Expectancy Theory, Ch. 9, p. 291

The expectancy theory is one of the four best-known theories of employee motivation (p. 289). Expectancy theory makes three assumptions about employee behavior as stated on page 291:
1. Employees perceive a relationship between a specific work behavior and some form of payoff or reward; that is, the behavior is viewed as instrumental to obtaining the reward.
2. Each reward or positive outcome is associated with a value (or valence, in the language of the theory) that reflects how much the individual wants the reward.
3. Employees develop expectations about their ability to perform the desired behavior successfully.
When working in sales and consulting positions in the past, it was very clear that if you made your quota whether it was selling a product or your consulting services, you would be rewarded with a commission check and extra monetary bonuses. The communication of this type of work behavior was always established with goals set between the management and employee through a type of contract that was both communicated verbally and in written form. Usually, these goals were set for the level of the position you held and the team or department you worked for.
At one company, each month the president even communicated with the whole company the status of company level revenue goals and individual quota goals obtainment. He would send out a company-wide group voicemail stating where we were at with meeting the projected company revenue goals for that quarter and who brought in the largest sales and consulting dollars that month and where they were at with meeting their quota. This was another way of motivating the employees each month to achieve their quota to earn not only their monetary reward but the reward of recognition by upper management and fellow employees. Furthermore, if you made 100% of your yearly quota and more, you were eligible for the President’s Club. The President’s Club was an all expense paid trip to a vacation resort for you and a guest. I wonder if those days of the dotcom budgets and rewards are gone with today’s economy.

Team-based organizations, Ch. 8, p.23

In chapter 8 on page 235, the book introduces team-based organization as where in addition to their individual responsibilities they also serve as members of one or more working groups. A team-based organization is one that has restructured itself around interdependent decision-making groups, not individuals, as a means of improving work processes and providing better quality and service to customers. For years, companies have involved team-based organizations in implementing new processes and technology within the company to improve their time to market. As a consultant in implementing Product Lifecycle Management enterprise systems, team-based organizations were utilized in implementing these systems within the company. The groups my consulting team worked with at a customer site may include expert mechanical engineers within their department, configuration and document management employees, help desk representatives, database administrators and department managers for each organization the system will effect and most importantly, had contributed budget in implementing the system. These individuals that made up the team were considered the knowledge base and representatives for the stakeholders within the company since these system installations and rollouts affected the design, manufacturing and release of the products by the company. Their decisions impacted the product release and revenue.

Workplace Democracy, Ch. 8, p. 234

In chapter 8 on page 234, Deetz outlines four steps toward workplace democracy in which shared decision making among stakeholders is crucial.
1) Create a workplace in which every member thinks and acts like an owner.
2) The management of work must be reintegrated with the doing of work.
3) Quality information must be widely distributed.
4) Social structure should grow from the bottom rather than be reinforced from the top.
The fourth step resonates with me when I think of how social media networking is being used in the workplace and for that matter in the marketplace. Instead of the traditional top-down communication, social media networking is a bottom-up approach to communication. For instance, when I worked at IBM, the company utilized the software they developed and sold to consumers internally for employee communication. For instance, IBM’s Websphere Portal was utilized for the company’s intranet. Each employee had a profile based on what organization, department and job title they participated in. Based on that information, the end user’s main pages displayed the pertinent content and information for that employee profile at a company level. However, the employee can then further define their profile and add various functionalities based on their special interest or job specifications to have even more refined content displayed. This included access to newsgroups where communication or discussion threads were started, answered or discussed by various employees throughout the company. The types of subjects discussed ranged from technical questions about certain products to options on how certain company procedures could be modified. These discussions threads were monitored and sometimes distributed or directed to the appropriate people to change or knowledge experts to answer. This is the type of bottom-up affect a social media network has on workplace democracy.

Pervasive Communication Environment, Technology and Teams

Pervasive communication environment is described as allowing people multiple access points to access, create, and share information in an integrated communication structure with text, audio, video, and voice capabilities almost anywhere, at anytime, for any reason. The word pervasive deems very appropriate for the way mobile devices are being used in everyday life. One of the most recent phenomena’s is Twitter. Twitter is becoming more and more popular for all age groups to use not only for updating everyone of their followers on what they are doing but for consumer use also such as marketing and advertising for company products and services. The buck does not stop there! There are Twitter applications (apps) for distributing and collecting data through surveys. There are apps that send coupons to the end users at the time the person is walking through the doors of a retail store. There are apps that can help you save money such as FuelFrog that allows you to enter your mileage between fill ups, how much gas costs and how many gallons or liters you added to your tank as described on Mashable.com. The reporting of this information can give you insight on your driving habits and can help you decide on better ones to help save money. With so much new technologies being implemented, it makes one wonder what the pervasive communication environment will look like in 5 to 10 years.

Authenticity, ch. 7, p. 200

“Do what you love!” is a motto that describes what authenticity means in both your work and personal life. The book further describes authenticity as a trend that is being propelled by a growing desire for authenticity, or for being real and honest in how we live and work with others. Whereas earlier notions of identity referred to an individual’s ability to look inside oneself (or outside of one’s professional work) to find one’s real self, contemporary ideas of authenticity focus much more on the ethics and consistency of one’s behaviors.

When I first read the description of authenticity, two related instances come to mind that I have been experiencing in my professional, educational and personal life. The first instance relates to conversations that I have had with my friends, mainly women that have teenagers approaching high school graduation and sometimes those with children in junior high school. They talk about how their children benefit by being a part of some organization or team sport to help their child get accepted into the college of their choice. Therefore, the student’s GPA along with other professional or organizational affiliations will help them achieve their goal of being accepted into college and better yet, a full scholarship.

The second instance that comes to mind is the wave of social networking being used as a way to help get jobs, set perceptions as the industry leader, or expert in a specific field to gain market awareness, sales, etc. Most companies are adopting this way of marketing and advertising by tying a personality to the company image who is authentic and is a real person that not only shares expertise but themselves more personally than we have seen in the past, such as an executive, product expert and so on. I sometimes wonder though if this type of exposure can lead to security issues or even cause the reader to become skeptical of the author’s authenticity because maybe all they want to do is sell them something.

Power, Ch. 6, p.168

As expressed in the text, power is based on the assumption that it is something a person or group possesses and can exercise through actions. The book gives five examples of social power, following the assumption that person A has power over person B when A has control over some outcomes of B wants: 1) reward power, 2) coercive power, 3) referent power, 4) expert power, and 5) legitimate power. At IBM, where I worked for five years, there were employees called principals. These were technical individuals that have reached high level status in the area of their expertise. They have gone through the process of being tested, critiqued and accepted by the discipline’s experts through a rigorous process. The social power of the expert power is regarded high at IBM through the principal job description and implementation. Therefore, I was trained by those principals and mentored when needed during customer engagements. I am grateful to those individuals that supported me in my career growth and have due respect for their knowledge of the business and application of the technology.

Rituals, ch.5, p.129

In every one of my jobs throughout my career there was some form of rituals within the organization that I work for. There were always performance evaluations that reinforced the organization and company’s goals and values. The last large corporation I worked at had an annual sales conference where employees attended workshops and various sessions all day on with new product release information, team building exercises and hands-on technology classes. However, every night there was some type of party event for every one attending, your department or sales group. Another ritual one of the company’s I worked for was a type of reward to the top selling sales people called “President’s Club”. For those sales representatives, sales engineers and consultants that obtained over 100% of their quota, the company hosted an elaborate trip at a resort. This same company had another ritual that I have yet to see at any other company I worked for. The company would require every new employee to stand up in front of a large group of their peers and sing their school’s fight song. Their philosophy was that they only hired the best and with that came some pretty big egos. This form of public humiliation was to bring everyone to the same playing field. I couldn’t remember my fight song, so I sang Sweet Home Chicago, a blues song. I kind of enjoyed it.