The 30 Day MBA (29 page)

Hertzberg called these causes of dissatisfaction ‘hygiene factors'. He reasoned that the lack of hygiene will cause disease, but the presence of hygienic conditions will not, of itself, produce good health. So the lack of adequate ‘job hygiene' will cause dissatisfaction but hygienic conditions alone will not bring about job satisfaction; to do that you have to work on the determinants of job satisfaction.

Other theories of motivation

There are a plethora of theories of how to motivate people at work and elsewhere. (See the partial list below.) As the subject has matured, researchers have segmented the market into ever-smaller sub-topics, for example focusing on certain subgroups, difficult people for example; or special situations such as after a merger or closure of part of a business.

• Achievement motivation theory (Atkinson, 1964)
  
• Action-outcome expectancy (Heckhausen, 1991)
  
• Attributional theory of achievement motivation (Weiner, 1972)
  
• Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957)
  
• Effectance motivation (White, 1959; Harter, 1978a)
  
• Expectancy times value theory (Vroom, 1964)
  
• Goal-setting theory (Locke, 1968)
  
• Intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1975)
  
• Learned helplessness theory (Seligman, 1975)
  
• Neuro-linguistic programming – NLP (Bandler and Grinder, 1976)
  
• Reactance theory (Brehm, 1966)
  
• Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977)
  

The guiding principle for all motivation practice is that people respond to a much wider range of stimulations other than life and death, fear and greed or stick and carrot. This article in the
Journal of American Academy of Business
, entitled ‘A Review of Employee Motivation Theories and their Implications for Employee Retention within Organizations' provides a useful backdrop for MBA students (
www.academia-research.com/filecache/instr/a/_/665402_a_review_of_employee_
motivation_theories_and_their_implications.pdf
).

Leadership

However great the employees are, unless a business has effective leadership nothing of great value can be made to happen. While the boss may have a pretty clear idea of what the business is all about and what makes it special and different, it may not be so clear to those who work further down. Employees often just keep their heads down and get on with the task in hand. While that's a useful trait, it is not sufficient to make a business a great place to work. To make that happen, the boss has to have a precise idea of where the business is heading and use their leadership skills to achieve results.

Vision

A vision is about stretching the organization's reach beyond its grasp. Few now can see how the vision can be achieved, but can see that it would be great if it could be done.

Microsoft's vision of a computer in every home, formed when few offices had one, is one example of a vision that has nearly been reached. As a mission statement in 1990 it might have raised a wry smile. After all, it was only a few decades before then that IBM had estimated the entire world demand for its computers as seven!

NASDAQ, the entrepreneurs' stock market, has as its vision: To build the world's first truly global securities market. ‘A world-wide market of markets built on a world-wide network of network linking pools of liquidity and connecting investors from all over the world thus assuring the best possible price for securities at the lowest possible costs.' That certainly points to beyond the horizon envisaged by business today.

Having a vision will make it easier to get employees to buy into a long-term commitment to a business – they will see that they could have career opportunities and progression in an organization that knows where it is going.

Mission

A mission is a direction statement, intended to focus your attention on the essentials that encapsulate your specific competence(s) in relation to the market/customers you plan to serve. First, the mission should be narrow enough to give direction and guidance to everyone in the business. This concentration is the key to business success because it is only by focusing on specific needs that a small business can differentiate itself from its larger competitors. Nothing kills off a business faster than trying to do too many different things too soon. Second, the mission should open up a large enough market to allow the business to grow and realize its potential. You can always add a bit on later.

In summary, the mission statement should explain:

• what business you are in and your purpose;
  
• what you want to achieve over the next one to three years, ie your strategic goal;
  
• how, ie your ethics, values and standards.
  

Above all, mission statements must be realistic, achievable – and brief.

Objectives

The milestones on the way to realizing the vision and mission are measured by the achievement of business objectives. These objectives ‘cascade' through the organization from the top, where they are measures of profit, through to measures such as output, quality, reject rates, absenteeism and so forth.

Objective setting is a primary process in which clear performance measures are agreed with every employee. The achievement of specific objectives is the ultimate measure of effective leadership.

Values

A business faces tough choices every day and the bigger it gets, the greater the number of people responsible for setting out what you ultimately stand for – profits alone, or principled profits. Defining your values will make it possible for everyone working for you to know how to behave in any situation. Southwest Airlines, the first and arguably the best low cost airline has cultivated a reputation for being the ‘nice' airline. A past CEO, James Parker, tells a story that sums up their values: ‘we want people to consistently do the
right thing because they want to.' One evening flight landed in Detroit and all the passengers, bar one, a young girl, disembarked. She should have got off at Chicago, an earlier stop, but failed to do so. Despite this being the night before Thanksgiving, the pilot and crew knew that they had to get the passenger back to her anxious parents. Without asking for company permission they just took off and returned the girl to her correct destination. They knew what should be done, regardless of the additional cost and inconvenience, and just got on with it.

Toys ‘R' Us have what they call their ‘R' Values:

CASE STUDY

At Toys ‘R' Us, Inc, we believe that by being rapid, real, reliable and responsible, we will best serve our customers, employees, shareholders, communities and kids!

Rapi
d
: We believe that speed is a reflection of our culture. Our team is focused and clear with common, user-friendly processes and solutions; fast and urgent in decision-making and speed-to-market; and quick in adapting to change.

Rea
l
: Our team is urgent, sincere, authentic, helpful to work with and confident. We are ‘Playing to Win!'

Reliabl
e
: Being reliable means working as a team so everything can move faster. We are a company that is dependable, and we produce what we promise.

Responsibl
e
: We believe that honesty, integrity and compassion are the foundation upon which we work together and conduct our business. Keeping kids safe is a cornerstone of the brand.

As a company, and as individuals, we value integrity, honesty, openness, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement and mutual respect. We are committed to our customers and partners and have a passion for technology. We take on big challenges, and pride ourselves on seeing them through. We hold ourselves accountable to our customers, shareholders, partners, and employees by honouring our commitments, providing results, and striving for the highest quality.

Management

Leadership and management are not the same thing, but you need both. A leader challenges the status quo, while a manager accepts it as a constraint. A boss usually has to be both a leader and a manager. Dozens of catchy
titles such as bottom-up, top-down, management by objectives and crisis management have been used to describe the many and various theories as to how to manage.

American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (circa 1911), who is credited with coining the phrase ‘time is money', was one of the pioneers of the search for the ‘one best way' to execute such basic managerial functions as selection, promotion, compensation, training and production. Taylor was followed by Henri Fayol (1919), a successful managing director of a mining French company, who developed what he called the 14 Principles of Management, recognizing that his list was neither exhaustive nor universally applicable. He also set out what he saw as the five primary functions of a manager. Nearly a decade later, Luther Gulick, an American, and Lydnall Urwick, a founder of the British management consultancy profession, expanded Fayol's list to seven executive management activities summarized by the acronym POSDCORB:

• Planning: determine objectives in advance and the methods to achieve them.
  
• Organizing: establish a structure of authority for all work.
  
• Staffing: recruit, hire and train workers; maintain favourable working conditions.
  
• Directing: make decisions, issue orders and directives.
  
• Coordinating: interrelate all sectors of the organization.
  
• Reporting: inform hierarchy through reports, records and inspections.
  
• Budgeting: depend on fiscal planning, accounting and control.
  

By 1973 Canadian academic Henry Mintzberg, now professor of organizations at INSEAD in France, had further expanded the manager's tasks and responsibilities into 10 areas:

1. Figurehead: performs ceremonial and symbolic duties as head of the organization.
   
2. Leader: fosters a proper work atmosphere and motivates and develops subordinates.
   
3. Liaison: develops and maintains a network of external contacts to gather information.
   
4. Monitor: gathers internal and external information relevant to the organization.
   
5. Disseminator: passes factual and value-based information to subordinates.
   
6. Spokesperson: communicates to the outside world on performance and policies.
   
7. Entrepreneur: designs and initiates change in the organization.
   
8. Disturbance handler: deals with unexpected events and operational breakdowns.
   
9. Resource allocator: controls and authorizes the use of organizational resources.
   
10. Negotiator: intermediates with other organizations and individuals.
    

All of these attempts at formulating an overarching and universal approach to arriving at a single best definition of the role of management foundered on the limitations of the information flow from the front line upwards. Two management theorists, Tom Peters and Nancy Austin, suggest that managers in effective companies get the information they need by getting out of their offices and talking with people – employees, suppliers, other managers, and customers. They coined the approach as ‘management by walking around', or ‘MBWA' (Peters and Austin, 1985).

Today, the view of the role of a manager is best described as being contingent on the internal and external circumstances they find themselves in. Expanded into the rather grandiose title of ‘contingency theory', its exponent Fred Fiedler, a business and management psychologist at the University of Washington, first introduced what he called the contingency modelling of leadership in 1967.

Management styles and processes

Despite the near-universal acceptance that there are no absolutes in management, the search for a tool or technique for helping managers understand and improve on their role as a manager goes on. These are some of the more practical of those attempts.

The Management Grid

Robert R Blake and Jane Srygley Mouton, who worked together at the psychology department of the University of Texas during the 1950s and 1960s, developed the ‘Managerial Grid' as a framework for understanding managerial styles. Their grid (see
Figure 4.8
) had two dimensions, concern for task and concern for people, with management styles being described by their position on the grid:

• Country Club operates on the belief that as long as the people are happy the results will follow.
  
• Produce or Perish states that we are only here to deliver results. It's an authoritarian style that subjugates people and their concerns to getting tasks performed at all costs. This is very much a Theory X (see above) method of operating.
  
• Impoverished Manager is equally disinterested in both output and people.
  
• Team Manager has a parallel concern for people and results. This is considered the optimal role.
  
• Middle of the Road is an attempt to balance the concern for output with a parallel concern for people. In compromising, neither of the competing needs is met satisfactorily. This style can also occur when a manager alternates between putting people first at one stage then if results aren't coming through swinging the other way: this is known as the Pendulum approach to management.
  

FIGURE 4.8
  
The management grid