A role is the aggregation of actions that is expected from you. It establishes your position in a team and defines your behavior.

Roles are:

• Formal
  • Executive (execution) roles – what to do
  • Management (administrator) roles – who is the one that  tells others what to do
• Informal – they emerge as a need related to the functioning of the team but are not specified in a job description

You should pay attention to some specific aspects of a role:

• Ambiguity – when an employee is not clear about the expectation that the other employees have from him because he was not provided with clear performance expectations and performance feedback
• Conflict – when an employee is not clear about his responsibilities and how to prioritize them. It is mostly a problem of not getting the right employee for the right job.

The incompatibility between the expectations of a role and what happens in reality is not always the employee’s fault. As manager you should remember that if an employee does not understand is almost every time your fault because you did not sent the right message.

“It’s just another tool. It is not the great cure for management inefficiency… MBO works if you know the objectives, 90% of the time you don’t.”
Peter Drucker

Management by Objectives (MBO) is an elaborate, systematic, ongoing program that helps employees to understand their objectives at organizational and personal level.

MBO principles:

1. Cascading of organizational goals and objectives
2. Specific objectives for each employee
3. Shared decision-making process
4. A predefined time framework
5. Performance evaluation and feedback

Advantages of MBO:

1. Motivation -employees’ involvement in the goal setting process increases job satisfaction and commitment
2. Better communication – the evaluation sessions and feedback are supposed to do that
3. Clarity of goals – SMART
   • Specific
   • Measurable
   • Achievable
   • Realistic
   • Time-related

From my experience with MBO, I can tell you that it did not work for me. Mostly because nowadays the manager that set the objectives often already works in a different company when time for the employee’s evaluation comes.

Psychologist David McClelland has developed a Theory of Needs that focuses not on the hierarchical relationship between them ( Maslow & Alderfer) but on how the needs are shaped over time and how they manifest as a motivational pattern.

Categories:

• Achievement (n Ach) with the following characteristics:
  • A preference for situations in which you can take personal responsibility for the result
  • A tendency to take calculated risks by setting moderately difficult goals
  • A desire to receive feedback for performance
• Affiliation (n Aff) – the desire to build and maintain interpersonal relations
• Power (n Pow) – the desire to influence others

The management of a company has an interest in changing the attitudes mostly towards ethics, change management processes, safety practices, and workforce diversity.

A 1+1=2 process says that if you change beliefs or values you consequently will change attitudes and influence behaviors. It is fairly difficult especially nowadays when people are aware that there is life beyond work.

Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that the change in attitude can be influenced by exercising the desired behavior. You create an example of the desired behavior, use trainings for role-playing, and give positive feedback to reinforce it.

Only that … the moment in which the management decide to take interest in changing attitudes is when a crisis happen. In the panic that comes with incompetent managers, capable to ask the CEO not why they have to jump, but how high they have to, the rest of the employees have only one choice:

You have to change your attitude or else … .

Despite the civilized formulation, basically Operant Learning Theory is learning by reward or punishment, and is applied in organizations through Transactional Leadership.

A certain behavior probability can be increased by the positive or negative reinforcement. Most of the means of reinforcement of employees’ behavior are rewards (promotions, benefits, etc.). They are valuable as long as they are connected in the mind of the beneficiary with the cause. Feedback is another buzz word here; everybody use it but few really give feedback.

To reduce the probability of a type of behavior according to Operant Learning Theory involves control. The extinction of a behavior is done by the termination of the positive reinforcement that is causing it. The punishment is done by an action that creates an unpleasant situation.

When you decide that punishment is required, do it now and do not act as you would regret it after!