Leading, Managing and Developing People - Essay Example

? Leading, Managing and Developing People Question How theories of motivation and leadership underpin the concept of employee engagement Leaders and leadership play various roles to ensure that employees are committed to the delivery of services with commitment in their work places. The participation of employees is beyond the normal performance of duties in their classes and to ensure that all the people are doing even more things and with a lot of efficiency and effectiveness. This implies that the employer or the leaders have to optimise the human resources in the employee through selecting the best ways through which they can achieve motivation of their employees. In ensuring that leaders achieve motivation of employees, some of them use some theories that help them to understand and choose the best way to treat their employees so that they can perform well. Through moderation of the working environment, leaders achieve active participation and engagement of employees, and this improves their chances of being productive and improving the performance of the organisation in which they work. There are various ways that help leaders motivate employees until they become actively engaged in performance of duties they have in organisation and can willingly contribute to the business (Lengnick-Hall, 2011, p. 245-247). In many circumstances, organisations experiences some changes which require employees to adapt so that they remain relevant in the production system and that the organisation in which they are working may continue to be productive and profitable. This means that leaders in organisations need to have their employees equipped with relevant information that will keep them focused on accomplishment of their goals in the company. The theories of improving engagement in an organisation require influence in the behaviour, improvement of the capacity, the collective environment of working and improvement of relationships among various individuals (Lengnick-Hall, Beck). In order to attain motivation of employees and cause them to be engaged in the operation of the company in which they work, the leaders should seek to understand the behaviour patterns of the employees (Collinson, 2005, p. 1421). This is because the way employees are influenced by the environment of the company operations, in the same way; it affects the company’s operations in the course of business. This means that to achieve actively engaged employees leaders will need to establish an environment that will ensure freedom of expression of ideas and feelings of the company. Influencing the behaviour systems of the employees, leaders should focus on implementing strategies that will conform to the behaviour systems and contribute to the success of the company in different situations. This implies that all employees will have their own perspectives represented in the course of doing business, and they will have the freedom they need to present ideas to the leaders as well engaging actively in creative activities in the company (Collinson, 2005, p. 1421-1422). The understanding of the personalities of the employees will help leaders to choose the right method to motivate them so that they can engage themselves in the company business. For instance, understanding the way employees could respond to various issue in the society could help the leaders to implement their plans of motivation. According to McGregor theory X and Y (Green, Wu, Whitten and Medlin, 2006, p. 577), there are two perspectives of looking at the employees in an organisation i.e. as inherently lazy and needing a form of pressure to perform their duties, or as a self motivated and needing little or no pressure so that they can perform. Using McGregor’s theory X and Y would help leaders to treat employees in ways that they are conscious of things they ought to do and those that they could not work for them. This ensures that leaders will be able to choose the right way of motivating the employees through punishment or by giving rewards that will keep employees motivated to give results (Green, Wu, Whitten and Medlin, 2006, p. 568). Leaders can achieve engagement of employees through the development of structured antagonism, which is a basis of the capitalistic system, which ensures employees compete with each other in the course of delivery of services to the company. In structured antagonism, employees compete with each other and try to maximize their opportunities and receive high value rewards from the employer, and they are active in engagement, in the organisation (Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010, p. 802). Another way leaders maximise employees’ performance to ensure they are active in engagement in the operation is moderating the psychological environment through being committed to their welfare. Leaders can ensure that employees are active through creating a culture of commitment to the delivery of services within the area of specialisation by being there for the employees. Commitment of human resource department of any company to invest in creating a conducive environment for employees in their working promotes their willingness to invest their effort, in the organisation. This happens because if the leaders in the organisation are able to satisfy the psychological needs the employees have and these employees reciprocate in doing their best to provide services to the clients of the organisation for which they are working (Ford, 2006, p. 82). In the performance of individuals in an organisation, there are different motivations to contribute to the performance of a company by employees at the lower levels. In some cases, some leaders decentralise the leadership and make it easy for employees to present their suggestions about the things they would wish to see in the organisation. One way through which leaders achieve decentralisation in organisations is the formation of teams in its various departments of organisation or department so that they can bring closer people to their leaders. In way, leaders focus on the ways they can maximize on communication because these strategies ensure that employees can express their concern and suggest ways they can help improve conditions, in the area of operation. Using cross-functional teams in an organisation ensures that all the team members can express their potential in realising the goals of the team and consequently that of the organisation that has given them the responsibilities (Collins and Clark, 2003, p.743). Question 2: How HR function is embedded in principles of performance management Performance management is a strategy through which the human resource team ensures that it has achieved the highest expectation about different situations of business. Organisation’s poor or good performance is determined by different factors and therefore, the company in which operation are happening should factor in the demands of those factors. This implies that every organisation leadership has a role to play to ensure that participation in the operations of organisation is maintained at a high level. Performance management implies participation of all the people in accordance to the different requirements so as to ensure that every person is able to contribute to the welfare of the organisation. on the other hand, Human resource (HR) function is the roles an organisational leadership have to play in order to establish its organisation running and profitable. Human resource function targets to manage events of change in the organisation, recruit, select and motivate employees as well as to communicate appropriately to the employees. If the HR function achieves its goals, there are high chances that the company will succeed in its operations and achieve great profitability, which will enhance its participation in the business. One of the ways through which an organisation realises success is through moderating some principles of performance, which have different influences in the performance of the business. This is because individuals have roles that they play that are usually in conformity to the systems of operations that are established in the organisation in which it is practised. Some principles of performance of an organisation that contribute to the performance of an organisation include change management, communication, formulation of strategies and managing knowledge within the organisation within which these attributes happen. Through the different roles that the HR does in achieving the above principles, it has the potential to realise the success and it achieves its mandates and expectations (Alfes, Truss and Gill, 2010, p. 111). HR achieves its goals through the way it addresses the various ways of managing the knowledge among the different employees in the organisation in which they are working. This means that all the people within an organisation have to get the knowledge that they need so that they can ensure that they adapt to the various requirements of the job. This would mean that HR will have responsibility of ensuring each of their operations is introduced in a way that all employees are able to get knowledge that they need for system’s success. This required a strong system of transmission of knowledge within the members of the organisation to be developed so that it can link those who are competent and those who need it. This ability of the HR to facilitate the things that happen in the organisation will facilitate the performance because it will ensure that all the resources are utilised in the most appropriate way that maximises on the production (MacBryde, Paton, Grant, Margaret Bayliss, 2012, p. 471). Another way that performance management influences the HR function in an organisation is through the principle of communication, which happens between different individuals in the organisation. This implies that the effectiveness of communication and communication networks in an organisation depicts the effectiveness of the HR in an organisation because it has the responsibility to formulate and direct the flow of information. Communication in an organisation is important so that the relevant individuals and personalities can get updated information about the issues that relate to the organisations and lead to the improvement of the performance. If the system of communication fails in an organisation, regardless of the good plans the HR could be having, it cannot reach full implementation, and this means that it will contribute to the failure of the organisation management. On the other hand, if the personnel in the communication department of an organisation are failures, it is blamed on the HR because it is the department that is involved in hiring and they are supposed to select the most competent. This implies that it is difficult to alienate the HR from the communication department’s performance in any organisation regardless of the fact that there are other management personnel that have the responsibility to control the performance of these individuals (Green, Wu, Whitten and Medlin, 2006, p. 574). The HR function is embedded on the principle of formulation of strategies and their implementation in an organisation because it is related to some aspect of perfect planning. To attain the function of the human resource, the strategies of an organisation need to be implemented in a way that will show consistency in accordance to utilisations of the resources that are set apart for a function. This means that organisation has its priorities set on the basis of different ways through which those who are responsible to form and implement strategies. HR function is embedded in effectiveness of implementation of the strategies of development in the performance of the company, and it influences not only the HR but also other departments that could be significant in an organisation. In order to achieve the goals of the initial strategy all measures should be aligned to the objectives and ensure that they have a clear record of progress to ensure that there is no deviation from the initial plan (Paauwe, 2009, p. 130-131 and; Paauwe and Bosile, 2005, p. 14-16). Another way that the function of HR is embedded in performance is through the various factors of the way the organisation responded to changes as a result of the dynamism in the environment of business. This implies that how effectively an organisation achieves adaptation to a change in the environmental conditions that influence the normal stability of the company as it carries on its business. Research carried out in the United Kingdom companies indicated that human resource will have to take a proactive role in managing changes that happen in an organisation. This implies that the company will need to supply task force that will ensure that all the driving forces to change are identified and addressed by different personnel in this company so that they do not escalate to cause the unnecessary instability in the company (Alfes, Truss and Gill, 2010, p. 114). What employees do in order to realise the performance play an important role in ensuring the participation of all the people in the process of performance which have influence on HR function. This is as could be seen in the participation of the general education system in UK where the performance in the colleges and other institution where the performance of employees improved the effectiveness of HR function. Question 4: Role of HR managers and specialists in effective organisational change In order to attain effective change in an organisation, human resource managers play some important roles to ensure that they are able to establish employees as productive as they were before the change they experienced happened. This requires HR managers to understand behaviour systems of different employees so that they can choose the ways they are going to enforce changes and facilitate the transformation. Through various strategies of addressing the needs of the people in the society, there will be a difficulty to establish the different things that will attain the highest results in the organisation. HR will need to understand roles in providing incentives and motivation to employees and ensuring that employees have adequate environment in which they can exploit their potentials so that they can remain relevant in the process of implementation. On the other hand, HR resource will need to understand the structures they will need to establish that will ensure that people will be able to exploit the environment with ease as well as implementing specific technological support systems that will make the exploitation of the environment easy. These roles will ensure that every employee will get satisfied taking their responsibilities, and they will have their psychological potential fully activated to produce even when there is no strict supervision by the employer. Many of the roles that HR manager should undertake should be aimed at ensuring that they are establishing a good environment, improving the psychological satisfaction of the employees, maximising their opportunities and ensuring they enhance the potential of the employees in readiness for production. Different theorists have indicated through their analysis of the roles that the HR managers perform in enhancing the performance of employees and managing change in an organisation for the organisational and personal benefits (Edgley-Pyshorn and Huisman, 2011, p. 610). In order to ensure that employees are actively involved in the organisation, HR managers perform the role of motivation in which they offer incentives to employees so that they can be active in performance. This ensures that employees are able to continue productively HR managers offer incentives that create some forms of competition among employees so that they continue to produce effectively. It is necessary to discover that in this case, the normal salaries are a base treatment, and they do not produce any motivation to employees, but additional privileges that come on conditions trigger the performance of employees so that they can do it even at a higher rate to gain the rewards from the employer. Motivations and incentives do not only improve performance in general but also promotes internal completion among employees who attempt to outdo each other in the process of operation of the business. The competitiveness does not only work for the benefit of the individual employee, but a combination of the efforts of different people in the organisation of the people contributes to the high performance of the organisation and hence contribute to the greater profitability of the company which any HR manager would like to see in their company. According to the four-stage model the role of motivation is played by the change makes that are established to develop the strategies through which people will adapt to change in the environment of work (Edgley-Pyshorn and Huisman, 2011, p. 614). Human resource managers play the role of enhancing the abilities of employees in an organisation so that they can remain relevant even in the changing environment. They do this through carrying out the necessary information through trainings that equip employees with the knowledge that they need in the environment in which they are living. This is an attempt to build employees' capacity to ensure that they enhance their abilities in performance and that they can be able to exploit resources amidst challenging environment. HR managers contribute to the development of programmes that ensure employees increase their knowledge and productivity in the process of participation to ensure at the end of knowledge acquisition. However, they do not only increase their individual productivity but also that of the company for which they are working and consequently increase the competitiveness of the company (Edgley-Pyshorn and Huisman, 2011, p. 612). One of the roles of HR managers is to influence the environment in which employees perform their duties in the organisation from all its perspectives which may include the physical, and the psychological, which influence how employees respond to various organisation activities. In this respect, the HR managers ensure that there is freedom in the course of implementation the various roles of the organisation by employees, which ensures that all of them can express their ideas and suggestion about the operation. A good working environment for employees ensures that they express a form of freedom and keep employees away from the pressures as well as ensure that they are satisfied in their psychological states. Employees are sure to be highly productive in their activities and their contribution to innovation and creative activities in the organisation. Some scholars propose a six-stage model in which the HR managers have to change the culture of the organisational to attain a change and improvement of the conditions of the workers. In this respect, the people attain the different things that will ensure that all the people are able to enhance their participation performance of their duties in the organisation. Change of culture of the people influences the different thinking of the people and influences the relationships that employees in an organisation have, and this will improve the status of the people in the society (Edgley-Pyshorn and Huisman, 2011, p. 614). References Alfes, K., Truss, C., & Gill, J. (2010). The HR Manager as Change Agent: Evidence from the Public Sector. Journal of Change Management, Volume 10, Issue 1, 109-127. Collins, C. J., & Clark, K. D. (2003). Strategic Human Resource Practices, Top Management Team Social Networks, and Firm Performance: The Role Of Human Resource Practices in Creating Organizational Competitive Advantage. Academy of Management Journal, Volume 46, Issue 6, pp740-751. Collinson, D. (2005). Dialectics of leadership. Human Relations, Volume 58, Issue 11, pp.1419-1442. Delbridge, R., & Keenoy, T. (2010). Beyond managerialism? The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Volume 21, Issue 6, pp799-817. Edgley-Pyshorn, C. & Huisman, J., (2011). The role of the HR department in organizational change in a British university, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24 Iss: 5 pp. 610 – 625. Ford, J., (2006). Discourses of Leadership: Gender, Identity and Contradiction in a UK Public Sector Organization. Leadership 2006; volume 2; No.77. pp 1-26. Green, K. W., Wu, C., Whitten, D., & Medlin, B. (2006). The impact of strategic human resource management on firm performance and HR professionals' work attitude and work performance. International Journal of Human Resource Management, Volume 17, Issue 4, 559-579. Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Beck, T. E., & Lengnick-Hall, M. L. (2010). Developing a capacity for organizational resilience through strategic human resource management. Human Resource Management Review. MacBryde, J., Paton, S., Grant, N. & Bayliss, M., (2012) Performance measurement driving change: a case from the defence sector. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 61 Iss: 5 pp. 462 – 482 Paauwe, J., (200). HRM and Performance: Achievements, Methodological Issues and Prospects. Journal of Management Studies Volume 46: Issue 1 Paauwe, J. & Boselie, P. (2005). HRM and performance: What’s next? (CAHRS Working Paper #05-09). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labour Relations, Centre for Advanced Human Resource Read More