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Organizational Behavior - Performance Improvement

If poor performance is not attributable to work design or organizational process problems, attention should be focused on the employee. The problem may lie in some aspect of the person's relationship to the organization or supervisor, some area of the employee's personal life, or a training or developmental deficiency. Think about how this relates to poor performance as you answer this week's questions.

•What are the two possible attributions of poor performance? What are the implications of each?
•How can managers and supervisors best provide useful performance feedback?
•If a conflict occurred between your self-evaluation and the evaluation given to you by your supervisor or instructor, how would you respond? What, specifically, would you do?
•In your own work or school experience, what have learned from your supervisor during the past several weeks? What techniques did your instructor or supervisor use to help you learn?

Predictors of harmful stress for one individual may have beneficial effects for another. The Achilles heel phenomenon suggests that people break down at their weakest point. Individual differences in approaches to the stress-strain relationship relate to gender effects, Type A behavior patterns, personality hardiness, and self-reliance. Consider these approaches as you prepare to participate in the discussion this week.

•How do individual differences such as gender, Type A behavior, personality hardiness, and self-reliance moderate the relationship between stress and strain?
•Why should organizations help individuals manage stress?
•Isn't stress basically the individual's responsibility? Explain.

A critical factor in promoting a healthy work environment is the stage at which stress is managed. The three levels of prevention are the primary prevention stage (designed to reduce or eliminate the stressor), the secondary prevention stage (designed to modify the response to stress), and the tertiary prevention stage (designed to heal symptoms of distress).

Read several studies on primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention of stress and compare them to each other. Identify at least one organizational stress management method aligned with each type of prevention. Which one do you believe would be most effective, and why?

Solution Preview

Step 1
One possible attribute of poor performance is lack of equity. The second possible attribute of poor performance is a change in technology without adequate training.
The implication of lack of equity is that the employee feels low motivation to work. This situation can be rectified by making the performance evaluation, reward system, and compensation system more transparent. There should not be any favoritism and nepotism.
The implication of change in technology without training is that when new technology is introduced, all the persons required to use the new technology as well as those who might be required to use the new technology must be trained to use the technology. If new software or an enterprise resource planning system is introduced, full training should be provided to all current users as well as potential users.
Managers and supervisors can best provide useful performance feedback through the performance evaluation process. The criteria of performance evaluation should be clarified and discussed with the employee before the evaluation period. Specific and measurable goals should be set and discussed with the employee. At the end of the period the data about actual performance should be compared with the targets. This process gives the best feedback about performance to employees. When on job a manager or supervisor wants to give feed back to employees, the feedback should be related to behavior, be specific, be timely, and should clarify why the feedback is being given.
If there is a conflict between my self-evaluation and the evaluation given to me by my supervisor, I will respond by collecting ...

Solution Summary

This solution explains employee performance improvement and prevention of employee stress. The sources used are also included in the solution.