EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT

 Development - formal education, job experiences, relationships, and assessments of personality and abilities that help
employees perform effectively in their current or future job and company.

Comparison between Training and Development

 Why is employee development important?

 To improve quality.

 To meet the challenges of global competition and social change.

 To incorporate technological advances and changes in work design.

 Development activities can help companies reduce turnover by:

 showing employees that the company is investing in the employees’ skill development.
 developing managers who can create a positive work environment that makes employees want to come to work and
contribute to the company goals.

Approaches to Employee Development

 Formal education programs include:

 off-site and on-site programs designed specifically for the company’s employees.

 short courses offered by consultants or universities, executive MBA programs, and university programs.

Tuition reimbursement - the practice of reimbursing employees’ costs for college and university courses and degree programs.

 Assessment

 Collecting information and providing feedback to employees about their behavior, communication style, values, or
skills.

 Used most frequently to identify employees with managerial potential, and measure current managers’ strengths and
weaknesses.

 Companies vary in the methods and sources of information they use in developmental assessment.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

 Most popular psychological test for employee development.

 Identifies individuals’ preferences for energy, information gathering, decision making, and lifestyle.

 It is a valuable tool for understanding communication styles and the ways people prefer to interact with others.

Assessment center - multiple raters or evaluators evaluate employees’ performance on a number of exercises.

 It is used to identify:

 if employees have the abilities, personality, and behaviors for management jobs.

 if employees have the necessary skills to work in teams.

 Types of exercises used include leaderless group discussions, interviews, in-baskets, and role plays.

Benchmarks - instrument designed to measure important factors in being a successful manager.

  Items that are measured include dealing with subordinates, acquiring resources, and creating a productive work
climate.

Performance appraisal - process of measuring employees’ performance.

 Different approaches for measuring performance:

 Ranking employees.

 Rating their work behaviors.

 Rating the extent to which employees have desirable traits believed to be necessary for job success.

 The appraisal system must give employees specific information about their performance problems and ways they can
improve their performance.

 Managers must be trained in providing performance feedback.

Upward feedback - involves collecting subordinates’ evaluations of managers’ behaviors or skills.

360-Degree Feedback System

 Factors necessary for a 360-degree feedback system to be effective:

 The system must provide consistent or reliable ratings.

 Feedback must be job-related (valid).

 The system must be easy to use, understandable, and relevant.

 The system must lead to managerial development.

 Job Experiences - relationships, problems, demands, tasks, or other features that employees face in their jobs.

 A major assumption is that development is most likely to occur when there is a mismatch between the employee’s
skills and past experiences and the skills required for the job.

Job enlargement - adding challenges or new responsibilities to an employee’s current job.

Job rotation - providing employees with a series of job assignments in various functional areas of the company or movement
among jobs in a single functional area or department.

Transfer - an employee is given a different job assignment in a different area of the company.

Promotions - advancements into positions with greater challenges, more responsibility, and more authority than in the previous
job.

Downward move - occurs when an employee is given a reduced level of responsibility and authority.

Externships - employees take full-time, temporary operational roles at another company.

 Employee exchange is one example of temporary assignments in which two companies agree to exchange employees.

Volunteer assignments offer employees opportunities to manage change, to teach, to take on a higher level of responsibility, or
to be exposed to other job demands.
 Interpersonal relationships

 Mentor - experienced, productive senior employee who helps develop a less experienced employee (the protégé).

 Mentors provide career support and psychosocial support to the protégé.

 Provide opportunities for mentors to:

o Develop interpersonal skills, increase feelings of self-esteem and worth to the organization, and gain
knowledge about important new scientific developments.

Purposes of Mentoring Programs

 To socialize new employees and to increase the likelihood of skill transfer from training to the work setting.

 To enable women and minorities to gain the experience and skills needed for managerial positions.

 To develop managers for top-level management positions or to help them acquire specific skills.

Group mentoring programs - successful senior employee is paired with four to six less experienced protégés.

 Coach - a peer or manager who works with employees to motivate them, help them develop skills, and provide
reinforcement and feedback.

 The best coaches are empathetic, supportive, practical, and self-confident but do not appear to know all the
answers or want to tell others what to do.

 Three roles that a coach can play:

 One-on-one with an employee, providing feedback based on psychological tests, 360-degree assessment, or
interviews with bosses, peers, and subordinates.

 Help employees learn for themselves by putting them in touch with experts who can help them with their
concerns and by teaching them how to obtain feedback from others.

 Provide the employee with resources such as mentors, courses, or job experiences that the employee may
not otherwise have access to.

The Development Planning Process

It involves:

 identifying development needs.

 choosing a development goal.

 identifying the actions that need to be taken by the employee and the company to achieve the goal.

 determining how progress toward goal attainment will be measured.

 investing time and energy to achieve the goal.

 establishing a timetable for development.

Company Strategies for Providing Development

 The most effective development strategies involve individualization, learner control, and ongoing support.