Question

1. Explain why managers should resist the inclination to rely on generalizations about why employees behave in a specific manner that does not reflect what you desire from them. What would you do instead of relying on generalizations?

Answer 1

Firstly, the focus here is on the generalisations that happen at the workplace. With respect to the direct reportees the first mistake that a manager does is that he generalises that the workforce is not interested in the task given by him and they are not wilfully performing the tasks that have been assigned to them. The reason for the same being the fact that the workforce is not being able to meet the deadlines or performing the task most effectively. It is not always that the employee is lazy or disinterested, there lot of employees who want to justify the role that has been given to them, and infact live upto the expectations imposed upon him, but there could be external and infact few internal reasons to the less than 100% efficiency that could be achieved.

The managers have to consciously make sure that the generalisations about the workers is not something that he would be believing and forming basis for the further decisions that he is about to take in the future. The point here to note for the managers is that there are whole lot of other reasons while working and most of them are not known to the manager and are not let known as well.

The manager has to look at how the estimate has been come up, were all the considerations taken into account, and what was the success rate of the estimation in the past as against the actual delivery dates. And how does the feedback system work is something that a manager needs to focus on while estimating the time required for a task.

There is definitely an informal communication channel within the company, in other words a grapevine, and this is something that the manager has to look into and get involved so that there are a whole lot of issues and concerns which do not end up in the official communication channel.

Last but not the least, the rewards system has to be looked into, that is the individual and group incentives has to be designed and restructured if needed to make sure that every employee and the work he does is valued. There could be flaws such as not incentivising the one who is performing well, or there could be cases where a free rider gets the benefit because of high performing employees within his team. Therefore the reward system has to be in such a way that the performing employee is incentivised and the one who is not working is penalised at the same time.