When workers are absent from work, this can cause many problems for organizations. Although organizations expect employees to take time off for doctor appointments and sickness, excessive absenteeism can lead to decreased productivity (Forbes, 2013). One of the best competitive advantages for organizations is the people that they hire. When talent is absent from work, this can have a deleterious effect on organizational effectiveness. A survey of European countries conducted by Eurofound revealed that, on average, rates of absence across Europe are between 3% and 6% of working time. Taking this into consideration makes absenteeism rate a hidden champion key performance indicator (KPI) for productivity, employee engagement and leadership effectiveness. This blog post discusses the causes and costs of absenteeism as well as how to measure and reduce it.
One of the most important aspects of organizational life is that management and staff feel secure in taking risks. The concept of psychological safety is the belief that a team is safe to take interpersonal risks without negative consequences for their career (Kahn, 1990). Team members who feel accepted within their teams experience psychological safety. Recent research on psychological safety show that it is an important factor for workplace effectiveness (Edmondson & Lei, 2014).
Increasingly, organizations are changing the ways in which they compensate and reward their employees. This is true for the relationship between the employer and management. A management incentive plan is a compensation or rewards agreement between an employer and management. The plan is designed to motivate managers and to align management performance with the strategic goals of the firm. This blog post describes the latest innovation in management incentives and discusses the linkages between incentives and individual and firm performance.
One of the current “trends” in the science of management is examining employees’ resilience. Like “emotional intelligence” and “grit” before it, “resilience” has become a desirable and much-discussed quality that hiring managers seek and leaders work to increase (Leadbeater, Dodgen, & Solarz, 2005). This is not without reason – resilience has been found to predict long-term success in a variety of fields (Klohen, 1996).
Evidence-based management (also known as EBM or EMBgt) is a management approach that involves using multiple sources of scientific evidence and empirical results as a means of attaining knowledge (Barends, Rousseau, & Briner, 2014). To be an evidence-based manager is to use the scientific literature as a means of answering questions, inspiring strategy decisions, and forming long-term plans. Published academic research from the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, communications, and even sociology can help to inform the decisions of a well-informed evidence-based manager. An evidence-based manager carefully considers the body of evidence, evaluating research for its quality and relevance.
The consulting industry is currently undergoing a radical change. Traditional strategy, restructuring, and implementation consulting agencies are more and more under pressure. The causes are manifold and can be anything from not meeting client requirements to new scientific findings and easier access to current knowledge via the internet. Alternative consulting approaches are focusing on the traditional consulting model’s weaknesses and become more and more important. We summarized four reasons for a reorientation of traditional consulting agencies.
Management without goals? Impossible, if you believe the large number of popular science and specialized books about management topics. Goals, target agreements, and bonus systems connected to target achievement are all part of every manager’s toolbox.
Diversity, and the need to productively diversify, presents ongoing dilemmas in the professional world. Numerous fields that were previously relatively homogenous are slowly achieving greater parity in terms of race, gender, disability status, and other sources of distinct experience (Bijak et al, 2007). As organizations change in their demographic composition, a variety of growing pains can occur. This is particularly the case in organizations that have not prepared or adjusted for their changing workforce and its needs.
There is a growing need among managers to understand issues concerning organisational job satisfaction. It is quite tempting to regard job satisfaction as simply being ‘happy’ at work, but this topic is slightly more complex than we would normally expect. Let us start by defining job satisfaction and look into what it involves. One of the most common definitions for job satisfaction came out in 1976 from an American psychologist named Edwin Locke. As he put, it is simply “a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experiences”. In other words, workers draw on their perceptions and emotions to evaluate jobs in some degree of favour or disfavour.
Concepts like efficiency vs. creativity or stability vs. flexibility are deeply engraved in our vocabulary as opposites rather than synergies. A similar contrast is the distinction between startups and companies. While startups amid current debates about disruptive innovations, digitalization, and industry 4.0 are generally associated with speed and agility, terms like bureaucracy and heaviness come to mind when we are thinking about companies
