Free «Organizational Theory and Behavior» Essay Sample

The Concept of Turnover

Employee’s turnover is a replacement of a worker with another for contributing factors during a certain period. Turnover is classified into four types: voluntary, involuntary, functional and dysfunctional. A voluntary turnover is usually initiated at the choice of the worker to exercise his or her free choice to leave the company. An involuntary turnover provides employer’s right to terminate a contract with an employee on the base of certain circumstances or reasons that an employee has no control over such as death, moving overseas or chronic sickness. A functional turnover happens when a low performing employee leaves the company, while a dysfunctional turnover is when a high performing worker chooses to leave the company. The rational levels of functional turnover even assist in company’s flexibility, as it can minimize the need for management-initiated layoffs. However, the dysfunctional turnover entails loss of valuable and high-performing people, which usually hurts the overall performance of the organization until a new employee is fully trained.

Turnover is measured as a ratio of the number of workers hired to replace those who left voluntarily or were fired during a fiscal year or a calendar year. The rate could be measured for an individual company as well as for its entire industry. A high turnover rate simply means that a lot of employees as a result of certain aspects at the company tend to leave not long after joining the firm, voluntarily or not. This rate also implies that compared to the industry’s average the company’s turnover rate is fairly higher. A lot of different aspects affect the employee’s turnover rate. Any factor could stem from either the employees or the employers. Low wages compared to other employers in the industry, poor benefits, management changes, the workplace environment or procedures, employee’s performance and contribution, or an overall strategy of the company contribute significantly to a turnover rate.

Turnover rate is a huge concern to most organizations because of additional costs and expenses that occur for recruiting, selection, and training costs, which turn out to be quite significant, especially in a low-paying job. When a company has a high turnover and has to replace an employee, it causes not only loss of money, but loss of time, productivity, and sometimes clients.

The Tree-component Model of Creativity

To make a rational decision, an employee needs creativity, the ability to generate a useful and rich solution to a problem through originality of thinking. Most of the employees possess a potential to generate a creative solution when confronted with a decision making issue. However, such potential is sometimes untapped. The three-component model of creativity suggests that a creative individual needs expertise, creativity, and task motivation.

The fist component of the model is expertise, which is the base of all creative works.  Without the expertise aspect, it would be difficult for an individual to come up with creative solutions. The potential for creativity is enhanced when an individual has the ability for quick learning. Having a memory for factual knowledge would also greatly benefit an individual. Availability of the unique talents in a target industry such as expertise in strategic management, or computer science is another great contribution to expertise component (Amabile, 1996).

The second component is creativity. This component contributes greatly to the creative performance as well. Even if the person has expertise component at the highest point but totally lacks the creativity skills, his or her performance would be marked as good or acceptable, but not as outgoing. The creativity skills give a person an ability to see the familiar things in a different light. These skills also allow a person to take new perspectives on the issues, and have a persistent and energetic working style. Nonetheless, this component depends to some extent greatly on personal traits. These personal characteristics are associated with self-discipline, tendency toward risk-taking, independence, tolerance for ambiguity, firmness in the face of frustration, and a relative lack of concern for social approval (Amabile, 1996). Nevertheless, creativeness can be maximized by consistently implementing techniques to enhance intellectual independence and cognitive flexibility.

The third aspect of the creativity model is task motivation. Motivation is classified into two types. Intrinsic motivation of an employee means that he works by interest, satisfaction, or a personal sense of challenge. Extrinsic motivation provides an employee’s intention to achieve some goal that is not related to work affairs such as attaining a guaranteed reward or winning a contest. Even though it is possible to combine both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to achieve creativity, one of them is usually a more dominant trait for a certain person working on a certain assignment. Numerous researches have been done to prove that a primarily extrinsic motivation is less favorable to creativity rather than a primarily intrinsic motivation. The intrinsic task motivation determines the extent to which a worker fully engages his or her expertise and creativity skills. Moreover, task motivation turns creativity potential into actual creative solutions. Although the two skill components mentioned before do determine what an employee is capable of doing at the workplace, it is the task motivation component that determines what that an employee actually will do.

Strength and Weakness of Group Decision Making

Group decision making could be described as a group of employees brought together for a limited period of time to solve problems or to make the most efficient decisions. It is complicated to state for certain whether group decision making is always better than individual decision-making. There is always variety of situational factors that affect the functioning of the group and its efficiency of the decisions. Despite this fact, there are relative strengths and weaknesses inherent in group decision making (Hadler).

One of the greatest strengths of group decision-making is diversity. Well-diversified groups that have people from various cultures, age groups, genders tend to generate a wide variety of decision alternatives from totally different perspectives. Diversified groups could also increase the number of solutions. When a greater number of constructive alternatives are produced, there is the probability that the group would eventually reach a superior problem solution than an individual. Another great advantage of group decision making is varied experiences. Varied experiences could become a great advantage to decision making process when group contains people who have different experiences in the same industry fields, life situations, or even the same problems. Such pool of experience also allows the group to develop creative and innovative solutions for a single problem.

Group decision making also offers a collective understanding advantage. Since the members of the group discuss and deliberate a lot about the issue before making an actual decision, it helps some members to understand the course of action to be followed. The last but not least strength of group decision making is error detection. With a large number of people working together, it is easier to deter the mistakes and errors before they have some serious consequences.

Although group decision-making has a lot of its advantages, there are some potential weaknesses as well. When company is in need of the quick decision, group decision-making would not be the best choice, because groups tend to be slower providing a decision than individuals. One of the biggest weaknesses of group decision-making is groupthink. Groupthink is a situation when members of a group are pressured to blindly abide by a view of majority. Groupthink has negative effects of the decision making because group members do not make decisions based on rationality but rather conform to the most dominant opinion. Other people’s opinion is suppressed, which does not allow the group to explore all actions and possibilities thoroughly.

Group polarization is another weakness of group decision-making. Group polarization is a tendency of the group to make more extreme solutions or decisions than the initial inclination of its members. An example of group polarization is the "risky shift" phenomenon. Such phenomenon happens when the final decision is riskier than if the decision is made individually. The reason for this is shared responsibility. The members of the group do not feel as much responsible and accountable for the decision as if they made this decision alone.

The Four-step Process that Charismatic Leaders Use to Influence Followers

Apart from having personal character traits that charismatic leaders use to inspire and influence their followers, they also use the four-step process. The first step entails the setting of an appealing vision or a clear mission that expresses an idealized goal. The goal should offer a prospective image by putting a specific target that has to be attained in a limited time for a better result to achieve. The vision should have an inspiring promise that is realizable (Rao, 2008). The picture of the future should have bright imagery and clear targets. Charismatic leader’s vision should create possibilities that are exciting, unique, and present a completely new structure that creates an organizational distinction. A formulation of the appealing vision is necessary. However, the vision must be accompanied by the vision statement. The vision statement allows charismatic leader to embody the overall goal. It is a key to followers’ acceptance and trust. Without the first step successful completion, it would be impossible for the leader to further his or her campaign.

In the second step, charismatic leader usually communicates the expectations of workers’ high performance and better results while comforting them and meeting their needs. Charismatic leader needs to set a benchmark for the superior performance. He or she should not forget to express confidence in his or her followers and their abilities to achieve the expected level of performance. Expressing confidence that followers can do anything is fairly essential because it enhances their self-esteem, motivates them, and allows them to improve their performance. Furthermore, increased performance brings results for the organization (Rao, 2008). 

 In the third step, a charismatic leader has to represent model behavior. The leader should be a role model that leads his or her followers through values, behavior, actions and words. While being an example of model behavior, the leader takes personal risk and makes sacrifice to attain the targets of the company. The leader conveys through actions and words new values and beliefs and sets a model example for followers to impersonate.

In the last and final step, the leader has to show unordinary behavior to express the convictions of the vision once again. Charismatic leader needs to share the success of the goal with his followers, give a credit for their hard and persistent job, and, of course, take a part of the failures and issues of the company.