I. WHAT REACTION DO EMPLOYEES HAVE TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE?
A. What Is Stress?
1. Stress is the response to anxiety over intense demands, constraints, or
opportunities.
a) It is positive when the situation offers an opportunity for one to gain
something.
2. Functional stress allows a person to perform at his or her highest level at critical
times.
a) It is when constraints or demands are placed on us that stress can become
negative.
3. Constraints are barriers that keep us from doing what we desire.
4. Demands may cause you to give up something you desire.
5. Opportunities are the possibility of something new or something never done
before.
B. What Are the Symptoms of Stress?
1. There are three general ways that stress reveals itself: physical, psychological, and
behavioral symptoms. (See Exhibit 8-3.)
2. In Japan, there’s a stress phenomenon called karoshi (pronounced kah-roe-she),
which is translated literally as “death from overwork.”
C. What Causes Stress?
1. Job related factors.
2. The discussion that follows organizes stress factors into five categories: task, role,
and interpersonal demands, organization structure, and organizational leadership.
3. Task demands are factors related to an employee’s job, design of the person’s job,
working conditions, and the physical work layout.
a) Autonomy tends to lessen stress.
4. Role demands relate to stress as a function of the employee’s particular role in the
organization.
a) Role conflicts create expectation that may be hard to reconcile or satisfy.
b) Role overload is created when the employee is expected to do more than time
permits.
c) Role ambiguity is created when role expectations are not clearly understood.
5. Interpersonal demands are pressures created by other employees.
a) Lack of social support from colleagues and poor interpersonal relationships can
cause considerable stress.
b) Organization structure can increase stress due to excessive rules and an
employee’s lack of opportunity to participate in decisions.
6. Organizational leadership represents stress due to the supervisory style of the
organization’s company officials.
a) Some managers create a culture characterized by tension, fear, and anxiety.
(1) Unrealistic pressures to perform in the short run, excessively tight controls,
and firing employees who don’t measure up.
7. Personal factors that can create stress include family issues, personal economic
problems, and inherent personality characteristics.
a) Some employees bring their personal problems to work with them.
b) Employee personality can have an effect on how susceptible he/she is to stress.
c) Type A personality is characterized by feelings of a chronic sense of time
urgency, an excessive competitive drive, and difficulty accepting and enjoying
leisure time.
(1) Only the hostility and anger associated with Type A behavior is actually
associated with the negative effects of stress.
d) Type B personalities never suffer from time urgency or impatience.
(1) Type Bs are just as susceptible to the same anxiety-producing elements.
D. How Can Stress Be Reduced?
1. General guidelines:
a) Not all stress is dysfunctional.
b) Stress can never be totally eliminated.
c) Reduce dysfunctional stress by controlling job-related factors and offering help
for personal stress.
2. Job-related factors
a) Employee selection: provide a realistic job preview and make sure an
employee’s abilities match the job requirement.
b) On-the-job: improve organizational communications to minimize ambiguity;
use a performance planning program such as MBO to clarify job
responsibilities, provide clear performance goals, and reduce ambiguity
through feedback; redesign job if possible, especially if stress can be traced to
boredom or to work overload; allow employees to participate in decisions and
to gain social support.
3. Personal factors
a) Not easy for manager to control directly.
b) Ethical considerations.
c) If the manager believes it’s ethical and the employee is receptive, consider:
d) Employee assistance and wellness programs
(1) Employee assistance programs (EAPs) assist employees in dealing with
difficult issues in order to get the employee back to work as soon as possible.
(2) A wellness program is any type of program that is designed to keep
employees healthy.
A Question of Ethics
One in five companies offers some form of stress management program. Although such
programs are available, many employees may choose not to participate. They may be reluctant to
ask for help, especially if a major source of that stress is job insecurity. After all, there’s still a
stigma associated with stress. Employees don’t want to be perceived as being unable to handle
the demands of their job. Although they may need stress management now more than ever, few
employees want to admit that they’re stressed.
Discuss This:
What can be done about this paradox?
Do organizations even have an ethical responsibility to help employees deal with stress?
II. HOW CAN MANAGERS ENCOURAGE INNOVATION IN AN ORGANIZATION?
A. Introduction
1. The way organizations thrive today is through innovation or they will die.
2. The standard of innovation to which many organizations strive is that achieved by
such companies as Apple, Facebook, and Nissan (with their all electric Leaf).
B. How Are Creativity and Innovation Related?
1. Creativity means the ability to combine ideas in a unique way or to make unusual
associations between ideas.
a) For example, Mattel.
2. Innovation is the process of taking a creative idea and turning it into a useful
product, service, or method of operation.
C. What Is Involved in Innovation?
1. Some people believe that creativity is inborn; others believe that with training,
anyone can be creative.
2. Creativity can be viewed as a fourfold process consisting of perception, incubation,
inspiration, and innovation.
3. Perception involves the way you see things. Being creative means seeing things
from a unique perspective.
4. Ideas go through a process of incubation.
a) During this incubation period, employees should collect massive amounts of
data that are stored, retrieved, studied, reshaped, and finally molded into
something new.
b) During this period, it is common for years to pass.
5. Inspiration in the creative process is the moment when all your efforts successfully
come together.
a) Creative work requires an innovative effort.
b) Innovation involves taking that inspiration and turning it into a useful product,
service, or way of doing things.
c) Thomas Edison is often credited with saying, “Creativity is 1 percent
inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
d) That 99 percent, or the innovation, involves testing, evaluating, and retesting
what the inspiration found.
D. How Can a Manager Foster Innovation?
1. There are three sets of variables that have been found to stimulate innovation.
a) They pertain to the organization’s structure, culture, and human resource
practices.
b) See Exhibit 8-5.
2. How do structural variables affect innovation?
a) First, organic structures positively influence innovation.
(1) They have less work specialization and fewer rules and are more decentralized
than mechanistic structures; they facilitate the flexibility, adaptation, and
cross-fertilization that make the adoption of innovations easier.
b) Second, easy availability of plentiful resources is a key building block for
innovation.
(1) An abundance of resources allows management to purchase innovations, bear
the cost of instituting innovations, and absorb failures.
c) Frequent inter-unit communication helps to break down possible barriers to
innovation by facilitating interaction across departmental lines.
d) Extreme time pressures on creative activities are minimized despite the
demands of white-water-rapids-type environments.
e) When an organization’s structure explicitly supports creativity, employees’
creative performance can be enhanced.
3. How does an organization’s culture affect innovation?
a) Innovative organizations tend to have similar cultures: they encourage
experimentation; they reward both successes and failures and they celebrate
mistakes.
b) An innovative culture is likely to have the following characteristics:
(1) Acceptance of ambiguity.
(2) Tolerance of the impractical.
(3) Low external controls.
(4) Tolerance of risk.
(5) Tolerance of conflict.
(6) Focus on ends rather than on means.
(7) Open systems focus.
(8) Provide positive feedback.
4. What human resource variables affect innovation?
a) Innovative organizations actively promote the training and development of
their members so that their knowledge remains current, offer their employees
high job security to reduce the fear of getting fired for making mistakes, and
encourage individuals to become champions of change.
b) Once a new idea is developed, an idea champion actively and enthusiastically
promotes the idea, builds support, overcomes resistance, and ensures that the
innovation is implemented.
c) Research finds that champions have common personality characteristics:
extremely high self-confidence, persistence, energy, and a tendency to take
risks.
d) Champions also display characteristics associated with dynamic leadership.
(1) They inspire and energize others.
(2) They are also good at gaining the commitment of others to support their
mission.
(3) Champions have jobs that provide considerable decision-making discretion.
E. How Does Design Thinking Influence Innovation?
1. Design thinking was introduced in previous chapter.
2. Emphasis is on a deeper understanding of what customers need and want, not just
seeing them as a sales target.
3. Intuit example.
Technology and the Managers Job
Helping Innovation Flourish
When employees are busy doing their regular job tasks, how can innovation ever
flourish? When job performance is evaluated by what you get done, how you get it done,
and when you get it done, how can innovation ever happen? This has been a real
challenge facing organizations wanting to be more innovative. One solution has been to
give employees mandated time to experiment with their own ideas on company-related
projects. For instance, Google has its
“20% Time” initiative which encourages employees to spend 20 percent of their time at
work on projects not related to their job descriptions. Other companies—Facebook,
Apple, LinkedIn, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, among others—have similar initiatives. Hmmm .
. . so having essentially one day a week to work on company-related ideas you have
almost seems too good to be true. But, more importantly, does it really spark innovation?
Well, it can. At Google, it led to the autocomplete system, Google News, Gmail, and
Adsense. However, such “company” initiatives do face tremendous obstacles, despite
how good they sound on paper. These challenges include:
•Strict employee monitoring in terms of time and resources leading to a reluctance
to use this time since most employees have enough to do just keeping up with
their regular tasks.
•When bonuses/incentives are based on goals achieved, employees soon figure out
what to spend their time on.
•What happens to the ideas that employees do have?
•Unsupportive managers and coworkers who may view this as a
“goof-around-for-free-day.”
•Obstacles in the corporate bureaucracy.
So, how can companies make it work? Suggestions include: top managers need to support
the initiatives/projects and make that support known; managers need to support
employees who have
that personal passion and drive, that creative spark—clear a path for them to pursue their
ideas; perhaps allow employees more of an incentive to innovate (rights to design, etc.);
and last, but not least, don’t institutionalize it. Creativity and innovation, by their very
nature, involve risk and reward. Give creative individuals the space to try and to fail and
to try and to fail as needed.
If your professor has assigned this, go to the Assignments section of
mymanagementlab.com to complete these discussion questions.
Teaching Tips:
What benefits do you see with such mandated experiment time for (a)
organizations? (b) individuals?
What obstacles do these initiatives face and how can managers overcome those
obstacles?