
Abstract
Organizations use many approaches to increase their performance. It is not enough to employ a worker, assign jobs, pay salary, and expect that employee to remain working with the organization for a long time and consistently produce desired results. Organizations achieve their goals through employees. Employees are assets to organizations. Organizations do everything to make sure that they get the best from their employees. Some of the ways through which organizations encourage their employees to perform well is by motivating them and ensuring that they are satisfied in the workplace. There are various strategies of motivating employees. Organizations also assign tasks to individuals and also to teams with targets to be achieved. Motivated individuals and teams strive to meet their targets. Working in teams may not necessarily result in impressive results. This is because team members are not necessarily the same. Some might be high performers while others might be poor performers. There are other factors which affect team performance. One of them is leadership. When selecting leaders for groups, organizations consider the qualities of good leadership. Having worked in a company, one gets an experience of how certain theories of motivation and teamwork are put in practice. This essay is about reflection my past work life experience in an organization. Two lenses will be used to describe the experience I gained in the workplace. A description of the job and the organization will be made. This includes the name of the organization, its location, and what it does. It will also include the requirements for the job as well as duties and responsibilities. The reason for applying the job, the experience of the job, and views regarding the job will be described. Then, the two lenses will be briefly described, followed by the concepts related to the experience at the workplace. A summary of the application of the relevant theories to the lenses will be made at the end of each lens. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn at the end of the essay.
Description of the Job and Organization
I worked with DB Schenker (Schenker of Canada Limited) Mississauga, Ontario, as a warehouse associate in the summer of 2015. My duties were processing customer orders, including picking, packing and inspecting shipments, and repetitive lifting of heavy items. The job requirements were: completion of high school, minimum two years warehouse experience, being able to continuously lift heavy items, excellent accuracy and organization skills complimented by the ability to multi-task and prioritize, working effectively as a team player, and excellent knowledge of the overall warehousing process. My sole reason for applying the job was to have something to do in summer. It was a very tedious job. I was doing one thing over and over again. This made me wonder how people take up that kind of job for a lifetime because it was really strenuous. Unlike other warehouses, the company was very particular about following their rules and regulations especially on safety. The supervisors enforced the safety rules and restricted employees without the right personal protective equipment (PPE) from entering the warehouse.
A reflection will be made on the experiences gained while working for DB Schenker. In subsequent reflections, Lens 3 and Lens 5 will be used. The main reasons for choosing the two lenses is because they apply well to my experience at DB Schenker. For example, Lens 3 is about employee motivation and job satisfaction. There were issues about the way employees were motivated and the way employees perceived motivation. Further, there were assumptions regarding employee motivation. Approach to employee motivation and job satisfaction was also different from division to division and from supervisor to supervisor. Lens 5 is about groups and teams. This applies also well to my experience because we had groups and teams in the workplace. However, there were more than one type of groups. We also had teams which operated quite different from groups. Group performance in the workplace was influenced by many factors. The following is a reflection of the workplace experience using Lens 3 and Lens 5.
During the interviews, I remember being asked a number of questions. Some of the questions included describing my ideal work environment. I also remember being asked to state three things which make me enjoy my work and three things which make me dislike working in an organization. I answered the questions to the best of my ability. And when I was finally employed, I got to learn more about the company, especially about the motivation of employees and how employees perceived the company. From the many conversations we had with my workmates as well as my personal observations, employees at Schenker were highly motivated. Employees spoke positively about the company and they strived to achieve the company’s goal. Every employee worked hard to meet their own targets as well as their team’s targets. Cases of absenteeism were rare. Furthermore, the employees I talked to said there was a low turnover in the company. Many of them said they could not compare the conditions at Schenker with conditions in where they had worked before. However, although the employees were generally motivated, not all of them were motivated by the same thing. The implicit assumption by the Schenker management was that all employees were motivated equally by the same factors. The company had divisions with supervisors in charge of each division. There were common methods the company employed to motivate the employees. However, every supervisor employed individual strategies to motivate his team. Motivation was therefore different in the various departments. From the conversations I held with my colleagues, I did not hear anyone complain about anything: poor salary, bad rules/regulations/procedures, bad boss, uncomfortable work environment, lack of support, or any other negative comment. Employees said they were satisfied because they were paid above the industry average and the management and supervisors treat them well.
Organizational performance has been largely associated with employee motivation. By motivating employees, organizations expect them to strive better and contribute to the overall organizational success. Maslow hierarchy of needs has been used to describe factors which motivates employees to do better. According to Maslow, there are five motivational needs: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization respectively with physiological needs appearing at the bottom and self-actualization appearing at the top of the pyramid. Maslow explained that a deficiency of a basic needs motivate people to achieve it when they are unmet. However, upon meeting a lower level need, an individual strives to meet the highest level need until he finally achieve the self-actualization at the top of the hierarchy (Koontz and Weihrich, 2010; McLeod, 2014). According to Nohria, Groysberg, and Lee (2008), motivating employees starts with acknowledging that for them to deliver their best, they must work in an environment which fulfills their basic emotional drive to bond, defend, acquire, and comprehend. They further pointed out that organizations can employ motivational strategies such as performance-based reward systems, creating a culture that foster and embrace openness and collaboration, challenging jobs, and putting in place performance management processes which are transparent, fair, and trustworthy. These are some of the strategies that were highly applied in DB Schenker. There were other strategies including job rotation, job enlargement, and being thanked by supervisors for successfully completing a task.
Lens 5
One other question which cropped up during the interview was whether I enjoyed working alone or in a team setting. I just answered, I was comfortable working alone as well as in a team. When I eventually joined the company, I learned that employees work in teams as well as individually depending on the tasks. Even when tasks were assigned individually, each employee’s effort contributed to the overall goal of the team. Supervisors led teams in each division. Different groups existed in the company. Some groups were formal and formed with the objective of meeting the company’s goal while other groups were informal and formed by employees as part of their socialization. Besides groups, there were also teams in the organization. For example, we had our own team in the warehouse with supervisor being our leader. Although there were groups, it was sometimes very hard to tell their leader because they were formed in an ad hoc manner. Unlike teams where the objectives were clear, informal groups had no specific goals to achieve. Teams strived to achieve their targets and in many occasions, all the teams met their targets. Many times I participated as a member of various teams. With time, I came to learn what affect group performance. Factors which affected group performance included the leadership of the team, the commitment of the group members, the availability of resources needed to accomplish a task, and motivation levels of the members in a group. Groups were formed when certain circumstances demanded. For example, certain tasks were better done as a group rather than as individuals. Every time a group was formed, it helped advance overall organizational goals. It can therefore be concluded that the groups were used well by the organization.
It has been pointed out that work groups are the building blocks for organizations. In a typical workplace like DB Schenker, there were teams and groups such as project management teams, improvement teams, and quality teams. Each group and team strived to achieve organizational goals. Each team and group had its leader. Team leader’s behavior can be best described by the Team Leadership Model advanced by Hill (Northouse, 2013). According to Hill, team leaders contribute to team effectiveness by monitoring/taking action, taking actions which are task/relational, and internal/external. Task leadership actions include goal focusing, structuring for results, facilitating decisions, training, and maintaining standards while relational includes coaching, collaborating, managing conflict, building commitment, and satisfying needs. External leadership actions are mostly environmental and include networking, advocating, and negotiating support, assessing, and sharing information. Our team and group leaders used to engage a lot in these actions and decisions. Group/team success depended on a number of things. According to Hill and Anteby (2003), teams’ operations, performance, outcomes and culture are highly influenced by the leadership style. Finkelstein (2015) pointed out that in order to enhance job satisfaction and increase team performance, a team leader should manage individuals, and not teams. This implies a leader should not lose focus on individual needs and concerns of every team member. A leader should also inspire team members with vision and assign them challenging responsibilities and offer them incentives like bonuses or raises. He further suggested that bosses should listen more and speak less, give feedback to team members, and also remain consistent in the way they relate with team members. Pentland (2012) contends that high-performing teams share certain characteristics. For example, every team member talk, and listen in almost the same measure and gestures. In such teams, conversations among members are also energetic. Not only does members connect with team leader but also with other members. Also in such teams, members engage in side conversations within the team, and they explore outside the team and come back with useful information. All these views are in line with the experience I gained at DB Schenker. Team leaders were supportive and encouraging.
Conclusion
The practical workplace experience involves a lot of learning how theory is turned into practice. Experience at DB Schenker gave me an opportunity to learn how motivational theories are applied in practice. I also learned more about groups and team dynamics as well as team effectiveness. Organizational performance is highly influenced by how motivated employees are. Organizations therefore employ various strategies to motivate their employees. In organizations, team and groups can be utilized to achieve organizational goals. Team success is determined by many factors, but mainly by the leadership style employed. A team leader ought to be a person who makes decisions and take actions which contribute to the overall team effectiveness.
References
Finkelstein, S. (2015).What Amazing Bosses Do Differently. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2015/11/what-amazing-bosses-do-differently&cm_sp=Article-_-Links-_-End%20of%20Page%20Recirculation
Hill, L.A. & Anteby, M. (2003). Analyzing Work Groups. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/product/analyzing-work-groups/407032-PDF-ENG
Koontz, H. & Weihrich, H. (2010). Essentials of Management. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill.
McLeod, S. (2014). Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Retrieved from: http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Nohria, N., Groysberg, B., & Lee, L-E. (2008). Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2008/07/employee-motivation-a-powerful-new-model
Northouse, P.G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and Practice. London: SAGE Publications.
Pentland, A.S. (2012). The New Science of Building Great Teams. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams
