Leadership Exam #3

Diagnosis and Leverage Points

A leader needs to diagnose the problems behind a poorly performing team by using the TLM model. • Diagnose the input variables at the individual, team, and organizational levels that most impact the process variable. • Using instruments such as the Campbell Interest and Skills Survey to select personnel may help a team's effort level from an individual perspective. • Examining the reward system that may be impacting a team helps at the organizational level. • Poorly designed tasks are hypothesized to be unmotivating.

Achievement Orientation

Achievement orientation is a person's tendency to exert effort toward task accomplishment depends partly on the strength of his or her motivation to achieve success. McClelland's Achievement Theory: Said that individuals with a strong need for achievement strive to accomplish socially acceptable endeavors and activities. • Maintained that differences in achievement orientation are a primary reason why people differ in the levels of effort they exert to accomplish assignments, objectives, or goals. • Component of the Five Factor Model or OCEAN model of personality dimension of conscientiousness. • Key success factor for people who advance to the highest levels of organizations.

Virtual Teams

Also known as geographically dispersed teams, or GDT's. According to researchers, areas that must change for global teams to work are: • Senior management leadership. • Innovative use of communication technology. • Adoption of an organization design that enhances global operations. • Prevalence of trust among team members. • Ability to capture the strengths of diverse cultures, languages, and people. Leaders of virtual teams need to bear in mind the following research conclusions: • Distance between members is multidimensional. • Impact of distances on performance is not directly proportional to objective measures of distance. • Differences in the effects that distance seems to have is due at least partially to the following intervening variables: • Integrating practices within a virtual team. • Integrating practices between a virtual team and its larger host organization.

Motivation

Anything that provides direction, intensity, and persistence to behavior. Must be inferred from behavior as it is not observable.

Assertiveness

Assertive behavior and assertiveness skills are composed of behavioral, knowledge or judgment, and evaluative components. • Individuals exhibiting assertive behavior are able to stand up for their own rights, or their group's rights, in a way that also recognizes the concurrent right of others to do the same. Differs from acquiescence and aggression. • Acquiescence: Avoiding interpersonal conflict entirely either by giving up and giving in or by expressing one's needs in an apologetic, self-effacing way. • Aggression: Attaining objectives by attacking or hurting others. Leaders who fail to be assertive with friends and peers run the risk of becoming victims of the Abilene paradox. • Abilene paradox: Occurs when someone suggests that the group engage in a particular activity or course of action, and no one in the group really wants to do the activity, and this feeling is expressed only after the activity is completed. Ways to behave more assertively. • Using "I" statements. • Asking for help when required. • Learning to say no to others. • Monitoring one's inner dialogue. • Being persistent without becoming irritated, angry, or loud.

Third Month: Communicate and Drive Change

At this point, the leader should be: • Articulating how the team will win. • Identifying the what, why, and how of any needed changes. • Defining a clear set of expectations for team members. Major events for the third month. • Meet with the entire team. • Meet off-site with direct reports if the team is large. Key objectives of the off-site meeting. • Get agreement on the critical attributes and values of team members. • Create a team scorecard. • Establish an operating rhythm. • Establish task forces to work on key change initiatives.

Needs That Drive Employees Who Perform Non-Routine Work

Autonomy- • Concerned primarily with making choices. • Key factor in the gig economy. Mastery- • Helping followers develop those skills that will enable them to perform at higher levels. • Leaders need to set clear expectations for job performance, assess the capabilities of followers, and then provide the training needed to acquire and improve critical skills. Meaning- • Workers wanting to work on things that make a difference.

Performance

Behaviors directed toward a firm's mission or goals or the products and services resulting from those behaviors Differs from effectiveness, which involves making judgments about the adequacy of behavior with respect to certain criteria. An adequate level of motivation may be a necessary but insufficient condition for performance and effectiveness.

Improving Creativity

Brainstorming stimulates creative thinking in groups. • Seeing things in new ways enhances creativity but it can be difficult because of a mental block known as functional fixedness. • Can be overcome in the following ways: • Thinking in terms of analogies. • Putting an idea or a problem into a picture rather than into words. • Leaders can use their power constructively to encourage the open expression of ideas. • Forming diverse problem-solving groups increases creativity but may also increase conflict.

Preparing for an Interview

Candidates should gather as much information about their potential company as they can. • Sources of information include websites, annual reports, press releases, and marketing literature. • Can also use Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and other social networking sites to set up informational interviews with people inside the organization.

Coaching: Concluding Comments

Coaching takes little additional time. Good coaches are equally versatile at all five steps of coaching Leaders need to assess and develop coaching skills. Coaching is a dynamic process. • Good coaches assess where followers are in the coaching process and intervene appropriately. Good leaders are those who create successors, and coaching may be the best way to make this happen.

Providing Constructive Feedback

Constructive feedback helps foster growth, and supervisory feedback can aid in building morale. Development of good feedback skills is an outgrowth of developing good communication, listening, and assertiveness skills. • Provider must: • Be clear about the purpose. • Choose an appropriate context and medium for giving feedback. • Send proper nonverbal signals. • Try to detect emotional signals from the recipient. • Be somewhat assertive in providing feedback. Components of feedback skills. • Knowledge component: Knowing when, where, and what feedback is to be given. • Behavioral component: Concerns how feedback actually is delivered. • Good feedback is specific, descriptive, direct, and helpful. • Evaluative component.

Evaluation of Followers' Performance

Contentious issues are as follows: • Some jobs are much more difficult to evaluate than others. • Leaders may sometimes assign the wrong performance goals to followers because they may lack better understanding of the job. • A sizable percentage of leaders want to be more popular than fair. • Many leaders and followers have negative reactions to the bureaucratic nature of performance appraisals.

Building High-Performance Teams: The Rocket Model

Context through morale components describe the "how" of team building. • The components of rocket model tell team leaders what they specifically need to do to improve team mission, norms, and so forth. Results component describes the "what" of team building • Shows what the team actually accomplished. • High-performing teams get superior results because they have attended to the other seven components. • Teams achieving suboptimal results can improve their performance by focusing on problematic components of the Rocket Model.

Building Credibility

Credibility: Ability to engender trust in others. • Leaders with high levels of credibility are considered trustworthy. • Tend to have a strong sense of right and wrong. • Stand up and speak up for what they believe in, protect confidential information, encourage ethical discussions of business or work issues, and follow through with commitments. • Comprises the following components: • Expertise: Technical competence, organizational knowledge, and industry knowledge. • Trust: Clarifying and communicating one's values and building relationships with others.

Empowerment

Defined as having two key components. • Leaders who wish to empower employees should delegate leadership and decision making down to the lowest level possible. • Leaders should equip followers with the resources, skills, and knowledge necessary to make good decisions. Macro psychological components: 1) Motivation 2) Learning 3) Stress Micro components of empowerment: 1) Self-determination 2) Meaning 3) Competence 4) Influence Empowered employees: • Have latitude to make decisions and are comfortable making these decisions. • Believe what they do is important. • Are seen as influential members of their team.

Communication

Effective communication: Involves the ability to transmit and receive information with a high probability that the intended message is passed from sender to receiver. • Quality of a leader's communication is positively correlated with subordinate satisfaction and productivity and quality of services rendered. • Effective communication skills give leaders and followers greater access to information relevant to important organizational decisions. • Effectiveness of the communication process depends on the successful integration of all the steps in the communication process. Communication breakdowns. • Causes. • Purpose of the message was unclear. • Leader's or follower's verbal and nonverbal behaviors were inconsistent. • Message was not heard by the receiver, or the message may be misinterpreted. • Often lead to blaming someone else for the problem. • Communication model can minimize conflict associated with communication breakdowns. • Leaders can improve their communication skills through the following means: • Determining the purpose of the communication before speaking. • Choosing an appropriate context and medium for the message. • Sending clear signals. • Actively ensuring that others understand the message.

Understanding and Managing Unit and Team Effectiveness

Effectiveness is usually the ultimate criterion by which leaders are judged because it is concerned with the outcomes or results of followers' behavior. Organization effectiveness measures worth noting are as follows: • In some situations, leaders may need to define team goals. • Effectiveness measures all suffer from some degree of criterion contamination. • Criterion contamination occurs when effectiveness measures are affected by factors unrelated to follower performance. • Leaders not only need to know how winning is defined, but they also need to know the various factors that affect goal accomplishment. Progress against a set of organizational goals and key performance indicators is usually published in the form of a team or balanced scorecard. • Balanced scorecards will include organizational goals that can provide middle and more senior leaders with a comprehensive picture of organizational effectiveness. • Leaders need to ensure followers understand how their performance contributes to team or organizational goal accomplishment.

Concluding Thoughts about the TLM

Even if a team is well designed, has superior organizational systems, and has access to superior-quality ongoing development, without adequate material resources, it is not likely to do well on the output level. Leaders can influence team effectiveness by: • Ensuring the team has a clear sense of purpose and performance expectations. • Designing or redesigning input stage variables at the individual, organizational, and team design levels. • Improving team performance through ongoing coaching at

Employee engagement

Extent to which people are absorbed with, committed to, and enthusiastic about their assigned work tasks. Form of productivity. The best leaders may be those who can motivate workers to perform at a high level while maintaining an equally high level of employee engagement and job satisfaction.

Bridging the Gaps: Building a Development Plan

Following are the steps for developing a high-impact development plan: • Working on career and development objectives. • Determining the criteria for success. • Determining action steps. • Deciding whom to involve and reassessing dates. • Stretching assignments. • Using various resources. • Reflecting the knowledge with a partner. Reflecting on learning. • Helps leaders analyze whether the final destination is still the right one, if an alternative route might be better, and whether there is a need for more resources or equipment. • Involves periodically reviewing one's progress with one's boss. Transferring learning to new environments. • The development plan should be changed, modified, or updated as you learn from your experiences, receive feedback, acquire new skills, and meet targeted development needs.

Delegating

Gives the responsibility for decisions to those individuals most likely to be affected by or to implement the decision. Concerned with autonomy, responsibility, and follower development than with participation. Research has shown that: • Leaders who delegate authority more frequently often have higher-performing businesses. • Followers are not necessarily happier when their leaders frequently delegate tasks. Why Delegating is Important: • Frees time for the leader to perform other activities. • Develops followers by providing them with practical experience in a controlled fashion. • Strengthens the organization by signaling that subordinates are trusted, and their development is important, which increases job satisfaction levels.

Items Found on Job Satisfaction Surveys

Global satisfaction: Assesses the overall degree to which employees are satisfied with their organization and their job. Facet satisfaction: Assesses the degree to which employees are satisfied with different aspects of work, such as pay, benefits, promotion policies, and working hours and conditions. Findings regarding global and facet satisfaction. • People generally tend to be happy with their vocation or occupation. • Hierarchy effect: People with longer tenure or in higher positions tend to have higher global and facet satisfaction ratings than those newer to or lower in the organization. Life satisfaction: Concerns a person's attitudes about life in general. Job satisfaction surveys are used extensively in both public and private institutions. • Survey results are most useful when compared with results from a reference group, such as an organization's past results or ratings from similar organizations. • Leaders MUST be willing to take action based on survey results or risk losing credibility and actually increasing job dissatisfaction.

Characteristics of Goals

Goals should be: • Specific. • Observable. • Attainable. • Challenging. • Supported by actual commitment. • Followed by feedback.

Nature of Groups

Group: Two or more persons interacting with one another in a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person. • This definition incorporates the concept of reciprocal influence between leaders and followers. • The definition does not constrain individuals to only one group. • Group members interact and influence each other. Although groups play a pervasive role in society, most people spend little time thinking about the factors that affect group processes and intragroup relationships

Employee Turnover

Has the most immediate impact on leadership practitioners AND from a financial standpoint impact the following: • Recruitment/retention costs • Reduced efficiency and productivity = increased costs and reduced profits • Lower customer service = possible lost sales and market share Functional turnover is considered healthy for an organization • Examples: When followers retire, do not fit into the organization, or are substandard workers. Dysfunctional turnover occurs when an organization's best and brightest become dissatisfied and leave. • Most likely to occur when downsizing is the response to organizational decline.

Key Characteristics of Effective Teams

Have a clear mission and high-performance standards. Leaders often evaluate equipment, training facilities and opportunities, and outside resources available to help the team. • Spend a considerable amount of time assessing the technical skills of team members. • Work to secure the resources and equipment necessary for team effectiveness. • Spend time planning and organizing in order to make optimal use of available resources. Teams have high levels of communication, which: • Help team members stay focused on the mission and take better advantage of the skills, knowledge, and resources available to the team. • Help minimize interpersonal conflicts.

Job satisfaction

How much one likes a specific kind of job or work activity. Satisfied workers engage in organizational citizenship behaviors. Organizational citizenship behaviors: Behaviors not directly related to one's job but helpful to others at work. Employee engagement has replaced job satisfaction over the past few years.

Theories of Job Satisfaction: Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory

Identifies the following factors of satisfaction: • Motivators: Factors that lead to satisfaction at work. • Hygiene factors: Factors that lead to dissatisfaction at work. • Efforts directed toward improving hygiene factors will not increase followers' motivation or satisfaction. Key to increasing followers' satisfaction levels is to just adequately satisfy the hygiene factors while maximizing the motivators for a particular job.

Team Leadership Model, or TLM

Identifies what a team needs to be effective. • Points the leader either toward the roadblocks that are hindering the team or toward ways to make the team even more effective than it already is. Resembles a systems theory approach. • Inputs are at the base. • Processes or throughputs are in the center. • Outputs are at the top.

Steps for Effective Problem Solving

Identify problems or opportunities for improvement to ensure that the task is clear. Analyze the causes of the problem using cause-and-effect diagram and force field analysis. Develop alternative solutions using procedures such as the nominal group technique. • Nominal group technique: Group members write down ideas on individual slips of paper, which are later transferred to a whiteboard or flipchart for the entire group to work with. Select and implement the best solution based on established criteria. Assess the impact of the solution using measurable criteria of success.

Needs

Internal states of tension or arousal, or uncomfortable states of deficiency that people are motivated to change. If needs are not met, people engage in certain behaviors to satisfy them. Leadership practitioners can get followers to engage in and persist with certain behaviors by correctly identifying and fulfilling their needs.

Goal Setting

Involves setting clear performance targets and helping followers create systematic plans to achieve them. According to Locke and Latham, goals are the most powerful determinants of task behaviors. • Goals direct attention, mobilize effort, and help people develop strategies for achievement and continue exerting effort until goals are achieved, which leads to higher goals. Common aspects of goal setting: • Goals that were both specific and difficult resulted in consistently higher effort and performance when contrasted to "do your best" goals. • Goal commitment is critical. • Followers exerted the greatest effort when goals were accompanied by feedback. A leader's implicit and explicit expectations about goal accomplishment can affect the performance of followers and teams. Pygmalion effect: Occurs when leaders express high expectations for followers. • Expectations alone can lead to higher-performing followers and teams. Golem effect: Occurs when leaders have little faith in their followers' ability to accomplish a goal. • Expectations result in a self-fulfilling prophecy and low performance. • Leaders wanting to improve individual or team performance should set high but achievable goals and express confidence that their followers can get the job done.

Implications of Group Size

Leader emergence is partly a function of group size. As group size increases, cliques are more likely to develop. • Cliques: Subgroups of individuals who often share the same goals, values, and expectations. Affects a leader's behavioral style. • Leaders with a large span of control tend to be more directive, spend less time with individual subordinates, and use impersonal approaches when influencing followers. • Leaders with a small span of control tend to display more consideration and use personal approaches when influencing followers. Affects group effectiveness.

First Two Months: Strategy, Structure, and Staffing

Leader should gather more information, determine the direction, and finalize the appropriate structure and staffing for the team for the next six weeks. Tasks to be performed include: • Gathering benchmarking information from other organizations. • Meeting with key external customers and suppliers. • Meeting with the former team leader, if appropriate. New leaders need to be able to articulate: • Where the team has been and where it needs to go over the next one to three years. • What the team needs to accomplish and what changes will be needed to make this happen. • Their expectations for team members. Once the proposed changes have been agreed to, new leaders need to have one-on-one meetings with all team members affected by any strategy, structure, and staffing decisions. • New leaders should seek feedback from peers and recruiters.

Expertise and Trust: Credibility Matrix

Leaders are grouped in four quadrants in the credibility matrix. • First quadrant: Leaders have high levels of expertise and trust. • Likely to be viewed by others as highly credible. • Second quadrant: Leaders do not follow through with commitments, are new to the firm, or have not invested time in building relationships with followers. • Third quadrant: Leaders may be new college hires or new to the industry. • Lack technical competence, organizational or industry knowledge, or time to build relationships with coworkers. • Fourth quadrant: Leaders are promoted from among peers or transferred from another department within the company. • The former may need to develop leadership knowledge or skills and the latter technical competence if they wish to increase their credibility.

Understanding and Managing Follower Performance

Leaders need to fully understand the team and organization goals. • These goals will dictate what followers need to get done and the type, intensity, and duration of follower behavior needed for goal accomplishment. Leaders need to understand the context or situation in which follower goals, task assignments, and behaviors need to be exhibited. Factors that affect followers' performance levels apart from motivation. • Followers' knowledge and experience. • Having the right hardware and software. • Leveraging the right processes and procedure. Performance management cycle is critical when working with followers to accomplish group or organizational goals: PLANNING - MONITORING - EVALUATING • Planning: Understanding the team's or organization's goals, the role followers need to play in goal accomplishment, the context in which followers operate, and the behaviors they need to exhibit for the team to be successful.

Learning From Experience

Leadership practitioners can enhance the learning value of experiences by: • Creating opportunities to get feedback. • Taking a 10 percent stretch. • Learning from others. • Keeping a journal of daily leadership events. • Having a developmental plan.

Monitoring

Monitoring: Includes tracking follower performance, sharing feedback on goal progress, and providing needed resources and coaching. Technological advances have allowed leaders to use electronic performance monitoring to a much greater extent than ever before. • Organizations like electronic performance monitoring as it is cheap, provides more control, and helps take time-wasting behavior out of the workplace. Problems faced by organizations. • Managing high performers and highflyers. • Talent hoarding.

Understanding Follower Potential

Most organizations report having serious shortfalls in leadership talent. • Organizations have tried to solve this problem by hiring outside people into leadership positions, but this has challenges. • Most people are poor judges of talent and do not always make good hiring decisions. • Hiring people from the outside to fill leadership positions can be demoralizing for those in the company and cause them to leave. Best way to tackle the leadership talent shortfall is to identify and develop followers who have the most potential to be effective leaders. • Leadership potential: Follower's capacity to advance one or more levels within the organization • Readiness: Evaluation of a follower's immediate promotability. • Succession planning: The process most organizations use to make leadership potential and readiness decisions. • Episodic and informal in small companies. • Systematic in large companies. • 9-box matrices or replacement tables are used to evaluate performance and potential of followers for key positions of leadership

Five Motivational Approaches

Motives or needs: Satisfy needs to change behavior Achievement orientation: Possess certain personality traits Goal setting: Set goals to change behavior Operant approach: Change rewards and punishments to change behavior Empowerment: Give people autonomy and latitude to increase their motivation for work

The First Two Weeks: Lay the Foundation

New leaders should meet people both inside and outside the team. Key objectives for these meetings are: • Learning as much as possible. • Developing relationships. • Determining future allies. One-on-one meetings with key team members should provide the leader with answers to critical questions. • What is the team member working on? • What are the team member's objectives? • Who are the "stars" a level or two down in the organization? • What are the people issues on the team? • What can the team do better? • What advice do team members have for the new leader, and what can the new leader do to help team members? New leaders should minimize their personal interactions with direct reports during their first two months on the job. New leaders should discuss the following during meetings: • Their peers' objectives, challenges, team structure, etcetera. • Their perspectives on what the new leader's team does well and could do better. • Their perspectives on the new leader's team members. • How to best communicate with the boss. • How issues get raised and decisions made on their boss's team. New leaders should make it clear that they want and appreciate their peers' help. • Should schedule regular meetings with their peers to build relationships and help new leaders stay ahead of potential conflicts. New leaders should meet with their stars during the first two weeks on the job. • Stars can provide ideas for improving team performance and are likely candidates for direct report positions should the new leader decide to change the structure of the team. New leaders should try to meet with individuals who were once part of the team but have taken positions in other parts of the organization. • These individuals offer unique insights into the history of the team and team members.

Group Norms

Norms: Informal rules groups adopt to regulate and regularize group members' behavior. • More likely to be seen as important and apt to be enforced if they: • Facilitate group survival. • Simplify, or make more predictable, what behavior is expected of group members. • Help the group avoid embarrassing interpersonal problems. • Express the central values of the group and clarify what is distinctive about the group's identity. Hackman recommends that a leader has a responsibility to focus the team outwardly to enhance performance. • Group members should actively scan the environment for opportunities that would require a change in operating strategy to capitalize upon them. • Teams should identify the few behaviors that team members must always do and those they should never do to conform to the organization's objectives.

Development Plan Checklist

Objectives: One-year career objective identified? No more than a total of two or three development goals? Areas in which the employee is motivated and committed to change and develop? Criteria for success: Is the new behavior clearly described? Can the behavior be measured or observed? Action steps: Specific, attainable, and measurable steps? Mostly on-the-job activities? Includes a variety of types of activities? Are activities divided into small, doable steps? Seek feedback and support: Involvement of a variety of others? Includes requests for management support? Are reassessment dates realistic? Stretch assignments: Do the stretch assignments relate to the employee's career objectives? Resources: Uses a variety of books, seminars, and other resources? Reflect with a partner: Includes periodic reviews of learning?

Theories of Job Satisfaction: Organizational Justice

Organizational justice is based on the premise that people who are treated unfairly are less satisfied, productive, and committed to their organizations. • Likely to initiate collective action and engage in counterproductive work behaviors. Consists of three components. • Interactional justice: Reflects the degree to which people are given information about different reward procedures and are treated with dignity and respect. • Distributive justice: Concerns followers' perceptions of whether the level of reward or punishment is proportionate to an individual's performance or infraction. • Procedural justice: Relates to the process that rewards and punishments are administered.

Understanding Follower Potential

Organizations run calibration meetings to standardize ratings across leaders with similar groups of followers. Some organizations use replacement tables for key leadership positions. • They identify those leadership roles most critical to strategy execution and organizational effectiveness. • They create tables that identify the candidates most likely to fill a particular role should the current occupant become absent due to any circumstance. • They identify people to send to high-potential programs to accelerate their ability to assume greater leadership responsibilities and plug the Ready-now gap for critical leadership positions.

Building High-Performance Teams: The Rocket Model

Prescriptive model for building high-performing teams. • Tells leaders what steps to take and when to take them when building new teams. Used as a diagnostic tool. • Helps determine where existing teams are weak and what leaders need to be done to get them back on track. Based on extensive research with hundreds of teams in the healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, service, software, telecommunications, energy, and financial service industries.

Peterson and Hicks' Model of Coaching

Process of equipping people with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities they need to develop themselves and become more successful Good coaches: • Orchestrate rather than dictate development. • Help followers clarify career goals. • Identify and prioritize development needs. • Create and stick to development plans. • Create environments that support learning and coaching. • Have well-developed skills, determine where a follower is in the coaching process, and intervene as appropriate. Model works particularly well for high performers. Steps of coaching. • Forging a partnership built on mutual trust and respect with a follower. • Inspiring commitment by conducting a GAPS analysis. • Growing skills by creating development and coaching plans. • Promoting persistence by helping followers stick to their plans. • Transferring skills by creating a learning environment.

Building Effective Relationships with Superiors

Requires followers to adapt to the superior's style by: • Clarifying expectations about their role on the team, committee, or work group. • Listing major responsibilities and using the list to guide discussions with superiors about different ways to accomplish tasks and relative priorities of the tasks. • Being honest and dependable.

Building Effective Relationships with Peers

Research suggests that a key requirement of leadership effectiveness is the ability to build strong alliances with others. Ways to establish and maintain good peer relationships. • Recognizing common interests and goals. • Understanding peers' tasks, problems, and rewards. • Practicing a theory Y attitude.

Understanding and Influencing Follower Satisfaction

Satisfied workers are more likely to: • Continue working for an organization ($ Reduced turnover) • Engage in organizational citizenship behaviors that go beyond job descriptions and role requirements ($ Increased creativity and productivity) • Help reduce the workload or stress of others in the organization ($ Increased efficiency and productivity) Dissatisfied workers are more likely to be adversarial in their relations with leadership and engage in diverse counterproductive behaviors. Dissatisfaction is a key reason why people leave organizations, and many of the reasons people are satisfied or dissatisfied with work are within the leader's immediate control.

Group Roles

Sets of expected behaviors associated with particular jobs or positions. Can be categorized in terms of task and relationship functions. • Task role: Deals with getting a task done. • Relationship role: Deals with supporting relationships within a work group. Problems that can occur with group roles and impede group performance. • Dysfunctional roles: roles do not align effectively • Role conflict: contradictory messages about expected behavior/results • Intrasender role conflict: Same person sends mixed signals. • Intersender role conflict: Receiving inconsistent signals from several others about expected behavior. • Interrole conflict: Inability to perform one's roles as well as one would like. • Person-role conflict: Violation of a person's values by role expectations. • Role ambiguity - lack of clarity around role's responsibility/functional need

Understanding and Improving Employee Engagement

Some aspects of job satisfaction are highly related to employee engagement • Employee engagement: Followers' attitudes about the organization and their work activities. • Fully engaged followers are believed to be more committed to team and organizational success, put forth more work-directed effort, and put in the hours necessary to complete assigned tasks. • Disengaged followers do not care about organizational success and are more interested in collecting paychecks than completing work assignments Engagement Surveys are administered to determine what percentage of people are actively engaged, engaged, disengaged, or actively disengaged. • Presenteeism: Notion of being at work while one's brain is not fully engaged (very common) Employee engagement has become so popular over the years because of the engagement-shareholder value chain. • Organizations with higher percentages of engaged and actively engaged followers should ultimately generate higher shareholder returns. Some organizations feel obligated to survey employees but not compelled to improve engagement scores. • Other organizations erroneously believe perks cause employee engagement. • This does not make up for long work hours or monotonous work. • The best approach is for leaders to share results with their followers and jointly identify the factors potentially affecting the results as well as areas of strength and improvement in the engagement scores. Biggest obstacle to improving employee engagement: Incompetent management. • Some leaders have no idea how followers feel about work. • Others mistreat their followers and do not care whether they are engaged.

Effective Stress Management

Stress: Process by which one perceives and responds to situations that challenge or threaten him or her. • Responses may include: • Increased levels of emotional arousal. • Changes in physiological symptoms. • Increased perspiration, heart rate, cholesterol level, or blood pressure. • Often occurs in situations that are complex, demanding, or unclear. • Stressors: Specific characteristics in individuals, tasks, organizations, or the environment that pose some degree of threat or challenge to people. Leaders and followers both experience stress depending on situations. • Leaders face a major stressful event at least once a month. • Followers' stress levels depend on their leaders. • Leaders play a substantial role in how stressful their followers' work experience is, for good or ill. Stress can either facilitate or inhibit performance, depending on the situation. Optimal stress depends on the level of physical activity that a task demands or a task's perceived difficulty. Stress has been linked to heart disease, immune system deficiencies, and the growth rates of tumors. Guidelines for effective stress management. • Monitor one's stress levels and one's followers. • Identify the cause of stress. • Practice a healthy lifestyle. • Learn how to relax. • Develop supportive relationships. • Keep things in perspective. • Apply the A-B-C Model to change self-talk. • A: Triggering event. • B: One's thinking • C: Feelings and behaviors.

Advantages of Having a Good Working Relationship with Superiors

Superiors and followers sharing the same values, approaches, and attitudes will: • Experience less conflict. • Provide higher levels of mutual support. • Be more satisfied with superior and follower relationships. Followers receive better performance appraisal ratings. In order to understand the superior's world better, followers should: • Understand the superior's personal and organizational objectives. • Realize that superiors do not have all the answers and have both strengths and weaknesses. • Keep the superior informed about various activities in the work group or new developments or opportunities in the field.

Development Planning

Systematic process of building knowledge and experience or changing behavior. Peterson and Hicks believe that there are five interrelated phases to developmental planning: • Identifying development needs. • Analyzing data to identify and prioritize development needs. • Using prioritized development needs to create a focused and achievable development plan. • Periodically reviewing the plan, reflecting on learning, and modifying or updating the plan as appropriate. • Transferring learning to new environments.

On the Horizon

Team leadership appears to be the most studied and applied category of research. Clusters: Intact teams that are self-managed. • Formed outside a company context but are hired and paid by companies as a unit, as a permanent part of the company. • Manage, govern, and develop themselves. • Define their own working practices and tools and share out remuneration.

Leadership Prescriptions of the Model

Team should be built like a house or an automobile. • Start with a concept. • Create a design. • Engineer it to do what one wants it to do. • Manufacture it to meet those specifications. Critical functions for team leadership. • Dream: A team needs to have clear vision. • Design: Needs to be done before the start of a project or task. • Development: Ongoing work done with the team at the process level to continue to find ways to improve an already well-designed team.

Team Building for Work Teams

Team-building interventions, at the team level, may help members understand why they struggle to achieve team objectives and can suggest coping strategies for an intolerable situation. • They do not remove the root causes of team problems. Many organizations make top-down efforts to correct team-building problems. • Other organizations are committed to teamwork and are willing to change structures and systems to support it but are not committed to the "bottom-up" work that is required.

Gersick's Punctuated Equilibrium Model

Teams do not necessarily jump right in and get to work. • Spend the initial months trying out various ideas and strategies. • Experience the equivalent of a midlife crisis midway into the project. • There is a flurry of activity and a reexamination of the strategy to see if it will allow them to complete their work.

The First Day: Making a First Impression

The first meeting with the boss happens in the boss's office and lasts an hour. • Key topics to address in the meeting • Identifying the team's key objectives, metrics, and important projects. • Understanding the boss's view of team strengths and weaknesses. • Working through meeting schedules and communication styles. • Sharing plans for the day and the next several weeks. • New hires should end discussions by arranging a follow-up meeting with their bosses to review progress and to ask whether weekly or monthly one-on-one meetings would be helpful. • New leaders should also meet with their entire teams the first day on the job.

Conducting a GAPS Analysis

The first phase in the development planning process is to conduct a GAPS (goals, abilities, perceptions, and standards) analysis, which involves the following steps: • Identifying career goals. • Identifying strengths and development needs related to the career goals. • Determining how one's abilities, skills, and behaviors are perceived by others by asking others for feedback or through performance reviews or 360-feedback instruments. • Determining the standards one's boss or organization has for one's career objectives. An individual needs to perform the following activities if he or she needs to accomplish career goals: • Review the information from the GAPS model. • Look for underlying themes and patterns. • Determine what behaviors, knowledge, experiences, or skills will be the most important to change or develop.

Your First 90 Days as a Leader

The stresses and strains of the first 90 days as a leader are both real and acute. The first three months give leaders unique opportunities to make smooth transitions, paint compelling pictures of the future, and drive organizational change. • But many leaders stumble during this critical time period.

Limitations to the Benefits of Size

There may be decreasing returns, on a per-capita basis, as group size increases. • May occur in additive tasks due to process losses. • Additive task: A task where the group's output involves the combination of individual outputs. • Process losses: Inefficiencies created by more and more people working together. Social loafing: Phenomenon of reduced effort by people when they are not individually accountable for their work. Social facilitation: People increasing their efforts or productivity in the presence of others.

Typical Items on a Satisfaction Questionnaire

These items are often rated on a scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). • Overall, I am satisfied with my job. • I feel the workload is about equal for everyone in the organization. • My supervisor handles conflict well. • My pay and benefits are comparable to those in other organizations. • There is a real future for people in this organization if they apply themselves. • Exceptional performance is rewarded in this organization. • We have a good health care plan in this organization. • In general, I am satisfied with my life and where it is going.

The Operant Approach

Utilizes the following methods to change the direction, intensity, or persistence of behavior: • Reward: Consequence that increases the likelihood that a particular behavior will be repeated • Punishment: Administration of an aversive stimulus or the withdrawal of something desirable to decrease the likelihood of repeating a particular behavior • Contingent rewards and punishments are administered as consequences of a particular behavior • Noncontingent rewards and punishments are not associated with particular behaviors • Behaviors that are not rewarded may eventually be eliminated through the process of extinction. Using operant principles to improve followers' motivation and performance requires the following steps: • Clearly specify what behaviors are important. • Determine if behaviors that are important are currently being punished, rewarded, or ignored. • Find out what followers find rewarding and punishing. • Be wary of creating perceptions of inequity when administering individually tailored rewards. • One should not be limited to administering organizationally sanctioned rewards and punishments. • Administer rewards and punishments in a contingent manner whenever possible.

Why People Leave or Stay with Organizations

Why Do People Leave Organizations? Limited recognition and praise Compensation Limited authority Poor organizational culture Repetitive work Why Do People Stay with Organizations? Promises long-term employment Exciting work and challenge Fair pay Encourages fun, collegial relationships Supportive management

Maslow Hierarchy of Needs

posited that people were motivated by five basic needs: 1. Need to survive physiologically. 2. Need for security. 3. Need for affiliation (that is, belongingness). 4. Need for self-esteem. 5. Need for self-actualization. -To boost motivation, performance, and effectiveness, leaders should focus on helping followers satisfy their self-esteem and self-actualization needs.

Principles of Effective Delegation

• Decide what to delegate. • Decide whom to delegate to. • Make the assignment clear and specific. • Assign an objective, not a procedure. • Allow for autonomy while monitoring performance. • Give credit, but do not blame.

Evaluating

• Evaluating: Providing summary feedback on job performance to followers. • Differentiation of followers is a critical aspect of evaluating performance, and doing this well should systematically improve the quality of followers over time. • Performance consequences should be allocated to employees based on fair judgments. • Most organizations consider themselves meritocracies, where those who get the best results are given the best rewards. • Personal growth has recently become a more important aspect of evaluation for some companies. • Performance appraisals are used by the majority of companies to evaluate employees.

Tuckman's Stages of Group Development

• Forming: Characterized by polite conversation, the gathering of superficial information about fellow members, and low trust. • Storming: Marked by intragroup conflict, heightened emotional levels, and status differentiation as remaining contenders struggle to build alliances and fulfill the group's leadership role. • Norming: Characterized by the clear emergence of a leader and the development of group norms and cohesiveness. • Performing: Marked by group members that play functional, interdependent roles that are focused on the performance of group tasks.

Listening

• Good leaders and followers recognize the value of two-way communication. • Listening to others is just as important to effective communication as expressing oneself clearly. • Leaders are only as good as the information they have, which usually comes from watching and listening to what is going on around them. • The best listeners are active listeners. • Passive listeners are not focused on understanding the speaker. • Individuals who are listening actively exhibit a certain pattern of nonverbal behaviors, do not disrupt the sender's message, try to put the sender's message into their own words, and scan the sender for various nonverbal signals. • Active listening improves understanding and visibly demonstrates respect toward the speaker. Leaders and followers can improve their active listening skills by: • Demonstrating nonverbally that they are listening. • Actively interpreting the sender's message. • Attending to the sender's nonverbal behavior. • Avoiding defensive behavior.

Group Cohesion

• Highly cohesive groups interact with and influence each other more than less cohesive groups do. • Have lower absenteeism and lower turnover, which can contribute to higher group performance. • Greater cohesiveness does not always lead to higher performance. • May sometimes develop goals contrary to the larger organization's goals. Disadvantages of highly cohesive groups. • Overbounding: Tendency to erect what amount to fences or boundaries between themselves and others. • Groupthink: People in highly cohesive groups often become more concerned with striving for unanimity than objectively appraising different courses of action. • Ollieism: Occurs when illegal actions are taken by overly zealous and loyal subordinates who believe that what they are doing will please their leaders.

Problems With High-Performance/High Potential Lists

• Many of the candidates who are shortlisted to the high-performance/high-potential lists are good individual contributors who know how to please their bosses but have questionable ability to be effective leaders. • Most companies rely solely on a leader's judgment to evaluate followers and not on certain personality traits, intelligence, and 360-degree feedback ratings, and team assessments, which are more accurate and less biased. • Candidates' names rarely makes it out of the lists once nominated, yet there is ample research showing that job performance varies dramatically from one year to the next.

Defining Performance, Unit or Team Effectiveness, and Potential

• Performance: What individual followers accomplish, and the behaviors exhibited to achieve results. • Unit or team effectiveness: Concerns collective results. • Potential: Primarily centers around promotion determinations. Follower Performance Categories: • The what of performance: Pertains to task and goal accomplishment. • The how of performance: Those behaviors directed toward the accomplishment of team or organizational goals.

Common Reasons for Avoiding Delegation

• Takes leaders too much time in the short run, although it saves time in the long run. • Risky because it reduces the leader's direct control over work that would affect his or her reputation. • Leaders fear the job will not be done properly. • Leaders may resist delegating tasks that are a source of power or prestige. • Leaders may feel guilty about delegating because people are already too busy.

Implications of the Rocket Model

• The Rocket Model is both prescriptive and diagnostic. • When building a new team or determining where an existing team is falling short, leaders should always start with the context, mission, and talent components. • Teams need to have a common understanding of the situation, a set of well-defined team goals, and the right players to succeed.

Conducting Meetings

• Well-planned and well-led meetings are a valuable mechanism for accomplishing diverse goals. • Important way of exchanging information and keeping open lines of communication within and between work groups or volunteer organizations. Guth and Shaw's tips for conducting meetings. • Determine whether a meeting is necessary. • List the objectives. • Stick to the agenda. • Provide pertinent materials in advance. • Pick a time and place as convenient as possible for all participants. • Encourage participation. • Take minutes to keep a record.