Editorial Practice: Organisation, Leadership and Motivation (Case Study Sample)

Motivation and Management
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Motivation and Management
The role of the manager is to ensure that the employees are motivated with the work that they carry out in the organization in order to get the best output from all the employees. The style that the manager uses in carrying out the managerial duties has a great impact on the employees. In this paper I will review a case study showing the management styles that were used. The leadership styles that are also used will be discussed in this paper. Leadership is essential and it exists in all societies as it governs the functioning of the society. The concept of cultural values separate people in terms of either ethnic groups or racial groups that each have their own culture (Ardichvili, Kuchinke, 2002). The cultural values of the society have an effect on the leadership style that is used in that society.
The leadership style that is mostly likely to work with foreign workers according to the research conducted by Alexander Ardichvili and Peter Kuchinke is transformational leadership. Transformational leadership has been found to work among multicultural through research conducted through sixty two cultures. This is attributed to the fact that different cultures have different opinions on how leadership should be. Transformational leadership has been found to work among people with different cultures than individual cultures. The other leadership style is the transaction-based leadership which has been hypothesized to work with high uncertainty avoidance culture and has been used in Russia (Khoo, Tan, 2002). Contingent reward has been highly associated with transformational leadership than transaction-based leadership style. Contingent reward has worked well with foreign workers. The three differences would be social, economic and political factors among the foreign workers. The way forward is to try to harmonize the different cultures. Democratic leadership style is a leadership style whereby the society votes for the leaders through elections by people that are legible to vote each casting a single vote. Autocratic leadership is a leadership whereby the leadership is passed on from one person to the other. Autocratic leadership may happen in an organization that was initially started as a family business and the Chief Executive Officer has to come from the family.The management needs to decide on the type of leadership that will be employed in the organization that will suit the needs of the employees.
Business process re-engineering in healthcare management is a case study that was conducted by Massimo Bertolini, Maurizio Bevilacqua, Filippo Emanuele Cirapica and Giancarlo Giacchetta (Bertolini, Bevilacqua, Ciara pica, 2011). The purpose for the study was to improve the efficiency of the surgical ward in a hospital. In this essay I will briefly summarize the article and answer the questions that are related to the case assignment.
The case study was based on a surgical ward whereby operations take place. In the surgical wards the operations are scheduled to take place while others are undertaken without a schedule. This requires the scheduled and unscheduled operations to coexist and this will require proper management to use this resource. The current state and design of the future system of the surgical ward have been analyzed and defined using event-driven process chains (EPC) methodology, the entity-relationship model and discrete event simulation. A what-if analysis was developed which simulates different scenarios and assesses their performance through the modelling processes, activities and sub-activities that take up a resources used in the ward. In the case study they discovered that using the Delphi methodology it was possible to identify the number of operation sessions, the availability of specific instruments used in surgery and the preparation of operating rooms for every operation. The most efficient management choices were now understood from the use of discrete event simulation.
Directing is one of the major responsibility of management. Directing involves the process of instructing, guiding and overseeing the performance of the employees to achieve the objectives set. Directing is the core management process since without it staffing, planning and organizing will not be effective. Directing is important in the following ways as it initiates action , integrates efforts , a means of motivating workers , provides stability ,efficient utilization of resources and coping up with changes. Directing initiates action when the management lays down the steps and procedures to their subordinates how the work will be done (Houy, Fettke, Loos, 2010) . Directing integrates the efforts of individual workers towards accomplishing the goals of the firm through effective communication and leadership. Directing the workers of the organization is a way of motivating them to provide better standards in the workplace. This is done by providing incentives that makes the performance of the workers grows. Directing of resources used in the company by ensuring minimum wastage, no redundancy of work done and overlapping of performance ensures that the resources are used efficiently (Drucker, 1992). Human beings are resistant to change and therefore it requires the management through effective communication to persuade them to embrace change by directing them. This is done by making them adapt to change through a slow transition process.
Based on the information in the article I would use directing to improve the state of the surgical ward. This I would do by using process performance management. The process performance management is a technique used to gauge the performance of something. In the surgical ward this would apply in assessing the performance of the staff and the performance of the resources used such as the surgical equipment. In the actual article they use discrete event simulation as a tool that leads to proper management that allows them to know what they need to improve on the surgical wards. What differs would be the technique I use but the end result will be the same as that in the article. If directing is not managed well the management process will fail. This is because the manager will find it difficult to control the staff. The manager through planning and organizing will face a challenge in trying to execute the tasks to meet the objectives. The staff will lack motivation to carry out their work and the resources that are being used will be wasted (Kerzner, 2013) .
Rewards are usually given to employees who perform very well in an organization. The rewards usually vary from bonuses, cash prizes, holiday packages or a job promotion. The management usually does this so as to motivate their employees so that their performance may improve. Workers that are motivated will have job satisfaction which is a good thing. The management when they want to motivate employees from different cultures especially the multinational corporations must first conduct a research to determine what motivates them. This is important because what works in the parent country may not work in a place with different cultures (Deci, 105). The management should therefore understand the importance of work centrality, rewards and job design in international context. The motivational theories may be different in foreign countries for example in Japan men and women are paid differently for the same work that they do. According to them it is not perceived to be inequitable and this goes against the equity theory. Learning the culture will assist one in coming up with a reward system.
The challenges that one faces in motivating employees in the international setting include lack of knowledge to what motivates the employees due to the difference in cultures. What motivates employees in another country may be different. The way people are motivated for example in the USA is financially but in some cultures money does not motivate employees. The Herzberg theory whereby motivation has two factors that is job satisfaction and hygiene factors. Job satisfaction relates to earnings, working hours, benefits while hygiene factors include company policy and working conditions. In foreign countries one must know which of the two factors motivate the employees. The management can carry out an analysis to determine how the employees can be motivated (Eisenberger, Shanock, 126).
Executive bonuses and incentive in the USA have been found to increase yearly and thus has widened the wage gap between the common employee and the top managers. This wage gap has led to employees lack motivation for their work as they see that the work they do is not appreciated by the firm. In some of the firms the executives are still earning high bonuses regardless of the financial status of the firm, lagging earnings and stock prices. The problem with most firms is that the pay of executives every year is higher regardless of the customer satisfaction, profitability, stock price and the requirements of the employees (Healy, 1985). The short-term and long-term incentives of the executives should be adjusted in such a way that it reflects with the current profits and stock prices. This ties to the business strategy in determining the payment structure and compensation structure of the firm. The human resource department comes up with a way of compensating the workers in regard of the quality of work done and the output of the firm. Research conducted in the USA showed that the executive compensation consists of five components as follows: big salary (35%), short-term incentives or bonuses (24%), long-term incentives or stock plans (31%), benefits (5%) and perquisites (5%). Most firms are now employing competitive bench marking to determine executive compensation by comparing firms with similar industry, size, geographical region a...