Who is in Control?
Looking at where responsibility exists in the seven groupings reveals a difference between the odd-numbered and the even-numbered groupings. This is a typical THEE oscillating duality. The duality here is:
■ Personal affirmation (for the employee)
versus
■ Management specification (for the organization)
CG1: Work is solely a matter of inner affirmation by the individual employee.
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Management must provide a suitable context—a clear structure of reasonable expectations, an atmosphere fostering autonomy and responsibility. An encouraging context helps employees make their own judgements and so view their work as worthwhile exercise of their abilities.
Managerial contexts that are dominating and intimidating generate anger and fears that inhibit creative responses. The biggest challenge facing most employees then becomes how to avoid being bullied (and who to bully).
Review applying determination.
CG2: Authority is a privilege or power that management specifies and assigns.
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Management must ensure the authority hierarchy is designed and allocated to cover all work. Otherwise standards will not be maintained and some required work will not get done.
Individuals most easily exert influence using their assigned authority. Outside those bounds, their social skills may allow influence to be accepted, but that is not guaranteed. Informal influence is liable to fail just where authoritative control is most needed.
Review exerting authority.
CG3: Results depend on how each individual construes the situation and their personal resourcefulness.
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Each employee develops and applies their own abilities, knowledge and mentalities differently. These divergences can neither be avoided nor controlled. So staff must be allowed to work out their own ways to improve efficiency, reduce waste, increase quality, meet deadlines and so on.
Management has to deploy the management resource, as well as a range of associated resources. However, no amount of resource guarantees results.
Review delivering results .
CG4: Assessments are for management to specify precisely, to organize and to conduct.
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Management must decide the procedures and policies for appraisals, analyses and inquiries of all sorts. Line-management is the core instrument for ensuring that all endeavours and all employees are properly assessed; but it is buttressed in a variety of ways.
Individuals are expected to collaborate with required reporting. Employees can and should unofficially track their position in the organization as revealed by their own observations as well as management reports.
Review making assessments.
CG5: Flexibility is offered and affirmed by a person: whether as part of management or as an employee. It is a matter of psychological make-up mixed up with personal interests and values in relation to the situation.
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Each employee must have a noticeable presence in the work-place. This enables them to notice and respond effectively, both socially and psychologically.
Management should expect personal presence, but cannot enforce it. Management's control over a variety of factors means it can, in principle, find ways to adapt to staff and affect the quality of their employment situation.
Review offering flexibility.
CG6: Commitment is a function of management specification because management sets the organizational policies and rules to which employees must submit and commit.
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The organization's policies, strategies, and regulations are not negotiable and employees are expected to adjust themselves, their thinking and their activities to suit. That adjustment should be observable in terms of the way employees are responsible and proactive. That is what showing commitment-CG6 means.
Review showing commitment.
CG7: Incentives of the organization are a matter for individual employees to evaluate and accept or reject.
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Management must offer terms (pay, perks, conditions, security &c.) to which individuals are likely to respond. This means recognizing that employees vary in regard to what terms are satisfying. To work comfortably, every employee must view what the organization offers as satisfactory.
To assess the incentive, a prospective employee will (or should) put the organization's offer in the context of the market rate, social and personal circumstances, industry developments and so on.
► Do you sit in your comfort zone at work or are you ambitious for new vistas? That is another duality worth exploring.
Originally posted: 11-Nov-2011