Western Michigan University
Haworth College of Business
MGMT 6170
Managing Human Resources and Behavior
Course Application Paper
Teresa Jenkins
December 9, 2011
Format: What are the most important lessons you learned from the course?
How will these lessons enable you to be more effective in the workplace?
Throughout this semester, we have covered many different, very relevant
topics/concepts. Each one has served as a learning experience for me, but will
also continue to serve me in the future as I progress in my career. I really
struggled with picking only a couple of concepts that I have learned the most
important lessons from, because each concept can and will be applied to both
my past experiences as well as experiences that I will have in the future. I did,
however, narrow my focus down to two particular concepts that I feel I did
gain the most insight into during the semester.
The first concept I will cover is Performance Management. As previously
stated in my second self-reflection paper, I have been in a position of
leadership for a little over six years total, but for four years at my current
employer. Starting as a new leader, you really look for guidance from your
own leadership (managers) to help you navigate through the fired tape” of the
organization and learn valuable lessons in how to manage your team and get
that team to produce in essence “for” you. You then take those “skills”
forward in your career to continue guiding you and helping you to find your
own “niche” and developing your own management style.
Covering the performance management concepts in class helped me to better
understand what it means to be a “good performer” by really breaking down
job performance into the three categories of: task performance, citizenship
behavior and counter-productive behavior. If you have ever heard the phrase
tione bad apple spoils the whole bunch”, you can easily see where a new
leader could look at an underachieving team and say “they” are not good
performers. Understanding what makes up the good performer by breaking it
down further to really clarify what aspect of performance that particular
employee may be having trouble with will enable me to do a better of
mentoring and guiding employees to enhance their performance.
Citizenship and counter-productive behaviors are very important, but are also
easier to identify when you are encountering a problem with an employee.
