Lecture notes OBGD

1st workshop & tutorials are mandatory

Lecture video 1 - Part 2

How can we use the formal organizational structures to manage employee’s efforts?

Why do we need organizations in the first place?

● Ability to complete big tasks
○ i.e. designing a car, producing an airplane etc.
○ Beyond the capacity of any single individual
● Combine the expertise, efforts and skills of many individuals, create synergy

Organizational structure:
Blueprint that specifies how jobs in the organization are divided, grouped and coordinated
● Displayed in an formal organizational chart
● Designing an organizational structure require two key decisions:
○ Differentiation: How to break up the big organizational tasks into smaller subtasks
that individuals can perform?
○ Integration: How to ensure that smaller tasks are aligned and well coordinated?
Require coordination mechanisms
Differentiation
● How bigger tasks are broken up through specialization, departmentalization and centralization
● Decide on 3 interrelated issues:
○ Work specialization: How many different subtasks should employees do in the
organization?
○ Departmentalization: How to group employees together into departments?
○ Decision-making-centralization: Where lies the decision-making responsibility in the
company?

Work specialization
● Specialization: Decide whether employees work on few or many different subtasks in the
organization
● Enables task mastery and increased efficiency; but:
○ Avoid overspecialization: Work becomes overly repetitive and boring, works
demotivating, decreases utilization of employees for other jobs;
○ Avoid underspecialization: Lack of focus creates excessive switching costs, creates a
“jack-of-all-trades, masters of none”, and overwhelmed employees.

Departmentalization
● Decide how individual jobs and employees are grouped in departments
● Functional structure: Put all R&D people together in R&D department, operations people in
the operations department etc.
○ Expands functional skills, but also coordination problems between departments
 ● Divisional structure: Put all R&D, operations, logistic people working on the same product,
serving same customer, or working in same region in same department
○ Enables coordination between departments, but functional skills deteriorate
(försämras)
Centralization
● Highly centralized structure: Decision making reserved for top management
○ Clear who has authority, consistent decisions, but also slow
● Highly decentralized structures: Individual employees are “empowered” for themselves
without having to check with their supervisors
○ Allows speedy decision making, can cause coordination breakdown

Integration
● Fitting the pieces together
● Making sure the efforts of different employees are well-coordinated
● Many organizational problems relate to lack of integration;
● Especially between departments
● Integration problems outcomes: Excellent team performance, but teams can still collectively
fail because of coordination breakdowns

Different ways to ensure integration

● Integration mechanisms: Individuals/groups that ensure that different departments align and
synchronize efforts
● Basic types:
○ Using formal hierarchy to coordinate efforts
○ Manager monitors coordination problems
○ Useful for organizations with simple structures
● Advanced types:
○ Dedicated liaisons (sambandsmän), integration departments, teams
○ Suitable for more complex organizations
○ Overly costly for simple organizations

Combining differentiation and integration

● Mechanistic structure:
○ Narrow tasks, highly specialized, centralized decision-making
○ Use of hierarchy to integrate decisions
○ Enables efficiency and control
● Organic structure:
○ Broader tasks, less specializing, empowered employees
○ Enables creativity and innovation

When should which structure be used?

● No universal or best way to design firms
● Align structure with environmental demands
● Organic structure: Best suited for innovative firms in uncertain business environments
● Mechanistic structure: Best suited for low-cost leaders operating in relatively stable business
environments
Lecture video 1 - Part 3

How can we use informal organizational structures to manage employee’s efforts?

How to make sure the informal and formal structure complement each other?

What is the informal structure?

Patterns of relationships that individuals use to complete work
● Describes who goes to who for task-related purposes to complete work

Visualization of the (in)formal structure

● Network graphs: employees are dots connected by lines
● Graph of formal structure: Who should be working with whom, based on formal
organizational chart
● Graph of informal structure: Who is actually working with whom to complete tasks
○ How work really gets done in the organization
○ Often hidden and needs to be rediscovered

Why is the informal structure important?

● Important results are realized through the informal structure
● The informal structure is often very different than one would expect looking at the formal
structure;
○ Marginal overlap between formal and informal structure; key figures in the formal
structure are often not key figures in the informal structure
○ Misalignments between the formal structure and the informal structure can lead to
large inefficiencies

Managing the informal structure

● What should we manage with regard to the informal structure? Two things:
1. The type of informal structure needs to align with the strategic objectives of the
company → different types have unique benefits/drawbacks
2. The informal structure is aligned with the formal structure in the company → avoid
relying on employees who lack central position in informal structure, or ignore
employees who have such central position
Alignment with strategic objectives
● The type of informal structure needs to align with the strategic objectives of the company
● Custom response network:
○ suitable for companies with innovation goals
● Routine response network:
○ Suitable for companies with low-cost goals

Custom response network

● Appropriate for companies that want to be innovation leaders
● Strengths:
○ High connectivity enables open problem solving
○ Increases novel combinations of expertise
○ More creativity and innovation
● Disadvantages:
○ Employees need to invest a lot of time in building and maintaining relationships

Routine-response network
● Appropriate for companies that want to be low-cost leaders
● Strengths:
○ Focus on narrow and task-related interactions creates efficiency
○ High formalization and centralization
○ Enables employees to focus on taskwork
● Disadvantages:
○ Little room for lateral connections

Alignment informal-formal structure

● The informal network needs to align with the formal structure in the company
● With little overlap:
○ Employees work in ways that are incompatible with the formal structure
○ Formal leadership structures, formal procedures and formal systems do not support
employees
○ Employees will lack resources they need to complete work, causing delays

Managing the informal structure

 ● Two problems can occur:
○ Misalignment informal structure - strategic objectives
○ Misalignment informal structure - formal structure
1. Managers need to understand and discover informal structure
2. Evaluate fit of informal structure
3. Based on evaluation, implement interventions

Step 1: Discovering the informal structure

● “Hidden” and invisible
● Effective way to discover informal structure:
○ Organizational network analysis, ONA
● Procedure ONA
○ Collect network data on who works with whom, email logs, phone records, agenda
logs, questionnaires etc.
○ Structure data as a matrix or an edge list and load that into a statistical program
○ Plot the organizational networks and calculate descriptive statistic such as density and
centrality
■ Density: indication of how many other employees the employee in the
organization interacts with. High density → custom response network
■ Centralization: Indication of whether there are some individuals in the
organization that mediate interactions between a large number of employees.
High centralization → Routine response network

Step 2: Evaluate fit of informal network

● Assess its (mis)alignment
● Misalignment with strategic objectives:
○ Use plots of informal network and centrality/density descriptives to classify type of
structure
○ Assess if type network fits with firm’s strategic objectives
● Misalignment with formal structure:
○ Asses how central individual employees are in both the informal and formal network
○ Asses if there are big differences between these statistics and, if yes, to whom they
pertain (tillhör)

Step 3: implement interventions

● how to deal with misalignments?
● Misalignment with strategic objectives:
○ Change way employees are working (coaching)
○ Change strategic objectives (capitalize on internal strengths)
● Misalignment with formal structure:
○ Transfer employees to different positions
○ Individual coaching programs

Organizational processes
Lecture videos 2 - Part 1 Theories on key processes in firms

Importance of decision making

● to be effective: companies must make decisions → that generate revenue and avoid costly
mistakes
● Effective decision-making is not easy: 50% of decisions are regretted
● Goal: Why decision making fails

Decision making: “The process of identifying and choosing among alternative courses of action in a
manner appropriate to the demands of the situation”

Types of decisions
● Routine decisions
○ Repetitive, day-to-day
○ Often involve < 10,000 EUR investments
○ Hiring temporary staff, supplier selections etc
● Non-routine decisions:
○ Dealing with novel, important, complex situations
○ Cannot be fully preprogrammed in rules
○ E.g. deciding on emergency responses, innovation projects, strategic aims of
company etc.

Simplified model of decision-making

● Problem-identification phase:
○ Identify need for making a decision
○ assess difference between current and desired state
● Information-search phase:
○ Search information for developing alternative courses of actions to get from current
to desired state
● Selection phase:
○ assess benefits/drawbacks of different courses of actions
 ○ select the best course of action to deal with problem
● Implementation and evaluation phase:
○ Put the decision into practice:
○ Evaluate the outcomes of decision after a while

Imperfect organizational decision-making

● anything but perfect in practice
● Decision-making model rarely followed in practice;
● Ofter troubled by human biases related to:
○ gathering right amount of information
○ properly using that information to find solutions
○ Evaluation the outcomes of decisions

Biases in information-search phase

● Two key problems
○ tendency to obtain too little information:
■ Confirmation bias: Search information that confirms what they already think
is true, ignoring information that disconfirms it
■ Overconfidence bias:
○ Tendency to obtain too much information:
■ Gather so much information that they lose oversight of what is relevant →
may focus on irrelevant information
○ Caused by:
■ Gathering information that has little decision relevance
■ Request information that they don't use
■ Complain that there is not enough information to make a decision → ignore
available information
● Biases that prevent managers from selection the best alternative course of action
○ Base-rate error:
■ tendency of people to ignore long-term statistical probabilities and favor
more specific information when making decisions
■ Specific information is less reliable
● Other “statistical” biases may affect:
○ Large sample insensitivity: employees often base decisions on few exceptional cases
rather than outcomes of large studies
○ Complex chains: People think that chances of complex chains of events to happen are
more likely than they actually are
○ Anchoring effect: Tendency to adjust judgements towards first piece of information
that is presented
○ Escalation of commitment: tendency to continuefruitless endeavor if you already have
invested money, time or effort in it

Principles for improving decisions

● OB research: Match type of decision-making method with the type of decision that needs to
be made
● Routine decisions:
○ Do not affect long term future of organization
 ○ Dont require top management involvement
○ lower level employees are most knowledgeable
○ Hence, delegate decision making to lower level employees
○ Prevents “information overload” at top management
● Non-routine decision
○ Beyond capacity of any single decision-maker
○ Requires input from diverse group of people
○ Group based decision-making:
■ Ensures that diverse individuals are involved in process
■ Avoid individual-level biases
■ Increases commitment/support for decisions

Success factors for group-based decisions

● To prevent diffusion of responsibility, conformity, domination and groupthink
○ Compose group of diverse members
○ Ensure group size is good (Two pizza rule → to feed entire group)
○ Appoint single individual to carry responsibility
○ Use decision-making technique (i.e Nominal Group Technique or Delphi Method)

Part 2: Practical insights on innovation processes

Innovation processes: The processes through which employees develop innovation ideas and through
which managers decide which ideas they select for developing into actual innovations

Routine decision-making processes: Deciding on how to deal with day-to-day issues involving little
investment

Success factors of the innovation process

● Diversity of members involved in processes
○ Coming up with innovative ideas
○ assessing the true value of innovative ideas
● Involvement of senior management:
○ In selection, implementation and evaluation of ideas
○ Ensures ownership

State gate innovation funnel

 ● in practice: Idea box

Common problems innovation processes

● A lot of companies still struggle with managing their innovations processes
● Forbes (2018): “Organizations fail to use ideas generated through idea competitions and
hackathon”
● Fortune (2014): “90% of all the”
● Root cause of these problems lie in the informal structure
○ Fragmentation
○ domination
○ Insularity

Fragmentation
● When important groups in the organization (i.e. departments, domains of expertise)do not
exchange ideas or information with each other
● Reason: Employees' natural tendency to build cohesive subgroups with like-minded persons
(like from the same department). artifact of functional structure
● Consequence: No “cross-pollination” of ideas between diverse departments. prevents
organizations from recombining insights different fields into new innovations
● How to detect it:
○ Use ONA to detect the informal structure that is used
○ Identify presence of subgroups in the organization that:
■ Have many connections within the groups
■ Few to no connections with other subgroups
○ Watch out for Brokers in the informal structure:
■ Bridges between otherwise less subgroups
■ Key drivers of organizational innovation
● How to reduce it?
○ Identify subgroups using ONA
○ Then bring people from unconnected subgroups together:
■ Projects groups
■ “Communities of practice”
○ Allows people to build relationships across subgroups, thus reducing fragmentation
that could hurt innovation
● How to prevent it?
○ Conduct analysis that maps conductivity between groups
 ● Introduce informal and formal rewards to brokers

Domination: What is it?

● Some groups have a majority/priority voice in what innovations should be selected
○ eg marketing professionals or senior male leaders
● Leads to one-sided selection and rejection of innovation ideas
● High potential innovation projects gets overlooked
● How can we detect it?
○ Use ONA to detect informal structure
■ Calculate and plot centrality of individuals in the process according to their
groups membership
■ If members from one groups have high degree centrality → indication of
domination
■ Small group of homogeneous employees decide on what innovation ideas
should be selected, leading to one-sided selection that hurts the innovation
process

Innovation process:
● Special kind of decision making process
● Requires combine ideas/knowledge from different departments/groups in novel ways
● Require diversity and connectivity among employees
● Can be troubled by fragmentation and domination
● Use ONA to identify, prevent and resolve such issues

Practical insights on routine decision-making processes

Definition routine decisions

● Should be delegated to lower-level employees → senior managers do not have to handle
irrelevant decisions
● Practical problems: Despite good theory, still a lot of problems in routine decision making due
to overinclusion

Overinclusion
● Happens when too many people are involved in the decision making process who shouldn’t
be involved
● Why does it happen?
 ○ Management is reluctant to give up responsibilities
○ Creates bottlenecks in decision-making process - all decisions end up at the same
desk
○ Curious people:
■ Employees want to be in “the thick of things” out of interes, without having
formal reasons to be involved
■ Each added employee will add time to decision-making
● How to detect it?
○ Conduct ONA
■ Collect data on who is involved in decision making process as well as roles of
these employees
■ (1) Decision-maker, (2) input-provider, (3) advice provider (4) individual
needs to know, (5) individual who simply feels a need to know
■ Track how much time these individuals took in the decision making process
■ Register positions of involved individuals
○ Managerial overinclusion
■ Manager fail to delegate responsibility to lower level employees
■ Senior management will have high centrality
■ Lower-level employees will have low centrality
○ Curious-employee overinclusion
■ determine how many employees are involved because of “a need to know”
■ Calculate how much time/money these individuals waste in decision-making
processes
■ Calculate how many employees are involved in general in the decision
making
■ Normal: between 5-7 people, above 7 will cause delays
● How to deal with it?
○ Identify the overincluded leaders and curious people
○ Provide these individuals with feedback on how much delays/costs they cause in the
decision-making process
○ Use this feedback to convince individuals to become less involved in
decision-making process

Conclusion
● Routine decisions
○ Need to be delegated
○ Prevent managerial overinclusion
○ Prevent curious people overinclusion
○ Use ONA to improve decision-making
Lecture 3 - Part 1: Leading theories on team effectiveness

Focus on key success factors and best practices

Part 2: Learn about practical problems that can reduce teams effectiveness

What is a team?
● 3 or more people
● work interdependently to achieve a goal

Why do we need teams?

● Tasks in organizations are becoming more complex
● People prefer to work in teams
● Increase performance and reduce costs

When are teams effective?

● Not all teams are equally successful
● Two components:
○ Performance:
■ Meeting productivity requirements externally evaluated by:
● higher-level management
● customers
■ Supervisor ratings/objective inputs
○ Viability:
■ Team commitment, rated by team members themselves
■ If team viability is high:
● The team is a nice place to work
■ If low:
● Members do not carry their weight
● team may lose (key) members

● Team performance & team viability

○ A team need to score high on both to be effective
■ High-performance, low viability: short-lived performance
■ High viability, low performance: inert ineffective team
○ Performance and viability not always highly correlated
■ Social teams → performance low, viability hgh
■ Harsh deadlines → performance high, viability low

Success factor #1: Team task design

● How to organize?
● Different tasks require different ways of cooperation
● Effective teams have an appropriate task design:
○ Sequence of work
○ Collaboration level
● 3 different
○ pooled interdependence:
■ Sequence:
 ● autonomous work on parallel tasks
● Every members contribution is pooled together
● no sequence in task completion
■ Collaboration
● a lot of autonomy
○ Sequential interdependence:
■ Sequence:
● Taking turn on the task
■ Collaboration:
● Little need for intense collaboration
○ Reciprocal interdependence:
■ Sequence:
● back-and-forth, discussing the task
■ Collaboration:
● Requires much more collaboration between members

● What design to use?

○ Match with type of task:
■ Complex task - reciprocal: e.g R&D teams, policy development
■ Dividable task - Pooled/sequential e.g. construction, assembly teams
○ Match with compensation:
■ Individual-based rewards - pooled
■ Group-based rewards - reciprocal

Success factor #2: Team composition

● Varies greatly depending on the task
● Surface level variables:
○ Demographics (gender, age, ethnicity, tenure)
○ Evidence less conclusive
● Deep-level variables
○ General mental ability
○ personality
○ task-related expertise
○ evidence more conclusive
● Examples:
○ Personality (BIG5 model)
■ Conscientiousness - maximize
■ Agreeableness- medium level
■ Extraversion - medium level
○ Task-related expertise (Functional diversity)
■ assure variety of expertise for creativity and innovation
■ less variety for routine tasks

● Team composition: Team member diversity

○ Society is diverse -> organizations are diverse
○ Question of diversity is not a simply a matter of team effectiveness
○ Diversity and inclusion as a part of the organizational culture
 ○ Managing diversity of deep-level composition variables:
■ Learn to manage misunderstandings and create a psychologically safe
environment

Success factor 3#: Team size

● Benefits of large teams:
○ Easier to tackle more complicated tasks
○ Additive tasks: performance is the sum of all efforts of team members
○ Disjunctive tasks
● Costs of larger and larger teams
○ Harder to motivate and coordinate
○ “Process losses”: time lost in coordinating and motivating team members
○ Grows exponentially as teams become bigger

Success factor #4: Team cohesion

● Emotional attachment between team members
● Positive consequences of social cohesion:
● higher commitment, motivation
● more participating in team processes
● more conformity to team norms
● Avoid cohesion from reaching extremes (groupthink)
● watch out for groups norms that reduce productivity
● Effective teams:
○ Have above-average cohesion, but not extreme levels
○ Internalized group norms that promote productivity

Lecture 3 - Part 2: Team effectiveness theory

Focus on practical part

Problems in current team research:

● “More-is-better-assumption”: Faulty assumption that teams are most effective when members
engage in more teamwork activities
● Predominant focus on internal team processes, and overlooking the importance of external
team processes

More-is-better-assumption
● The more information sharing, the better performance
● Problem:
○ Takes time to share information
○ Process loss - inefficiencies, delays, missed deadlines
○ Stress, burnout and turnover
● How to deal with it?
○ Focus on how people collaborate, not only how much they collaborate
○ use ONA to describe team network
■ Which people are the most central, eg expertise, role, tenure
■ WHEN are they most active
 ■ are there subgroups or isolates

Focus on internal team dynamics

● Current team research has focus mostly on internal team processes
● ignoring that teams are part of bigger systems
● Problem:
○ “Best practices” optimize internal processes at the expense of external processes:
■ e.g. “team cohesion”
● How to deal with it?
○ Manage both internal and external networks that teams use to accomplish work
○ Internal network:
■ determine best structure, whether this is applied and (if needed) what changes
are needed
○ External network:
■ Make sure team is well connected to diverse range of other teams inside and
outside firm

Evaluate and improve internal network

● Subjective method:
○ identify highest performing team and identify its internal network and other
characteristics
○ enable other teams to mimic this team’s characteristics
● Objective method:
○ Identify internal network other characteristics and performance of all teams
○ Use stat. method to see which team characteristics explain/predict performance
● collect network data of comparable teams
● use ONA properties of internal networks
● Collect data on teams’ effectiveness
● Collect data on team composition, diversity, size
● combine data step 2-4
● use combined data from step 5 to discover optimal network structure for specific teams

Evaluate and improve external network

● Enables interteam coordination
● Provides access to other teams’ support and resources
● Unfortunately, most teams are inwardly focused
● Three potential problems:
○ Little external connectivity
■ No access to external support & resources
■ No disseminating of best-practices
■ Chances of coordination breakdown and interteam conflict
■ Solutions:
● immigrant strategies: temporary internship, “open house”, employee
exchange
● Hiring policies: Hire employees from other important companies
○ Uncoordinated external connections
■ Members of team may make different agreements with other teams
 ■ external team will receive mixed signals
■ Soution:
● appoint liaisons; individuals responsive for mediating information
○ Concentrated external connections
■ one person is over-connected to other teams
■ Other members are under-connected
■ Skewed workload inside team
■ Solutions:
● Similar to fragmentation:
○ apprenticeship programs
○ career succession planning
○ mentorship programs
○ workload distribution interventions
● Ensure a replacement for over-connected person
● Ensure workload is better distributed between over- and
under-connected team members

Using ONA to improve EXTERNAL networks

● collect data on who interacts with whom
● Use on a to calculate network descriptive statistics
○ plot the team’s internal and external network
○ Determine if individuals with external connections are well connected inside the team
○ determine who maintains these external connections
● Interpret information from step 2
● Devise solution if step 3 indicates problem

Lecture 3 - Part 3: ONA AND ORGANIZATIONAL OUTCOMES

Linking ONA with organization outcomes

● How strongly is one network measured related to performance
● How is density related to team performance?
● Higher Density tend to lead to higher performance
● What if you worked with 1000 teams?
○ Regression analysis
○ Using a graph
○ Density on x-axis, performance on y-axis
● How can we summarize this relationship?
○ Many ways
○ linear:
■ Easier to make hypothesize
■ Easier to make decisions
■ Usually not the most accurate

Density and performance as line

● We can summarize this relationship by using a line
● Least squares method:
○ Drawing lines through data points
 ○ Minimize distance of each data point to the line
○ Find the line with minimal distance to all data points
○ Create and equation that describes this line
○ How can we describe this line?
■ How is it positioned on the plot
■ Slope - “angle” of the line (b1)
■ intercepts -Where the line crosses the line axis (b0)
■ Put intercept and slope in equation
■ Performance = b0 + b1*density
■ Output:

● Is relationship between density and performance statistically significant??

○ Run hypothesis testing: Pr(>ItI)
○ if p<0,05 → significant
○ can work with 0,05, but preferable 0,001 - assuming density had no effect on
performance → helps understand that it was statistically significant for this
○ Want to be as low as possible
● Multiple regression
○ if we’re interested in e.g diversity as well
○ Use 3D plot
○ Example: Performance = b0+b1*density+b2*diversity
○ If diversity p is lower than density p → diversity is more strongly related to
performance than density is
spara density, centrality, distribution osv värden i variabler
Gör regression analysis
Jämför p-värden

Lecture 4 - Part 1: Individual employees, leading theories on employees’

effectiveness

Focus:
● How to motivate employees through:
○ Compensation
○ setting goals

Theory on worker motivation

● What is work motivation?: Process of arousing, directing and maintaining behavior towards a
goal
● Importance: Work motivation leads to:
○ Work effort
○ job satisfaction
○ higher skill levels
○ improved procedures/protocols

Three ways to manage motivation

● compensation/salary plans
● goal setting
● job design

1.1a Compensation
● Delicate relationship money - motivation
● can motivate, but not there is more to i
● importance of relative earnings:
○ assess balance input/outcome
○ fair balance = higher motivation
○ inbalance = demotivates employees
● Overpayment
○ Disproportionally high wages compared to peers
○ Guilt
○ May try to restore pay fairness by changing behavior
○ Behavioral: overpaid employees increase input in jobs to justify higher pay
○ Cognitive: rationalize overpayment, overpaid persons convince themselves that hey
“deserve” it
● Under Payment
○ Disproportionately low wages to peers
○ Anger
○ Try to restore balance between inputs/outcomes job
○ Lower inputs: do less work, show up latte, take longer breaks, produce less quality
○ Increase outcomes: Ask for pay rise, find job elsewhere
 ● Research on underpayment
○ basketball players: underpaid players are less motivate, contribute fewer point in
competitions
○ Baseball players: underpaid players switch teams more often than players with
normal salaries and often leave the sport
○ Factory workers: In one study, stealing increased by 250% when workers pay was
reduced by 15% pay
● Managerial implications
○ Avoid underpayment
■ Reduced motivation, reduced performance, turnover,
■ employees with same expertise should have same pay
■ Justify why some employees are paid more
■ transparency in pay to avoid misconceptions
○ Avoid overpayment
■ Can motivate people, but often short-term effect
■ people will convince themselves they deserve it
■ indirectly leads to underpayment
● Types of payments
○ Influence worker motivation by the way employees are reward for their work
■ Fixed hourly wages
■ Variable pay-for-performance
○ Pay-for-performance plans usually more motivating
● Pay-for-performance plans is optimized when
○ Employees have all support and resources they need
○ Right type of performance is measured and rewarded
○ Employees value the rewards they get for performing well
○ All three elements are needed

Part 1.1b: Goals

● Goal setting theory:
○ Motivating employees without paying them more
○ General idea:
■ Goals are excellent motivators: they specify what employees need to achieve
to be considered successful → employees will feel challenged if they fail
■ Subsequent goals lead to more motivation
○ Not all goals help to motivate
○ Best practice principle:
■ Assign specific goals
■ Make difficult, but acceptable goals
■ Provide feedback

Assign specific goals

● First principle goals-setting theory; make goals specific
● Different types of goals:
○ No goals at all
○ “Do-your-best goals”
○ “Specific” gals with clear aim and criteria
 ○ Outcomes and research:
■ Specific goals are superior to-your-best or no goals
■ Lead to highest motivation and performance

Difficult but acceptable goals

● Second principle: design difficult but acceptable goals
○ Too easy: employees are not challenged
○ Too difficult: employees give up
● Develop challenging goals
○ Goals that lie within employees capacity, but pish limits
○ discuss with employees what goals they find challenging

Provide feedback
● Thirds principle
● Informs employees on how well they score on attaining their goals
● enables employees to make improvements

Part 1.1c Work design

● Increase motivation by designing jobs that are exciting, pleasurable and meaningful
● Based on job characteristics model by Hackman
● Skill variety: how many different skills and talents are needed to performed in the job
● Task identity: whether a “whole” task is done in job, from beginning to end
● Task significance: how important the job is for other people and society in general
● Autonomy: Whether the employee can self-decide how to execute the job
● Feedback: whether the employee has information on outcomes of job

● Consequences job dimensions

○ Lead to higher motivation through series of psychological states
○ Effects depend critically on how interested employees are in improving themselves
● Managerial implications
○ Two take-away recommendation to enable employees to become more motivated and
work harder
■ assess both employee growth need strength and job dimensions
● conduct survey, such as “job diagnostic instrument”
■ Determine the match between jobs and employees and take action if needed
● redesign jobs
● adjust hiring policies

Lecture 4 - Part 2: Individual employees, practical insights on employee

effectiveness

Personal networks and effectiveness

● Even highly motivated members may not become hgh performers
○ caused by how employees connect with other people
○ employees need effective networks to perform well
○ networks ensure employees to get all resources they need
● when left on their own, employees have tendency to build ineffective networks that limit their
performance
● To become high performers, employees have to:
○ secure the right position in the network
○ Connect with the right people in the organization
○ Connect with these people in the right manner
○
○ Network traps that may prevent employees to do so:
■ bottlenecks, formalists, disconnected experts, biased networkers, surface
networkers or chameleons
■

● Success factor #1: the right position

○ High performers have:
○ Power position in the organizational networks such as brokers, bridges, liaisons
○ connecting otherwise unconnected groups
○ are in the thick of things - first to know about important developments in the
organizations
○ spot opportunities that require insights from multiple groups
○ Because of that, employees with power positions:
■ are more likely to be in top 20% best performers
■ promoted faster and adapt quicker in diverse groups
● Network trap #1: Using the right positions
● Employees may fail to use their power position effectively they can become bottlenecks:
○ Fail to delegate work and want to keep too much control
○ employee, as a result become overloaded with work
○ spends all time on responding to requests, leaving little time on other core tasks
○ this then delays and distorts work in the organization
● Identify if employee is bottleneck:
○ assess “indegreee” connections: ie how many people rely on the focal employee
○ assess “outdegree” connections, how many people the employee relies him or herself

● Success factor #2: The right people

● High performers:
○ Connect with people how possess knowledge and expertise that extend their own
knowledge and abilities
○ Have people in their network with complementary, not similar, expertise
○ connect with people from different functional fields, departments, hierarchical layers,
organizations and locations
● Network trap #2: Connected to the right people
○ Employees may fail to connect to diverse partners:
○ Natural tendency to connect to like-minded individuals from same field, locations,
tams, level
○ easier to talk to and connect with
○ The employee then becomes a “disconnected expert”
■ Seeks advice from individuals within own field of expertise
■ leads to one-sided focus on own field of expertise
 ■ Relies on same people for advice, regardless of advice needed
■ mistakes friendship for expertise
○ Identify if employee is a disconnected expert
■ assess the amount of external connections to other departments, hierarchical
layers, organizations, and locations
■ assess whether person relies on same person for different types of advice
■ solutions:
● Identify with which departments, hierarchical layers, organizational
and locations persons lacks relationships
● try to build relationships under controlled environment

● Success factor #3: The right manner

● Relates to how employees approach other employees, and how much time they spend on their
relationships
● High performers:
○ Build high-quality relationships with their network contacts
○ both individuals in relation value the relationship
○ both individuals benefit from the relationships
○ relations are based on trust, reciprocity, mutual support
● Network trap #3: Connected in the right manner
● Failure to build high quality relations make employee a surface networker
● Surface networker:
○ Have build massive networks with many individuals
○ this can backfire: too little time for each individual partner
○ failure to engage in deep collaboration with partners
○ can give employee bad name and prevent him/her to work with other individuals in
meaningful manner
● Identify:
○ Ask partners if they benefit from working with focal person
○ useful advice, information, appropriate level of attention
○ enables partners to perform better in organization
○ if person gets below-average ratings, peron is spreading time too thinly across too
many partners
● Solution:
○ reduce size of network (keep valuable relations)
○ spend more time on smaller group of people

Conclusion
● Being highly bmotivated is not enough to become a high performer
● employees must also make targeted investment to:
○ become central individuals in the organizations
○ who connect with the right people in the right manner
● if such attempts fail, employees might fall for network traps and become bottlenecks,
disconnected experts or surface networkers