MediaSpace Wiki

Organizational Spr2006 Sess29

Interpersonal Relationships in the Workplace

• Hiring and Assimilation
  • Rules, Expectations, and Goals
• Entering an organizations culture
  • Anticipatory socialization
    • Seeing others
    • Education
    • Advance Research
  • Formal socialization
    • Training Sessions
    • Manuals
    • Mentoring/One on One Training
  • Informal socialization
    • Supervisors
    • Coworkers
    • Customers
    • Doing the job
  • The value of listening
    • Questions (direct and indirect)
    • Intelligence (who likes what)
    • Testing, including disguised conversation
    • Observing
    • Surveillance
• what we are talking about is sensemaking
  • making sense of how an organization works
  • what it is trying to do
  • how we can contribute
  • and how we can exert some control of the future
• In chapters 8-10 we see the E&G redefining classic theory relationships
  • not management -> relationships -> resource
  • but sensemaking -> relationships -> teams
• Sensemaking is key at every turning point in our organizational career
  • New Jobs
  • Life changes
  • Organizational changes
  • New processes
  • New precedents
  • New problems
  • New media
  • New solutions
• Our experience of organization
  • starts with assimilation
    • interviewing/joining/hiring
    • training/socialization
    • initial motivation
    • identifying with the organization
    • finding a career (perhaps an illusion)
  • and then turns to achieving productivity
    • learning our job
    • forming relationships
    • learning the organization
    • becoming involved
    • taking on new responsibilities
    • making decisions to deal with new situations (selection)
    • sometimes creating precedents for others (retention)
    • iterating, refining, and expanding our skill set
    • finding job Satisfaction
• Organizations try to measure these things.
  • but measuring productivity is tricky
    • the value of feedback
    • the danger of feedback
  • bottom line, you get what you measure
    • so be careful what you measure
    • measurement can provide useful data on progress
    • it can also trap you into unproductive ways of ensuring the quality of measurements at the expense of productivity
    • measurement can, in effect, create a path of resistance
  • it is this kind of problem that, in one of our prior Harvard articles, led the writer to note that trust avoids authority and flees a judge
    • measurement should always help people to do their job better
    • and should explicitly not be used as a basis for judging competence
• This is another variation on upward distortion
  • Gatekeeping
  • Summarization
  • Withholding
  • Managing the boss
• A better approach assumes that management is inevitable as a solution to complexity
  • but that managers work for their employees
    • helping to make them more productive
    • helping to coordinate their efforts
    • getting buy-in, as needed, from individuals and teams
      • clear and specific goals
        • difficult but attainable
      • frequent feedback on progress towards and changes in goals
      • enabling rewards for goals achieved
    • empowering them to get the job done
      • distributing power rather than acting powerful
      • trusting people to meet challenges
      • maintaining an open communication
      • involving diverse groups and individuals in problem solving

Looking ahead to the group presentation

Your groups goal is to provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of your organizations communication with its various stakeholders. To do this you need to overview the organization, its stakeholders, the ways in which the organization currently communicates with its stakeholders, and ways in which it might improve its communication with its stakeholders. Yo'll have about 25 minutes to do this.

Notice

In response to concerns about presenting directly after the spring break, I've shuffled the schedule a bit. Group project presentations start on Friday, April 21.