INTRODUCTION
Collaboration, motivation, communication, empowerment, organizational learning, creativity, leadership are some of the organizational behaviour concepts behind the success of many huge and strong companies around the world including big companies in Malaysia such as Air Asia, Sime Darby and many more. Basically, organizational behaviour (OB) is the study of what people think, feel, and do in and around organizations. Its focus is on employee behaviour, decisions, perceptions, and emotional responses. It looks at how individuals and teams in organizations relate to each other and to their counterparts in other organizations.
Whether you are an auditor, lecturer, accountant or entrepreneur, the study of OB should be understood and apply even though organizations will continue to have managers, but their roles have changed and the rest of us are increasingly expected to manage ourselves in the workplace. In the words of one forward-thinking OB writer years ago: Everyone is a manager.
I have chosen two topics from the course outline which are Motivation and Leadership as to relate with the current issues and apply those theories with my own experiences. I will discuss the topics based on the definition, theories related with the topics, issues regarding current scenarios in organization in Malaysia, and my own experiences based on topics of Motivation and Leadership.
MOTIVATION
Motivation refers to the forces within a person that the direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behaviour. When discussing about employee motivation in the organizations, the phrase “employee engagement” is to be used. Employee engagement refer as employee’s motivational and cognitive motivation, self-efficacy to perform the job, perceived clarity of the organization’s vision and his or her specific role in that vision, and belief that he or she has the resources to get the job done. This definition relates to the four cornerstones of individual behaviour and performance identified in the MARS model which consist motivation, ability, role perceptions and situational factors.
The most widely known theory of human motivation is Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory. It was developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow to show the model condenses and integrates the long list of needs that had been studied previously into a hierarchy of five basic categories.
Physiological: The need for food, air, water, shelter and the like.
Safety: The need for a secure and stable environment and the absence of pain, threat, or illness.
Belongingness/love: The need for love, affection, and interaction with other people.
Esteem: The need for self-esteem through personal achievement as well as social esteem through recognition and respect from others.
Self-actualization: The need for self-fulfilment, realization of one’s potential.
According to Maslow, we are motivated simultaneously by several needs, but the strongest source is the lowest unsatisfied need at the time. As the person satisfies a lower-level need, the next higher need in the hierarchy becomes the primary motivator and remains so even if never satisfied.
Recently, there was a study of “Motivational Orientation as an Internal Marketing Tool in Service Training: A Study of Service Delivery in a Hospital” conducted by Rahim Mosahab, PhD Candidate (Corresponding author) from School of Management, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia. According to author’s findings, Internal Marketing (IM) was proposed by Berry in 1976 to solve the problem of service quality using external customers’ strategies on employees so called internal customers. The job is considered as product which should be designed in such a way that will meet human needs and motivate them to offer high quality service (Berry,1976).
Berry & Parasuraman (1991), states:
“Internal marketing is attracting, developing, motivating and retaining qualified employees through job-products that satisfy their needs. Internal marketing is the philosophy of treating employees as customers and it is the strategy of shaping job products to fit human needs”.
The courtesy, empathy, and responsiveness of service employees all combine to influence quality perceptions of customers. However, some research had argued that employees not only deliver and create the service, but are actually part of the service in the customers’ view. Motivated employees, who have a clear vision of the importance of service quality to the firm, should provide superior service. Employee motivation is thought to be an essential ingredient of learning organizations
Worker training as an employee-management aspect is important to organizational success and it was identified that the management of human resources and employee training as basic internal marketing activities, while equipping staff with the skills and information needed to perform as a key strategy in implementing internal marketing. He believes the main purpose of training is to enable organizations to compete more effectively and a central goal is to link training effectiveness with employee performance. Human resources are considered as major company assets and believe workers’ knowledge and skills can be effectively enhanced through training and participating in organizational mission, vision, and strategy development. Wildes (2002) largely attributes the success of the food and beverage venue featured in her case study to the use of experimental, learned, and specifically targeted training methods, which emphasize on teamwork, employee satisfaction, and over the top service.
An implication of the findings is that motivational orientation of employees, as a significant factor, should be considered in service training planning and implementation. Many managers believe that by sticking to the training materials and trying to discipline their refractory employees, they will manage to create a classroom environment that will be conductive to learning. Nevertheless, these managers seem to lose sight of the fact that, unless they accept their employees’ personalities and work on those minute details that constitute their social and psychological make-up, they will fail to motivate them therefore managers can improve their methods of service training by considering the domain of motivation. Furthermore, other related researches regarding the relationship between these two orientations and employees achievements are considered to be useful.
When I have my first working experience after I have finished my SPM, I worked with Sepang International Circuit (SIC) for about three months. I was the sale assistant in merchandise department in SIC. My duty was to promote and sell items produced under SIC brand. On the first day, I received service training by my senior before I am being transferred to work at other places. The next days, I have to managed and control SIC’s booths in LCCT, KLIA and KL Sentral. I discovered that during on that time, I was motivated simultaneously by several needs such as safety and belongingness. For safety factor, I need a secure and stable environment as that was my new working experience. I was transferred into four new places within two months. Hence, I have to face every new challenges and handling new people from various backgrounds. Besides that, work based on customer orientation need to has an effective and efficient communication among customers. And good interactions between superiors are needed so that I will feel more motivated to perform my duties and manage to achieve the goal of the company.
LEADERSHIP
Leadership is about influencing, motivating, and enabling others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members. Leaders apply various forms of influence-particularly persuasion and related tactics that build commitment as to ensure that followers have the motivation and role clarity to achieve specified goals. Leader also arranges the work environment such as allocating resources and altering communication patterns so that employees can achieve organizational objectives easily. Below diagram shows that some perspective of leadership:
Recently, at the Women in Leadership Forum, stated that women in Malaysia have certainly made significant strides in their participation in all segments of the Malaysian economy and have demonstrated their ability to lead and to succeed in both the public and private sectors. Most importantly is the ability for continuous reinvention. The changing environment is more globalised, more competitive, more uncertain and ambiguous, more technologically driven, more prone to crisis, and is subject to greater scrutiny and demands for greater transparency. This more difficult operating environment demands new skills and abilities to manage these new challenges. Indeed, the role of leadership is dynamic and has changed considerably. Reinvention is to support the ability to creatively respond to change.
For a woman who is a mother, wife and daughter, the sacrifice involved is great. The challenge will be to achieve a balance so that work performance is not being adhered at all cost. Support systems at the work place and at home is vital. Equally important is time management, stress management and people management. As the pressures come from several fronts given the far reaching and wide spread implications of the actions taken, leadership positions require a high level of courage and endurance. Having strategic focus and energies aligned to achieving the results reinforces the ability to cope under such pressures.
Based on my own experience, I have become a leader since I was in standard one until I completed my primary school. I have gained a lot of knowledge and skills on how to become a good leader. From my experience, a leader should become a person with full commitment, responsible, honest, brave to speak the truth, have effective communication skills and knows how to handle when problem arises. When I was in form 5, I became the head school prefect, leader of sport society, president of PBSM, editor school magazine, auditor (student) school cooperative and committee members of SPBT. All this opportunity had make me more matured in facing with people behaviours. Basically, I was using supportive leadership style as provide psychological support for subordinates. I was friendly and approachable so that it will make the work more pleasant, treat subordinates with equal respect and show concern for the status, needs and well-being of subordinates. Besides that, I before I making any decision, I will seek advices from my teachers and also my fellow friends to get their opinion regarding some issues. I also will gave chance to my subordinates to voice out their thought and opinion in any matters, I will take into consideration on each matter from them so that it will reflects the benefits of social support to help subordinates cope with stressful situations.
CONCLUSION
Often, students taking organizational behaviour (OB) either do not understand how important knowledge of OB can be to their professional careers, or they do understand and they want to put that knowledge into practice. Organizational Behaviour takes a more experiential angle to the material to meet both of those needs. Organisational effectiveness is generally associated with goal accomplishment. Although this is an accurate method of examining effectiveness, problems arise when we rely completely on the goal approach. Reality is, in most cases, too complex to expect an organisation to proceed directly from the accomplishment of one goal to another. One essential component of a successful appraisal system is the existence of clear and well communicated goals. Without an understood standard, the evaluation has little meaning.
