Human Resource Management

Group Roles

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What Are Roles?

1. The concept of roles applies to all employees in organizations and to their life outside the organization as well.
2. A role refers to a set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone who occupies a given position in a social unit.
3. Individuals play multiple roles.
4. Employees attempt to determine what behaviors are expected of them.
5. An individual who is confronted by divergent role expectations experiences role conflict.
6. Employees in organizations often face such role conflicts.

Following are the different types of group roles:

1. Task-oriented roles
2. Relationship-oriented roles
3. Individual roles

Task-oriented roles
• Initiator-Contributors
• Information seekers/providers

Relationship-oriented roles
• Encouragers
• Harmonizers

Individual roles
• Blockers
• Jokers

Characteristics of a well-functioning, effective group

A group is considered effective if it is having following characteristics.
• Relaxed, comfortable, informal atmosphere
• Task to be performed are well understood & accepted
• Members listen well & participate in given assignments
• Clear assignments made & accepted
• Group aware of its operation & function
• People express feelings & ideas
• Consensus decision making
• Conflict & disagreement center around ideas or method

Group

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A group is defined as two or more interacting and interdependent individuals who come together to achieve
particular objectives.

Types of Groups

a. Formal groups are work groups established by the organization and have designated work assignments
and established tasks. The behaviors in which one should engage are stipulated by and directed toward
organizational goals.
b. Informal groups are of a social nature and are natural formations. They tend to form around friendships and common interests.

Why Do People Join Groups?

There is no single reason why individuals join groups.
1. Security reflects strength in numbers.
• The group helps the individual to feel stronger, have fewer self-doubts, and be more resistant to threats.
2. Status indicates a prestige that comes from belonging to a particular group.
• Inclusion in a group viewed as important provides recognition and status.
3. Self-esteem conveys people's feelings of self-worth.
• Membership can raise feelings of self-esteem--being accepted into a highly valued group.
4. Affiliation with groups can fulfill one's social needs.
• Work groups significantly contribute to fulfilling the need for friendships and social relations.
5. One of the appealing aspects of groups is that they represent power.
• What often cannot be achieved individually becomes possible through group action.
• Power might be desired to protect themselves from unreasonable demands.
• Informal groups additionally provide opportunities for individuals to exercise power.
6. Finally, people may join a group for goal achievement.
• There are times when it takes more than one person to accomplish a particular task.
• There is a need to pool talents, knowledge, or power in order to get a job completed.

Individual

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Why to Focus on Individuals?

Individuals are important units of any organization. If we understand the behavior of individuals, we can predict
the outcomes; it will become easy to manage the behaviors of individuals in desirable directions. We have to look at three individual variables—biographical characteristics, ability, and learning. Biographical characteristics are readily available to managers. Generally, they include data that are contained in an employee’s personal file. The most important conclusions are that, age seems to have no relationship to productivity; older workers and those with longer tenure are less likely to resign; and married employees have fewer absences, less turnover, and report higher job satisfaction than do unmarried employees. But what value can this information have for managers? The obvious answer is that it can help in making choices among job applicants.

Ability directly influences an employee’s level of performance and satisfaction through the ability-job fit. Given management’s desire to get a compatible fit, what can be done?

First, an effective selection process will improve the fit. A job analysis will provide information about jobs currently being done and the abilities that individuals need to perform the jobs
adequately. Applicants can then be tested, interviewed, and evaluated on the degree to which they possess the necessary abilities.
Second, promotion and transfer decisions affecting individuals already in the organization’s employ should reflect the abilities of candidates. With new employees, care should be taken to assess critical abilities that incumbents will need in the job and to match these requirements with the organization’s human resources.
Third, the fit can be improved by fine-tuning the job to better match an incumbent’s abilities. Often
modifications can be made in the job that while not having a significant impact on the job’s basic activities,
better adapts it to the specific talents of a given employee. Examples would be to change some of the equipment used or to reorganize tasks within a group of employees.

A final alternative is to provide training for employees. This is applicable to both new workers and present job incumbents. Training can keep the abilities of incumbents current or provide new skills as times and conditions change.

Any observable change in behavior is prima facie evidence that learning has taken place. What we want to do, of course, is ascertain if learning concepts provide us with any insights that would allow us to explain and predict behavior. Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool for modifying behavior. By identifying and rewarding performance-enhancing behaviors, management increases the likelihood that they will be repeated. Our knowledge about learning further suggests that reinforcement is a more effective tool than punishment. Although punishment eliminates undesired behavior more quickly than negative reinforcement does, but punished behavior tends to be only temporarily suppressed rather than permanently changed. Punishment may produce unpleasant side effects such as lower morale and higher absenteeism or turnover. In addition, the recipients of punishment tend to become resentful of the punisher. Managers, therefore, are advised to use reinforcement rather than punishment.
Finally, managers should expect that employees would look to them as models. Managers who are constantly late to work, or take two hours for lunch, or help themselves to company office supplies for personal use should expect employees to read the message they are sending and model their behavior accordingly. Individual differences do not dictate people’s behavior. Instead, they limit a person’s behavioral range, making some behavior easier than others.

The Basic OB Model

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The basic OB model suggests study of the organization at following three levels:

1. Organization
2. Group
3. Individual

The purpose of understanding organizations from all three levels (individual, group, and organization) is to develop a well-rounded view that will prepare us for the challenges that managers face in today's business environment. Focusing on the individual level allows us to understand individual differences, perception, motivation, and learning. Focusing on the group level shows us how more than two people can
work together in groups or teams within an organization. Focusing on the organization level allows us to see the effects of the organizational environment, technology, strategy, structure, and culture.

The Environment Of Organization

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• Work group
• Job
• Personal life

Inside the organization, the work group or the relationship between the group members can affect the individual behavior. Organizational culture can also have impact on the individual behavior.
Cultural values indicate what a cultural group considers important, worthwhile, and desirable. People share the
values of their culture, which form the basis for individual value systems composed of terminal values and
instrumental values. A key work-related value is a person's ethics. Value systems affect ethical behavior in
organizations. Managers must be most concerned with interpersonal and person-organization value conflicts.
Interpersonal value conflicts occur when two or more people have opposing values, which can prevent coworkers from working together effectively. Person-organization value conflicts occur when someone's values
conflict with the organization's culture, causing frustration and possibly disrupting personal performance.
The factors that influence job satisfaction are pay; the job itself; promotion opportunities; supervisors; and coworkers. The link between job satisfaction and work performance is complex and influenced by multiple
organizational and personal factors. The link appears to be stronger for professionals than for employees at
higher organizational levels.

Organizations and human behavior

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Variables Influencing the Individual Human Behaviors:
In simple word behavior is the function of Person and Environment in which he/she is working.
The following two factors mainly influence the individual behaviors…

1. The Persons
2. The Environment of the Organization

The Persons No single measure of individual differences can provide a complete understanding of an individual or predict all the behaviors of an individual. It is therefore more useful to consider a variety of differences that explain aspects of employee behavior. These can be

• Skills & Abilities
• Personality
• Perceptions
• Attitudes
• Values
• Ethics

Skills & Abilities:
Mental and physical capacities to perform various tasks. This comes from knowledge, learning, and experiences.

Personality:
Research has shown five major dimensions to be consistent components of personality. The Big Five
personality dimensions are conscientiousness, extroversion/introversion, and openness to experience, emotional stability, and agreeableness. Conscientiousness - defined as being reliable and dependable, being careful and organized, and being a person who plans - is the dimension most strongly correlated to job performance. Extroversion/introversion refers to the degree to which a person is sociable, talkative, assertive, active, and ambitious. Openness to experience is the degree to which someone is imaginative, broad-minded, curious, and seeks new experiences. Emotional stability is the degree to which someone is anxious, depressed, angry, and insecure. Agreeableness refers to the degree to which a person is courteous, likable, good-natured, and flexible. Managers must remember that the relevance of any personality dimension depends on the situation, the type of job, and the level at which a person is working.

Four personality traits that have been consistently related to work-related behavior are locus of control, Type-A behavior, self-monitoring, and Machiavellian-ism. Locus of control indicates an individual's sense of control over his/her life, the environment, and external events. Those with an internal locus of control believe that their actions affect what happens to them, while those with an external locus of control believe that outside factors affect what happens to them. People who exhibit Type-A behavior try to do more in less and less time in an apparently tireless pursuit of everything. Type-A people feel great time urgency, are very competitive, try to do many things at once, and are hostile.
Self-monitoring, the fourth personality trait is the degree to which people are capable of reading and using cues from the environment to determine their own behavior. Strong self-monitoring skills can help managers and employees read environmental and individual cues quickly and accurately and adjust behavior accordingly. People with elements of a Machiavellian personality put self-interest above the group's interests and manipulate others for personal gain.

Perceptions:
We use the mental process of perception to pay attention selectively to some stimuli and cues in our environment. There are two types of perception. Social perception process is the process of gathering, selecting, and interpreting information about how we view themselves and others. In contrast, physical perception focuses on gathering and interpreting information about physical objects rather than people. Closure permits us to interpret a stimulus by filling in missing information based on our experiences and assumption.

Attitudes:
Attitudes are comprised of feelings, beliefs, and behaviors. One important work-related attitude is job
satisfaction, the general attitude that people have toward their jobs. Main five factors contribute to job
satisfaction: pay; the job itself; promotion opportunities; the supervisor; and relations with co-workers. The
relationship between job satisfaction and work performance is complex and influenced by multiple
organizational and personal factors. Managers have more influence over job satisfaction than any other
individual difference discussed in this chapter.

Values:
Values are long-lasting beliefs about what is important, worthwhile, and desirable. A person's value system is the way he/she organizes and prioritizes values. Terminal values are goals for behavior or for a certain result that someone wants to achieve. Instrumental values are the means—the instruments—that people believe they should use to attain their goals. Cultural values can affect personal values

ETHICS:
A key work-related value is the employee's ethics. Those who hold a relativist's view of ethics believe
that what is right or wrong depends on the situation or culture. Those with a Universalist’s view believe that
ethical standards should be applied consistently in all situations and cultures. Value conflict occurs when there is disagreement among values that an individual holds or between individual and organizational values. To avoid value conflict, managers should work toward integrating and fitting the values of different employees with the values of the organization.

Contribution of OB to effectiveness of Organization

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Wouldn't a Manager’s job be easier if he or she could explain and predict behavior? This is the focus of
organizational behavior (OB), the study of the actions of people at work. The goal of OB is to explain and predict behavior of employees at work. OB focuses on both individual behavior and group behavior. Managers must understand behavior in both the formal and informal components of an organization. Managers are particularly concerned with three types of employee behaviors: productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. A fourth type of behavior, organizational citizenship, is emerging as a vital concern. Managers must also be attentive to employee attitudes.
Attitudes are value statements, either favorable or unfavorable, concerning people, events, or objects.
Attitudes of special interest to managers pertain to those related to job satisfaction, job involvement, and
organizational commitment. Can you think of ways in which your personal attitudes (values) have impact on your behavior at work? Sometimes an individual experiences an inconsistency between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. Are happy workers productive workers? The answer to this question is not as simple as it might appear. Review the relationship between employee happiness and productivity and see what you think. Many researchers now believe that managers should direct their attention primarily to what might help employees become more productive.
Five specific personality traits have proven most powerful in explaining individual behavior in organizations.
These are locus of control, Machiavellians, self-esteem, self-monitoring, and risk propensity. Review these traits so you can be prepared to predict practical work-related behaviors.
Sometimes different people will hear or witnesses the same situations yet interpret them differently. This
happens because of differences in perception. Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory impressions in order to give meaning to the environment. Managers need to recognize that employees react to perceptions, not to reality (if there is such a thing as “reality”). Thus, managers must pay close attention to how employees perceive both their jobs and management practices.

We constantly learn from our experiences. Sometimes we learn from rewards and punishments that are a
consequence of our behavior. We learn to behave in order to get something we want or to avoid something we do not want. This is called operative conditioning. An extension of apparent conditioning is social learning
theory. Social learning theory emphasizes that we can learn through observation as well as direct experience.
Managers can influence an employees learning through the rewards they allocate and the examples they set.
Does this advice seem equally applicable to parenting? The behavior of individuals in groups is not the same as the sum total of all of the individuals’ behavior.
Individuals often act differently in groups than when they are alone. This means that managers must also
understand the elements of group behavior. This chapter describes the basic concepts of group behavior.
It is clear that the ability to understand and predict employee behavior is a powerful tool for managers. To
illustrate, a movie director must often “get into the mindset” of characters in a script. Understanding a
character’s perceptions and motivation can help the director guide actors toward an award-winning
performance. Managers, too, can serve as a guide and coach, helping employees meet organizational goals.

The Goals of Organizational Behavior

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1. The emphasis will be on employee productivity, reduce absenteeism, and turnover.
2. Organizational citizenship—a fourth type of behavior becoming important in determining employee performance.
3. Attitudes are evaluative statements—favorable or unfavorable—concerning objects, people, or events.
4. An attitude is made-up of three components: cognition, affect, and behavior.
5. The cognitive component consists of a person’s beliefs, opinions, knowledge, and information held by a person.
6. The affective component of an attitude is the emotional, or feeling, segment of an attitude.
7. The behavioral component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a certain way.
8. The three most important job-related attitudes are job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational
commitment.

Organizational Behavior

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• OB is concerned specifically with the actions of people at work. Managers need to develop their interpersonal or people skills if they are going to be effective in their jobs. Organizational behavior (OB) is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within an organization, and then applies that knowledge to make organizations work more effectively. Specifically, OB focuses on how to improve productivity, reduce absenteeism and turnover, and increase employee citizenship and job satisfaction. We all hold generalizations about the behavior of people. Some of our generalizations may provide valid insights into human behavior, but many are erroneous. Organizational behavior uses systematic study to improve predictions of behavior that would be made from intuition alone. Yet, because people are different, we need to look at OB in a contingency framework, using situation variables to moderate cause-effect relationships.
• OB addresses some issues that are not obvious, such as informal elements. It offers both challenges and
opportunities for managers. It recognizes differences and helps managers to see the value of workforce
diversity and practices that may need to change when managing in different situation and countries. It can
help improve quality and employee productivity by showing managers how to empower their people as well
as how to design and implement change programs. It offers specific insights to improve a manager’s people
skills. In times of rapid and ongoing change, faced by most managers today, OB can help managers cope in
a world of “temporariness” and learn ways to stimulate innovation. Finally, OB can offer managers guidance
in creating an ethically healthy work environment.

Focus of Organizational Behavior
OB looks at individual behavior, which includes personality, perception, learning, and motivation. It is also
concerned with group behaviors specifically in areas of norms roles, team building, conflicts and negotiation.

Why to work in organizations?

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People can be more productive when working in groups than when working alone. What Managers can do and
what Managers cannot do while managing people, organizations and society is the myths of management.
Basic purpose of the working or existence of organization is:
• Link individuals into relationships
• Allocate the tasks to fulfill the objective
• Allocate authority to perform individual tasks
• Coordinate the objectives and activities of separate units
• Facilitate the flow of work

The Challenges of today’s organization

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Organizations are facing different challenges in today’s environment like:

Technology
Only 20 years ago, few workers used fax machines or e-mail, and computers occupied entire rooms, not desktops. Advances in information and communication technology have permanently altered the workplace by changing the way information is created, stored, used, and shared.

Diverse Workforce
A diverse workforce refers to two or more groups, each of whose members are identifiable and distinguishable based on demographic or other characteristics like gender, age group, education etc. Several barriers in dealing with diversity include stereotyping, prejudice, ethnocentrism, discrimination, tokenism, and gender-role stereotypes.

Multiple Stakeholders
Stakeholders are those who have interests in the organization. Multiple stakeholders for an organization include the customers, suppliers, consumers, investors, lenders, etc.

Responsiveness
An organization has to be responsive to the challenges and threats that it faces from within the internal or
external environment. It requires quick responsiveness to meet the challenges and opportunities arising out of
these changes.

Rapid Changes
Due to changing internal and external environment, rapid changes in the organization occur. Organization has
to be flexible to adjust to those changes.

Globalization
Managers are faced with a myriad of challenges due to an array of environmental factors when doing business abroad. These managers must effectively plan, organize, lead, control, and manage cultural differences to be successful globally.

The Human Relations Viewpoint

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Human relations proponents argued that managers should stress primarily employee welfare, motivation, and
communication. They believed social needs had precedence over economic needs. Therefore, management must gain the cooperation of the group and promote job satisfaction and group norms consistent with the goals of the organization.
Another noted contributor to the field of human relations was Abraham Maslow. In 1943, Maslow suggested
that humans have five levels of needs. The most basic needs are the physical needs for food, water, and shelter;
the most advanced need is for self-actualization, or personal fulfillment. Maslow argued that people try to satisfy their lower level needs and then progress upward to the higher-level needs. Managers can facilitate this process and achieve organizational goals by removing obstacles and encouraging behaviors that satisfy people's needs and organizational goals simultaneously.
Although the human relations approach generated research into leadership, job attitudes, and group dynamics, it drew heavy criticism. Critics believed the philosophy, while scientific management overemphasized the economic and formal aspects of the workplace; human relations ignored the more rational side of the worker
and the important characteristics of the formal organization. However, human relations were a significant step in
the development of management thought, because it prompted managers and researchers to consider the
psychological and social factors that influence performance.

The Hawthorne Studies

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Western Electric Company, a manufacturer of communications equipment, hired a team of Harvard researchers led by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger. They were to investigate the influence of physical working
conditions on workers' productivity and efficiency in one of the company's factories outside Chicago. This
research project, known as the Hawthorne Studies provided some of the most interesting and controversial
results in the history of management.
The Hawthorne Studies were a series of experiments conducted from 1924 to 1932. During the first stage of the project (the Illumination Experiments), various working conditions, particularly the lighting in the factory, were altered to determine the effects of these changes on productivity. The researchers found no systematic
relationship between the factory lighting and production levels. In some cases, productivity continued to
increase even when the illumination was reduced to the level of moonlight. The researchers concluded that the
workers performed and reacted differently because the researchers were observing them. This reaction is known as the Hawthorne Effect.
This conclusion led the researchers to believe productivity may be affected more by psychological and social
factors than by physical or objective influences. With this thought in mind, they initiated the other four stages of
the project. During these stages, the researchers performed various work group experiments and had extensive
interviews with employees. Mayo and his team eventually concluded that the informal work group influenced
productivity and employee behavior.

Human Relation Approach

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Another approach to management, human relations, developed during the early 1930s. This approach aimed at
understanding how psychological and social processes interact with work situation to influence performance.
Human relations were the first major approach to emphasize informal work relationships and worker satisfaction. This approach owes much to other major schools of thought.

Synergy

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Systems theory also popularized the concept of synergy, which states that the whole is greater than the sum of
its parts. For example, 3M have applied its core technology of adhesives to many products, from industrial
sealers to Post-it notes. 3M has not had to start from scratch with each product; its adhesives expertise provides synergies across products.

Subsystem

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Systems theory also emphasizes that an organization is one level in a series of subsystems. For instance, Royal Air force is a subsystem of our defense industry and the flight crews are a subsystem of Royal Air force.
Again, systems theory points out that each subsystem is a component of the whole and is interdependent with
other subsystems.

Efficiency and Effectiveness

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The closed-system focus of the classical theorists emphasized the internal efficiency of the organization; that is,
these perspectives addressed only improvements to the transformation process. Efficiency is the ratio of outputs
to inputs. Systems theory highlights another important dimension for managers: effectiveness. Effectiveness is
the degree to which the organization's outputs correspond to the needs and wants of the external environment.
The external environment includes groups such as customers, suppliers, competitors, and regulatory agencies.
Even a firm that has mastered Taylor's scientific management techniques and become extremely efficient is
vulnerable if, it does not consider the effectiveness of its output.

Open versus Closed Systems

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A closed system does not interact with the outside environment. Although few systems actually take this form, some of the classical approaches treated organizations as closed systems. The assumption was that if managers
improve internal processes, the organization would succeed. Clearly, however, all organizations are open
systems, dependent on inputs from the outside world, such as raw materials, human resources, and capital, and
output to the outside world that meet the market's needs for goods and services.
Above figure illustrates the open-system perspective. The organizational system requires inputs, which the
organization transforms into outputs, which are received by the external environment. The environment reacts
to these outputs through a feedback loop, which then becomes an input for the next cycle of the system. The
process continues to repeat itself for the life of the system.
As above Figure shows, a system is a set of interdependent parts that processes inputs (such as raw materials)
into outputs (products). Business inputs typically known as resources include human, physical, financial etc
resources. Most businesses use a variety of human, financial, physical, and informational resources. Manager’s
function is to transform these resources into the outputs of the business. Goods and services are the outputs of
the business. Some of the major components of the external environment include customers, competitors,
suppliers, and investors.

Systematic Approach to Management

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A system is an entity with a purpose that has interdependent parts. The systems approach suggests viewing the
organization as a system. All systems have four basic characteristics:
1) they operate within an environment;
2) they are composed of building blocks called elements, components, or subsystems;
3) they have a central purpose against which the organization’s efforts and subsystems can be evaluated; and
4) essential systems thinking places focus on the inter relatedness among the subsystems and its environment.

Systematic management emphasized internal operations because managers were concerned primarily with
meeting the explosive growth in demand brought about by the Industrial Revolution. In addition, managers
were free to focus on internal issues of efficiency, in part because the government did not constrain business
practices significantly. Finally, labor was poorly organized. As a result, many managers were oriented more
toward things than toward people.
The influence of the systematic management approach is clear in the following description of one organization's
attempt to control its workers.

Components of Organization

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Components of Organization are

1. Task
2. People
3. Structure
4. Technology

Task: This component can be defined as a mission or purpose of the existence of organization. Every organization is having a purpose of existence that is accomplished by producing certain goods and services as an output, which is termed as task.

People: The workforce or human part of organization that performs different operations in the organization.

Structure: Structure is the basic arrangement of people in the organization.

Technology: The intellectual and mechanical processes used by an organization to transform inputs into products or services.

Organization

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An organization is not a random group of people who come together by chance. They consciously and formally establish it to accomplish certain goals that its members would be unable to reach individually. A manager's job is to achieve high performance relative to the organization's objectives. For example, a business organization has objectives to (1) make a profit (2) furnish its customers with goods and services; (3) provide an income for its employees; and (4) increase the level of satisfaction for everyone involved.
An organization is a social entity, which is goal orients and deliberately structured. Organizations are not functioning in isolated but are linked to external dynamic environment. Virtually all organization combines (1) Raw material, (2) Capital and (3) labor & knowledge to produce Goods and Services.

Types of organization

a) Formal: The part of the organization that has legitimacy and official recognition.
b) Informal: The unofficial part of the organization.

Management and its relationship with HRM

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There are five basic functions that all managers perform: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. HR management involves the policies and practices needed to carry out the staffing (or people)
function of management.

HRM can help to manage the following factors in the organization.
• Productivity
• Operations
• Relationships
• Conflict
• Stress
• Reward systems

Effectiveness and success of entire organization depends upon effective manpower of organization.

HR Professionals’ Responsibilities

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Line manager
Authorized to direct the work of subordinates—they’re always someone’s boss. In addition, line managers are
in charge of accomplishing the organization’s basic goals.

Staff manager
Authorized to assist and advise line managers in accomplishing these basic goals. HR managers are generally
staff managers.

Manager’s Roles

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Managers play following roles in an organization:

Interpersonal roles
• Figurehead—duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature
• Leadership—hire, train, motivate, and discipline employees
• Liaison—contact outsiders who provide the manager with information. These may be individuals or groups
inside or outside the organization.

Informational roles
• Monitor—collect information from organizations and institutions outside their own
• Disseminator—a conduit to transmit information to organizational members
• Spokesperson—represent the organization to outsiders

Decisional roles
• Entrepreneur—managers initiate and oversee new projects that will improve their organization’s
performance
• Disturbance handlers—take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems
• Resource allocators—responsible for allocating human, physical, and monetary resources
• Negotiator role—discuss issues and bargain with other units to gain advantages for their own unit

All managers are mostly concerned with following activities:

• Staffing
• Retention
• Development
• Adjustment
• Managing change

Levels of Management

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Three level in the organization can classify managers, particularly for traditionally structured
organizations…

1. First-line managers are the lowest level of management. They’re often called supervisors

2. Middle managers include all levels of management between the first-line level and the top level of the organization.

3. Top managers include managers at or near the top of the organization who are responsible for making organization wide decisions and establishing the plans and goals that affect the entire organization.