Introduction
Woolworths
Woolworths was a high-street retail string, which at its height handled more than 800 stores countrywide, and hired more than 30, 000 staff. In late 2008, Woolworths got into administration, and consequently closed in '09 2009.
Each branch hired a mixture of full time and in your free time employees, and there was a definite hierarchy clear.
At the very best of the hierarchy was the top of branch - responsible for the entire performance of the store. Then there have been senior professionals usually two present each day, they were in charge of the management of the overall day to day businesses of the branch. This included stock control, personnel rotas, and the cashing of money by the end of the day. Full -time employees were next, plus they tended to be middle aged, who proved helpful week days. They were regularly delegated jobs by the management. In the bottom of the hierarchy were the part -time employees. These were often students, who did the trick through the evenings when the store was closed down with the weekends when the shop was busier. These were given little responsibility, as most of them were apathetic to the performance of the organisation. These were mainly there for financial reasons, alternatively than to go after a career in retail. As almost all were students, the staff turnover was very high and this led to the management providing these employees few opportunities. This hierarchy was on the whole effective, as part time employees were happy to follow orders from regular employees and senior managers.
Management at Woolworths were relatively removed from their staff. Due to the casual hierarchical system set up, mind of branch had little communication with in your free time employees. This recommended that the management didn't know many of their employees on a personal level, which resulted in an unhealthy software of motivational methods.
This report will look at the consequences that management is wearing employee motivation at a particular branch of Woolworths. It will assess different techniques utilized by the organisation as a whole, and by the branch professionals, to motivate the employees. This survey will also make a number of suggestions for ways that management can motivate these employees more effectively in Woolworth's future companies.
HR/Organisational Behaviour - Motivation
In times of recession, the need to motivate staff is probably as strong as ever. As much employers won't have a sizable cover recruiting and training personnel, they'll want to hang on to their most talented and skilled workers to ensure their business survives the recession and remains competitive in the upturn (Sullivan, 2009).
Employees in virtually any company need something to keep them working to the best of their ability. In most cases employees are influenced by money. However, sometimes only a salary is insufficient to remain at an organisation. A worker must be determined to work for a company or firm. If an organisation fails to motivate its staff effectively, then productivity and quality of work will deteriorate.
Keeping someone attempting to the best of their ability is the best goal of employee motivation. There are many methods to help keep employees determined, this report will look at a number of theories involving the result that management has on employee motivation, and will try to apply these to a branch of Woolworths.
Motivating personnel is one of the most important duties for a head in an organisation; however it is also one of the very most difficult. Doing this goes a long way toward guaranteeing a professionally healthy and effective work environment (Staren, 2009).
Because there have been a large amount of part-time university student employees working at the branch of Woolworths, management's biggest task was to keep these particular staff motivated. It is common for more radiant employees to see this kind of job as just a means to earn cash. Because they have few financial tasks, they are less inclined to wish to impress management and work to the best of their ability to keep their job.
It is of the thoughts and opinions that a poor of service was an integral factor in the best failure of Woolworths. Because many staff were not encouraged by their work, there was a knock-on influence on the grade of work completed. This led to a poor customer feedback & most importantly a poor reputation.
The emphasis was therefore on the management to change this impression.
The following is a books review of motivational theory. It'll begin by looking at the factors associated with an employee's job that most motivate them, followed by a detailed analysis of the result of management on determination.
Literature Review
What motivates a worker?
In the early area of the 20th Century, employees were considered just another input in the development of goods and services. When Henry Ford first developed his assemblage range for the Model-T, staff were treated as if these were another machine along the way, their skills reduced to an individual task out of the 84 steps Ford experienced divided Model T development into.
However this view of thinking changed after the publication of the Hawthorne Studies. Professor Elton Mayo analyzed the impact of work conditions in staff productivity, and following experiments conducted over six years, deducted that employees are motivated not only by money, which employee behaviour relates to other behaviour.
Studies in this field revealed that "interesting work" has been the main motivational factor. It really is taken care of by Hackman (1975) that interesting and challenging work inspires visitors to perform much better than required, exerting additional effort in order to experience a feeling of gratifying their potential and accomplishing worthwhile ends. Creating interesting work might be a obstacle for organisations however. According to Kovach (1989), it's hard to make all work within an organisation interesting, as it's on an individual level, and what may be interesting to 1 person might not be interesting to another.
Situation plays an important role and inspiration varies over time and situation as well. Kovach's research shows that younger personnel with low incomes in non-supervisory positions were most worried about money, job security and leads of promotion while older workers with higher incomes and higher organisational positions were determined more by the task and its quality.
There have been many studies conducted on the factors for employee motivation. The to begin that was by the Labour Relations Institute of NY in 1946, on commercial employees. Appreciation of work done was most important motivating factor in the first survey, as well as in 1997. However in the last decade, good wages became the most typical factor. Demographics, such as income and location, should be considered when analysing these behaviour, corresponding to Wiley (1977).
One of the key factors of your motivated workforce is the leadership they receive. Good management of staff can ensure an organisations employees work to the best of their capacity.
The role of leadership when motivating staff
McGregor (1960) maintained that there are two fundamental methods to handling people. Many managers have a tendency towards theory X, and generally get poor results. Enlightened managers use theory y, which produces better performance and results, and allows people to increase and develop.
With theory X, a director has little admiration for their employees skills and considers that they have to be meticulously supervised which detailed systems of adjustments developed. A hierarchical framework is necessary with narrow span of control at every single level. They believe that the average person dislikes work and will avoid it they can, therefore employees must be forced towards organisational targets, with the risk of punishment. They also suppose that employees prefer to be directed, to avoid responsibility and needs security most of all. Beliefs of this theory lead to mistrust, highly restrictive guidance, and a punitive atmosphere.
With theory Y, management feels employees to be ambitious, self-motivated and exercise self-control. It is assumed that employees enjoy their mental and physical work responsibilities. Theory Y managers assume that employees will figure out how to look for and allow responsibility and exercise self-control and self-direction in achieving objectives to which they are determined.
An additional theory, Theory Z, was developed by William Ouchi, in his publication 1981 'Theory Z: How American management can Meet the Japanese Challenge'. It encourages a mixture of theory Y and modern Japanese management, which places a huge amount of flexibility and trust with personnel, and assumes that personnel have a strong loyalty and interest in team-working and the company.
McGregor's work can be related to McClelland's success model. Because of the high task emphasis, achievement-motivated folks have a tendency towards X-Theory style; however an nAch manager can be trained to see the value of utilizing Theory Y style. NPow managers are almost definitely Theory X and nAffil are typically Theory Y of course, if not can relatively easily learn to be so.
McGregor's work was based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This theory is one of the very most widely discussed theories of motivation. The original Hierarchy of Needs model originated between 1943 and 1954, and first broadly published in Determination and Personality in 1954. It worried the responsibility of employers to provide a place of work environment that induces and allows employees to fulfil their own potential (self-actualization). He proposed that each folks is determined by needs, and that these most basic needs are inborn. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs areas that people must fulfill each need in turn, you start with the first, which deals with the most apparent needs for survival itself. Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of affect and personal development. Conversely, if the things that meet our lower order needs are swept away, were no longer worried about the maintenance of our higher order needs.
McGregor advised that management might use either set of needs to motivate employees. As management theorists became familiar with Maslow's work, they soon understood the probability of connecting higher-level needs to employee drive. If organizational goals and individual needs could be integrated so that individuals would acquire self-esteem and, eventually, self-actualization through work, then drive would be self-sustaining. Today, his Theory Y theory influences the design of personnel regulations, affects the way companies perform performance reviews, and patterns the thought of purchase performance.
David McClelland suggested that an individual's specific needs are developed over time and are created by one's life experiences. Nearly all these needs can be classed as either accomplishment (nAch - seek to stand out), affiliation (nAff - need harmonious human relationships with other people and need to feel accepted by others), or electricity (nPow - seek to benefit either themselves or the company). An employee's motivation and effectiveness using job functions are affected by these needs. Management should seek to comprehend their employee's needs in order to accomplish maximum inspiration.
The importance of each of these needs will change in one person to another. If management can determine the value of each of these needs to an individual, it will help them decide how to influence that each.
By using these ideas to address a person employees needs, management could increase desire by utilising Management by aims (MBO). MBO is a organized and organized procedure which allows management to focus on achievable goals and to attain the best possible results from available resources.
It was initially discussed by Peter Drucker in 1954 in his publication 'The Practice of Management'. It aims to increase organizational performance by aligning goals and subordinate goals throughout the business. Ideally, employees get strong suggestions to recognize their aims, time lines for completion, etc. MBO includes ongoing tracking and feedback in the process to reach targets.
With MBO, managers focus on the result, not the activity. They delegate jobs by "negotiating a contract of goals" with the subordinates without dictating a detailed roadmap for execution. Management by Objectives (MBO) is about setting objectives and then breaking these into more specific goals or key results.
Application of OB theory to its organisational practice
This review of management practise has a number of implications for Woolworth's management.
Recognising the needs of people within the workforce can help management develop their methods and will enable these to receive the best out of each individual employee. By using Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, management could probably profile their regular and part time employees effectively.
By applying McClelland's principle at the beginning of your employee's job, management can get a deeper knowledge of the profile of their workers. In the past, maybe it's assumed that part-time personnel have the same desires and needs from their job. It really is fair to suppose they are all there for financial reasons only. However by applying this theory, it could be discovered that there are employees who want to pursue the work and transform it into a job. They would match the nAch group of McClelland's theory. Recognising this will give the management the chance to develop this staff and to hands them more responsibility in their work. This will inspire the employees which in turn will advantage the organisation.
The majority of the part time workforce would match the nAff character, as they seek to have harmonious activities and would seek to make their job as straightforward as is possible by building friendly relationships. It's the management's responsibility to ensure that the working environment is well suited for these employees, as they constitute the majority.
It is vital that the management recognises McGregor's X and Y theory. On the branch of Woolworths involved, there were lots of managers who fit the theory X identity. In this particular field, where one of the main element tasks of management is connecting with their staff, this had an extremely negative effect. Though it would be fair for a supervisor to assume that lots of of their part time personnel are apathetic to the organisation's success, this is not the truth. By not offering them any responsibility would not be a pragmatic decision, as it would simply deter personnel further from achieving their potential potential at work.
A theory Y figure on the other hand may well not be ideal for this kind of employees as well. As accepted in this report, the majority of the part time workforce is there exclusively for financial reasons. Giving them too much responsibility may result in too little effectiveness, as they feel they can escape with doing a lacklustre job without having to be held responsible.
Instead a mixture of theories X and Y might be the best option to control a retail workforce, where the management might delegate responsibility to employees and give them some self-reliance at the job, whilst still keeping a detailed eye on the progress.
The MBO style is suitable for knowledge-based enterprises when your labor force are competent. It really is appropriate in situations where you wish to build employees' management and self-leadership skills and tap their ingenuity, tacit knowledge and effort. Therefore it might not exactly be suited to nearly all employees at Woolworths. However the brain of branch should have used this style to create regular objectives for their senior managers. This might have an optimistic effect on all employees in the hierarchy, as the mature managers can be more motivated and can in turn encourage the staff better.
Conclusion - Lessons for management
Successful work environments are seen as a open communication by any means levels. The effective director realizes that figuring out positive motivators requires knowing his staff on a person basis. He recognizes that what motivates one member, even in the same role, might not be the same for another (Staren, 2009). Woolworth's management must have considered indentifying each of their employees needs and motivating factors early on in their role and ensured that they treated their labor force as individuals.
Woolworth's management should take good thing about incentive based motivational methods in which performance is led by objectives. By meeting regularly with personnel to ascertain mutually agreed after goals and targets, this may have appreciable motivational results on its workforce.
The managers must have ensured that the staff members' acquired appropriate expert or are often empowered to continue as they consider necessary to attain their jobs. Presenting staff more responsibility is only going to have a confident effect on their motivation. The key is understanding the sort of responsibility they really want.
