Deliverable 3 – Psychological Contract Training Outline
Competency
Evaluate leadership practices that support organizational effectiveness.
Scenario
You are a Senior HR Representative, and your task is to hire a new regional HR manager. You are responsible for conducting the interviews, and you want to know about the candidate’s experience and success as a leader. You want to know their leadership style and how effective they were in previous positions. You have concluded your interview and now must create a hiring report from the interview.
Instructions
Select a leader you know from personal experience or one that you have researched to serve as your interviewed candidate. Evaluate the candidate for their leadership practices and how effective they were for their organization. Write a hiring report that includes the following:
Summarize your leader for your audience (avoid using the first person).
Describe their leadership style and how effective their motivational practices were for their organization.
Discuss their leadership strategies used in building and maintaining trust in leader-follower relationships.
Review any ethical leadership practices that contributed to overall organizational success.
Based on your research and analysis, what would be your recommendation for hiring this candidate?
Provide attribution for credible sources used in the hiring report.
For research guidance, consider scheduling a research appointment with the Business Librarian: https://rasmussen.libanswers.com/faq/167429
Deliverable 3 – Psychological Contract Training Outline
Assignment Content
Competency
Evaluate leadership practices that support organizational effectiveness.
Scenario
You are a Senior HR Representative, and your task is to hire a new regional HR manager. You are responsible for conducting the interviews, and you want to know about the candidate’s experience and success as a leader. You want to know their leadership style and how effective they were in previous positions. You have concluded your interview and now must create a hiring report from the interview.
Instructions
Select a leader you know from personal experience or one that you have researched to serve as your interviewed candidate. Evaluate the candidate for their leadership practices and how effective they were for their organization. Write a hiring report that includes the following:
- Summarize your leader for your audience (avoid using the first person).
- Describe their leadership style and how effective their motivational practices were for their organization.
- Discuss their leadership strategies used in building and maintaining trust in leader-follower relationships.
- Review any ethical leadership practices that contributed to overall organizational success.
- Based on your research and analysis, what would be your recommendation for hiring this candidate?
- Provide attribution for credible sources used in the hiring report.
For research guidance, consider scheduling a research appointment with the Business Librarian: https://rasmussen.libanswers.com/faq/167429
Resources
In this module, you will have the opportunity to master the following competency:
- Evaluate leadership practices that support organizational effectiveness.
Further, the content in this module will help you achieve the following learning objectives:
- Assess the application of motivation theories in the workplace.
- Explain the differences between management and leadership.
- Appraise strategies for building, maintaining, and repairing trust in the leader-follower relationship.
- Illustrate the role of emotional intelligence in leadership behavior.
Module 03 Theories of Motivation in the Workplace
Misconceptions are prevalent among managers regarding how to motivate employees. Many managers believe that motivation is a personality trait, such as extroversion or agreeableness, and that people either have it, and so are driven, or they don’t, and so are lazy. Indeed, many managers believe that employees are inherently lazy, and must be watched closely for mistakes and “slacking off” on the job. Such inaccurate beliefs result in micromanagement and mismanagement of employees. Managers should formulate their understanding about what motivates employees by becoming familiar with the sizeable amount of evidence about what motivation actually is – instead of a personal trait, motivation is more accurately described as the result of the interaction between the person and the situation. For example, an employee may struggle to read through a dry technical manual, but if they enjoy reading detective stories, will devour the newest fictional book within hours.
The concept of motivation has been studied for nearly a century, and a great deal of knowledge has been generated about what truly motivates employees. Of course, as with any concept, the current state of knowledge reveals complex answers, and further knowledge is still being researched. However, there are three complementary theories of motivation that have been considered valid in explaining employee motivation. These theories are the ERG Theory, the model of Intrinsic Motivation, and Expectancy Theory. Managers should reflect on the evidence produced from the study of these theories when seeking to motivate employees.
The ERG theory states that individuals have three groups of core needs: existence, relatedness, and growth.
Existence
Existence needs are those basic material requirements humans need to survive – physiological and safety needs such as food, shelter, air, among others.
Relatedness
Relatedness needs describe the desire people have for establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships.
Growth
Growth needs describe the intrinsic desires humans have for personal development and mastery.
ERG Theory
The ERG theory demonstrates that more than one need may be operative at the same time and that if a higher-level need, such as a growth need, is stifled, then a person may compensate by increasing a desire for a lower-level need, such as economic security.
The model of intrinsic motivation holds that people genuinely care about their work, will continuously seek to improve it, and are energized while working. This motivation comes not from external rewards, but from the work itself. However, intrinsic motivation is only achieved when employees experience choice, competence, meaningfulness, and progress regarding their work. Employees seek to make decisions about what tasks to work on and how to work on them and will feel competent if they can perform the tasks they have chosen at a high standard. The tasks employees choose need to represent a connection to a greater purpose than just the task at hand to be meaningful, and as the work is being accomplished, employees need to feel they are making progress towards an end goal. If these four components are experienced, employees will be more motivated by intrinsic needs than external rewards.
Intrinsic motivation plays a heavy role in expectancy theory, and this role is of utmost importance for manager understanding. Expectancy theory states that employees are motivated to act a certain way because they expect that the act will be followed by a given outcome, and that outcome will be considered an attractive one. Therefore, this theory focuses on the relationships inherent in motivation: effort-performance, performance-reward, and reward-personal goals. In other words, an employee put forth effort expecting a positive performance appraisal as a result, and that appraisal would result in a reward such as a bonus or promotion, and that reward would satisfy that employee’s personal goals.
Expectancy theory provides an excellent explanation as to why many employees aren’t highly motivated and only accomplish the minimum work required. If an employee feels their efforts will not be recognized properly, or if they are appropriately recognized, the recognition will not lead to the desired reward, they will not see the point of exerting discretionary effort in accomplishing the task at hand.
If managers want to properly motivate their employees, it is critical that they understand the driving needs of the employees, how those needs translate into personal goals, and how to link effort, performance, and rewards to those goals. Not every employee will be motivated by the same needs; therefore, the better the managers understand their individual employees, the more likely they will understand what truly motivates them.
Additional Reading(s)
Source(s)
Blumberg, M., & Pringle, C. D. (1982). The missing opportunity in organizational research: Some implications for a theory of work performance. Academy of Management Review, 7(4), 560-569.
Diefendorff, J. M., & Chandler, M. M. (2011). Motivating employees. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA Handbooks in Psychology. APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology, Vol. 3. Maintaining, expanding, and contracting the organization (pp. 65-135). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association.
Latham, G. P. (2007). Work motivation: History, theory, research, and practice (Foundations for Organizational Science), 1st ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2015). Breaking the rules: a historical overview of goal-setting theory. In Advances in motivation science Vol. 2 (pp. 99-126). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Module 03 Trust between Leaders and Followers
There is no leadership without at least one follower. However, not all followers behave the same. Some are passive and feel nothing towards the leader, while others may be completely devoted to supporting the leader and ensuring goals are achieved. Obviously, the latter type of follower is more desirable than the former. The most critical component of the leadership-follower relationship that can build that desired type of follower is trust. The importance of trust cannot be overstated. A recent research study found that 82% of employees feel being able to trust their managers is crucial to their work performance. Furthermore, organizations whose leaders are highly trusted were 2.5 times more likely to have an increase in revenue or profit over 5% a year. Other benefits from having trusted leadership include higher rates of customer loyalty and retention, a more competitive market position, and achieving predictable business results.
It is important to clarify what trust is to understand how to cultivate it in the workplace better. Trust can be described as the willingness to accept personal risk based on another person’s actions. Trust is a positive expectation that involves making oneself vulnerable to another person and being confident that the vulnerability will not be taken advantage of by the receiver of the trust. Underlying the concept of trust are five dimensions that sustain this willingness to take a risk of being vulnerable. These dimensions are integrity, competence, consistency, loyalty, and openness.
Integrity: Integrity refers to whether someone is honest and truthful. Research has demonstrated that of all the five dimensions, integrity is the most essential.
Openness: Finally, openness describes being accessible, transparent, and a commitment to reducing secrecy.
Loyalty: Next, loyalty is not just about a follower being loyal to a leader, but the opposite direction must also hold true. The leader must be willing to protect and save face for the follower.
Consistency: Third, consistency focuses on a person’s reliability and predictability. Consistency matters in two areas: first, a person should act and react predictably to similar stimuli. Second, there should not be inconsistencies between words and actions. This component is often heard in the phrase “walk the talk.”
Competence: Second, competence describes a person’s expertise, knowledge, or skills. In other words, it is believed that a person will be able to do what they say they can do.
Trust between Leaders and Followers Continued
Trust is observed three different ways in relationships at work: identification-based trust, knowledge-based trust, and deterrence-based trust.
Identification-Based Trust
Identification-based trust describes a relationship built upon an emotional connection. In this relationship, both parties understand each other’s intentions and are willing to let the other person stand in or act for them when necessary. There is an understanding and appreciation of each other’s wants and desires. The connection in this relationship is based on emotion, and controlling and monitoring actions are minimal. Identification-based trust is the highest level of trust.
Knowledge-Based Trust
Knowledge-based trust is founded on behavioral predictability and is usually based on a history of repeated interaction. These repeated interactions build up an experience-base of knowledge which leads to confidence in the predictability of behavior. This kind of relationship is built more upon information rather than emotion. Most organizational relationships are of this type.
Deterrence-Based Trust
The last form, deterrence-based trust, is the most fragile type, as this relationship is based on a fear of reprisal if trust is violated. In other words, individuals will behave predictably because they fear the consequences of not doing so. Such a relationship is usually built on the authority position of the manager.
Managers and leaders should strive to build relationships based on knowledge-based trust and if possible, identification-based trust. To do so, leaders should practice certain behaviors. First, they should ensure open and clear communication with followers. Such communication also includes practicing active listening and understanding that successful communication operates both to and from the other person. Leaders should hold themselves accountable and take the blame for failure without shifting that failure to the follower. A leader must “practice what they preach” and lead by example, not by just telling others what to do. Leaders should also be transparent and open. Finally, leaders should be authentic and be willing to show their true selves to followers. When possible, leaders should connect emotionally and show genuine interest in their follower’s interests and passions.
Leaders who build high levels of trust with their followers will not only realize organizational benefits but will also likely gain additional passionate followers who are ardent in helping the leader, and therefore the organization, achieve its strategic goals.
Additional Reading(s)
Source(s)
Atkins, A. (2014). Building workplace trust: Trends and high performance. Interaction Associates. Retrieved from http://interactionassociates.com/sites/default/files/research_items/Trust%20Report_2014_15IA_0.pdf.
Burke, C. S., Sims, D. E., Lazzara, E. H., & Salas, E. (2007). Trust in leadership: A multi-level review and integration. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(6), 606-632.
Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611-628.
Kelloway, E. K., Turner, N., Barling, J., & Loughlin, C. (2012). Transformational leadership and employee psychological well-being: The mediating role of employee trust in leadership. Work & Stress, 26(1), 39-55.
Module 03 Emotional Intelligence in Leaders
Leadership is often described as the ability to influence others to achieve planned goals. This influence occurs through social interaction. Essentially, leadership effectiveness is dependent on this process of social interaction with followers. Leaders influence the emotional climate of organizations and build shared emotional experiences with their followers. It has long been understood that leaders need a certain level of cognitive intelligence as well as job-relevant knowledge to be effective. These qualities are necessary for leadership but are not sufficient. Substantial evidence demonstrates that the single best predictor for effective leadership is emotional intelligence. Indeed, evidence shows that this is especially true the higher the leadership level in an organization. Emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately understand one’s own and others’ emotions, to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships, and the ability to manage one’s own and others’ emotions to drive motivation.
Emotional intelligence is important not only for leading individual employees but also for groups and across group boundaries. Just as individual employees will have emotions that the leader needs to be aware of, a group or team will also have a pattern of emotions that leaders must understand. Furthermore, the emotions of other individuals and groups outside of the boundary of the group being led must also be considered. Emotional intelligence, then, is needed to lead at all levels of the organization. Most CEO’s are hired for their intellect and business expertise and are fired for their lack of emotional intelligence.
There are five key components of emotional intelligence.
Self-Awareness
First, there is self-awareness, which describes the ability to recognize one’s own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values, and drivers. Also, this ability to self-reflect also includes the awareness of how one’s own emotions, etc., will impact others.
Self-Management
Second is self-management, which describes the ability to control or direct any disruptive emotions within the self to keep relationships and interactions moving in a positive direction.
Social Awareness
Third is social-awareness, which describes the ability to read non-verbal cues, focus more on the other person during communication, and are effective at conflict resolution.
Empathy
The fourth key component is empathy. Empathy is the ability to put one’s self in someone else’s shoes and understand how they may feel or react to a certain situation. The greater the level of empathy a leader has, the better they can understand the motivations and desires of their employees.
Self-Motivation
The fifth component is self-motivation. This refers to a strong desire to achieve goals, optimism, and high standards of quality for work performed.
Emotional intelligence should not only reside in the leadership but should become a valued component of the organizational culture. Indeed, research has shown that emotional intelligence demonstrated throughout the organization is a key predictor of higher levels of employee effectiveness, engagement, and innovation. In other words, emotional intelligence is good not only for interpersonal relationships and leader effectiveness, but it is also useful for business. Emotional intelligence can be applied to four essential functions in an organization. The first is leadership and professional development. Emotional intelligence can be part of a leadership program, a stand-alone training course, or could be a focus of coaching sessions. Second, it can be used in selection and performance decisions. Just as job duties are built into a success profile to illustrate what the effective employee should be able to do, so, too, can emotional intelligence components be added into the same profile to demonstrate how the effective employee conducts their duties. Building emotional intelligence into the success profile provides a model of behavior for employees to follow, and also provides tangible standards upon which performance discussions may be held. Third, emotional intelligence should be used when forming and developing teams and business units, regardless of whether they are created for specific projects or as part of a permanent reorganization. It will provide a means through which team members can strengthen interpersonal communication, minimize disruptive conflict, strengthen problem-solving dynamics, and learn to present information more effectively. Finally, emotional intelligence should be a factor in customer interactions and service. Customers do not make purchasing decisions based only on rational decision-making. Customers are profoundly influenced by their emotional experiences, and these experiences can be directed by customer-facing employees with high emotional intelligence.
Research demonstrates that building emotional intelligence into the culture of the organization not only makes the workplace a lower-stress, more productive environment for employees, but it also makes good business sense for generating better strategic outcomes.
Source(s)
Boyatzis, R.E. & Oosten, E. V. (2002). Developing emotionally intelligent organizations. In R. Millar (Ed.), International executive development programmes, 7th ed. London, UK: Kogan Page Publishers.
Côté, S. (2014). Emotional intelligence in organizations. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1(1), 459-488.
Daus, C. S., & Ashkanasy, N. M. (2005). The case for the ability‐based model of emotional intelligence in organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational behavior, 26(4), 453-466.Kerr,
Garvin, J., Heaton, N., & Boyle, E. (2006). Emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 27(4), 265-279.
McCleskey, J. (2014). Emotional intelligence and leadership: A review of the progress, controversy, and criticism. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 22(1), 76-93.
Meinert, D. (2018, 23 Feb). Emotional intelligence is key to outstanding leadership. HR Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0318/pages/emotional-intelligence-is-key-to-outstanding-leadership.aspx.
Rosete, D., & Ciarrochi, J. (2005). Emotional intelligence and its relationship to workplace performance outcomes of leadership effectiveness. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 26(5), 388-399.
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, cognition and personality, 9(3), 185-211.
Walter, F., Cole, M. S., & Humphrey, R. H. (2011). Emotional intelligence: Sine qua non of leadership or folderol? Academy of Management Perspectives, 25(1), 45-59.
Scandura, T. A. (2020). Essentials of Organizational Behavior (3rd Edition). SAGE Publications, Inc. (US). https://ambassadored.vitalsource.com/books/9781544396798
Motivation and Motivation Theory. (2012). In S. D. Hill (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Management (7th ed., pp. 688-692). Gale. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX4016600206/GVRL?u=mnarasmuss&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=f49002dc
Psychological contracts. (2007). In P. Blyton, & J. Jenkins, Key concepts in work. Sage UK. Credo Reference: https://go.openathens.net/redirector/rasmussen.edu?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.credoreference.com%2Fcontent%2Fentry%2Fsageukwork%2Fpsychological_contracts%2F0%3FinstitutionId%3D4286
