How Corporate Behaviour Affects Company Identity Management Essay

Purpose : This paper aims to discuss how corporate behaviour (company, management and employee behaviour) affects the corporate identity.

Methodology : This paper applies concepts and ideas mostly from online Emerald Journal and some other random websites.

Findings : Corporate behaviour give a great impact to an organization. Public, stakeholders, and employees are focusing on the company and management behaviour. While the managers look for a high standard employee behaviour. All these behaviours will affect whether the organization can accomplish and achieve organization’s goals.

Article type : Literature review.

Keywords : Corporate behaviour, company behaviour, management behaviour, employee behaviour, organization.

Introduction

Strong corporate identity can help an organization with the marketplace, attraction of investment, motivation in employees and as a differentiation if their products and services. Identity is an effective strategic instrument to have high achievement in competitive world. Corporate behaviour is one of the component is corporate identity. There are 3 elements in corporate behaviour, that is company, employee and management behaviour.

Importance of corporate behaviour

People spend most of their life in some organization or the other. Majority believes that corporate behaviour have a long-term effect and a huge impact on the overall corporate identity. In other words, what the organization “does” is clearly linked to the perception of what the organization “is”. Generally, the company, management and employees’ behaviour influences customers and other stakeholders. Besides that, the lower employees will see the senior managers as their role model, it means the management’s behaviour sets a standard for employee behaviour. In short, if the company, management and employees behaved well, it give a good reputation and high confidence to the customers, and stakeholders will be supportive too.

In the manager-subordinates relationship, trust is a significant feature that motivates subordinates to perform above expectation. In leadership, understanding trust is important as to make all members understand how to create effective cooperation within organizations. According to Davenport and Prusak (2000), trust is an important element in the decision by employees to become engaged in the knowledge exchange process. They argue that trust is important because technology, infrastructure and management influence alone cannot be relied upon to facilitate the flow of communication.

Corporate Behaviour

Company Behaviour

Organization Behaviour

Organization behaviour is the study and application of knowledge on how individuals and groups act in organizations. Besides that, it also studies the organizations from multiple viewpoints, methods, and levels of analysis. The major goals of organizational behaviour are to predict, explain and control behaviour. Organization behaviour is important in building better relationships in the organization itself in order to achieve human objectives, organizational objectives, and social objectives.

An organization has it’s own rules and regulations, vision and mission. For managers and all employees, these helps and guides them to understand and control the organizational events. Members’ behaviour towards the organization can affects the overall performance of the organization. Employees in an organization work interdependently toward the same purpose in their working areas.

The main purpose of having organization behaviour is to gain a greater understanding. Great understanding will influence employees in an organization have a sense of belonging to the organization. This helps to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness in the process of achieving goals. Other than that, good communication in an organization is a very important tool that it can be the making or breaking of a company.

Management Behaviour

Introduction

Management behaviour is an academic discipline which concerned with understanding, describing, predicting, and controlling human behaviour in an organizational environment. An organization made up of different individuals and multiple relationships. To manage the overwhelming complexity, management behaviour must be well managed. In an organization, is not easy to understand each employees’ individual behaviour. The other way round, it is easier for all the employees to understanding the organization’s behaviour.

Management Style

Autocratic Management Style

Autocratic management style means manager give instruction to the staff to perform tasks without getting opinion and making consultation. The decision made by the manager is fast without involving other employees, work is usually accomplished on time. There is a disadvantages in this management style, that is the work environment and the staffs are less motivated. This is because indirectly, the staffs just wait for the boss order. Autocratic management style will be most efficient in situation where decision must be made in immediate.

Democratic Management Style

Democratic management style majoring in making decision. It must come along with responsibility as it will work more effectively. It is important that the staff are delegated the task and are given authority and must be efficient enough to perform the task. In this style, staffs should not have a thought of “pushing away responsibility”. This style is most suitable for training up staffs to make decision in work.

Participative Management Style

Participative management style is similar to democratic management style. Usually, the manager takes the inputs from the staffs and modify it to his own decision. This management style requires more time but the advantage is that it involve the staffs giving feedback during implementation. The main difference between participative and democratic management is the decision made is based on logical evaluation of various options rather than by majority.

Laissez Faire Management Style

Laissez faire management style is like let the nature rake its own course. Tasks are given to the staffs and staffs have total freedom to finish the entire task on their own. This management style is best used in situation when dealing with conflicts as you do not want to be seen as siding anyone.

Authoritarian Management Style

Authoritarian management style is that a manager who controls fully of a workplace situation without referring to the team’s view and input. In short, this management style have a command structure where decisions are passed down from the top, layer by layer of command transmitting orders and demanding absolute acceptance of that instruction.

Employee Behaviour

Employees are the main man power of an organization. An organization can have a very excellent background but without employees, everything is not going to work. Employee satisfaction is an important issue for management and employees in any organizational setting. Employees behaviour plays an essential role in an organization. The company pay for the employees to work and accomplish tasks in order to achieve company’s targets and goals. Human beings are affective among each other. For example, if an employee is not hardworking and serious in work, this will affects the other employees as well. Other employees may take him or her bad attitudes as an excuse or learn from it.

Boxall and Macky (2007) introduced high performance work systems (HPWS) theory or high commitment or high involvement HRM (2009). Arthur (1994) said High commitment HRM is about shaping employee behaviors and attitudes by developing psychological links between organizational and individual goals to increase effectiveness and productivity. Employee commitment is much required. First, employee has to understand organization’s goal. Secondly, employee’s willingness to exert effort on behalf of the organization is needed. Thirdly, employee him/herself should has a strong desire to maintain his/her membership in the organization. To maintain and improve the outcome of an organization, employee should has high job satisfaction, low absenteeism and organization citizenship behaviour. To make employee have strong citizenship feelings for the organization, organization should provide members with high involvements focus in work and task. Besides that, organization should includes members with personal involvement in setting objectives, having frequent opportunities to discuss performance and give feedback and having some choice over the pay and benefits received. Employees with high levels of commitment are more willing to devote greater efforts towards an organization’s goals and objectives. The greatest success in employee behaviour is gaining customers’ satisfaction towards the organization’s products and services.

Innovative Behaviour

Introduction

Farr and Ford (1990) defined innovative behaviour as behaviour directed towards the initiation and application (within a work role, group or organization) of new and useful ideas, processes, products or procedures.

An organization needs innovation all the time. Capitalize on their employees’ ability to innovate is one of the way for organizations to become more innovative. Employees help to improve business performance with their ability to generate ideas and produce new and better products, services and work processes. To attain organizational success, employees need to be both willing and able to innovate.

Organization should focus on the innovative behaviour of employees and the role leaders or managers play in enhancing such behaviour. According to Anderson (2004), he indicated that employees’ innovative behaviour depends greatly on their interaction with others in the workplace. The more interaction employees have with each other, the more creative ideas will be generated. Generally, leaders influent employees’ work behaviours. Area of idea generation and the implementation or application of these ideas are important elements of innovative behaviour.

Idea Generation

The creative or idea generation stage of innovation are mainly focused in many studies. However, innovation usually includes the implementation of ideas. Employees can generate ideas by engaging in behaviours to explore opportunities, identify new issues or seek for solutions for problems. Employees with strong personal commitment to a particular idea may be able to persuade others with its idea. Innovative behaviour is related to employee creativity, the more creative the idea, the higher the quality of the product, the more popular the product will be. From here, we can see that creativity is a very essential part in innovation process, where problems are recognized and ideas are generated.

The Importance of Manager

Manager is a person tasked with seeing and guiding one or more employees or department to ensure these employees or departments carry out assigned duties and tasks. Managers carry a very serious and important role that is to increase and improve productivity among employees. Take note that, negative behaviour within the leadership capacity is directly link to a decline in productivity.

The roles of manager are (Mr. Henry Mintzberg):-

Informational roles

Generally, informational roles is information handling. It is vital as accurate information assist in making intelligent decision at all time. Before manager give out data or instruction to the employee, he / she has to undergoes interpretation, analyse and filter process before converting it to correct and valid information. Thus, accurate information is distributed to employees and correct instruction is given out. Information can be collected from internal and external environment of an organization. Information from internal environment are data base, accounting information of the organization, and some gossip and conversation of subordinate could be an useful information. While information from external environment are information or news from the public, local community, government, stakeholder and more.

Informational role can be divided into monitor, disseminator and spokesman. Monitor always keep an eye on information coming from the outside and inside of the organization, at the same time also control the process. A successful monitor is someone who constantly alert to useful information and then distribute it to the employees. Disseminator involves transmitting information and judgements to the members of the organization. Information related to inter operations and external environment are under the coverage of disseminator. Spokesman is a manager who speaks for his organization, he lobbies and defends the organization. He help maintain and improve the image of the organization.

Decisional roles

The decisional roles involve around making choices in an organization. The four decisional roles includes entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator and negotiator. An entrepreneur is someone who search the organization and its environment for opportunities and initiating the change of process to bring in more transformation. This includes designing and completing projects for changes, leading to more improvements. Overall, manager’s roles involve strategy formulation, team-building, change-management and project handling. Disturbance handler have the responsibility related to corrective actions when organization faces unexpected disturbances and problem. The actions include review and solve the crises faced. Resource allocator has to allocate resources of the organization among all concerned people or department. Manager has to prepare schedule, budget, allocation of duties to all employees. Lastly, negotiator handle the negotiation, which means bringing more advantages to the organization and decline all the disadvantages.

Interpersonal roles

Interpersonal roles is a key to authority. Interpersonal roles includes figurehead, leader and liaison. Figurehead represents the organization in all matters or formality. The top level manager will represents the organization socially while the supervisor will represents the department to higher management. The leader role is the relationship between the manager and employees. While the liaison act as the manager who interact with the subordinators and people from outside organization, he gain favours and information and maintain the routine flow of work.

Organization Citizenship Behaviour (OCB)

Introduction

Organization Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) is also known as “good soldier syndrome” (Organ, 1988). OCB includes punctuality, innovating, helping others, volunteering and less undesirable actions such as complaining or arguing faults with others. Although OCB is job-related, it is not tied to the formal reward system. OCB functions as to make operation of the organization more effectively. OCB includes five behaviour types – altruism, courtesy, sportsmanship, conscientiousness and civic virtue, all these are necessary for an effective organization.

In-role Performance

According to Van Scotter (2000), he said In-role performance (e.g. task performance) refers to the activities that directly transform raw materials into the goods and services produced by the organization including activities that service and maintain the technical core.

Extra-role Performance

Extra-role performance is the behaviours that are not formally required by any job, but it helps to form social context of all jobs, thus enhance effectiveness. Borman and Motowidlo (1997) and Organ(1988) says this behaviour includes volunteering, demonstrating effort, helping others, following rules and supporting organizational objectives.

Research shows that employee with extra-role behaviours have outcomes such as positive managerial evaluations of subordinate performance and reward allocation decisions and lower employee turnover intentions.

Case Study

The subjects for this study were 140 enlisted men and officers in the US Army. Two measurement instruments were used: an organization citizenship behaviour questionnaire (Bateman and Organ, 1983), and the work environment scale (Moos, 1986). When asked to rate their satisfaction with their military life, on a 1-7 Likert-type scale, 53 per cent reported satisfaction levels as above average (greater than 4), and 25 per cent marked their satisfaction level at 4; only 22 per cent reported satisfaction as less than average. To obtain a self-report index of productivity, the questions “On an average day, how much effort do you put out at work?” and “Compared to others working with you, how much effort do you put out?”, were included. The mean response to “average amount of effort put out at work” was 89 per cent (s = 0.16); for “comparative effort”, 85 per cent of respondents reported exerting more effort than others.

This study discuss about the relationship between good soldier behaviour and the workplace. At the same time, it indicates that the work environment is a significant cause of OCB. Other than that, we can affirmed that OCB is related to the behaviour of producing more work output. This study also identified certain characteristics of individuals relating the perceptions of OCB. Armies are not organizations with good working conditions and high payment. But this study shows the average soldier rated satisfaction with military above the scale midpoint. Good work environment could be the main reason that lead to individuals behave as good soldiers. In this case, good soldiers have high task orientation, high job performance which can enhance the productivity. A specific amount of human input, high OCB could result in greater output and increased efficiency. This is due to the extra-role behaviour of the good soldiers put more resources and effort into the work process. However, just as extra-role behaviour of good soldier may be prososial, they may also be counter-role, providing a good reason for managers to enhance positive OCB.

Performance Management

Den Hartog (2004) said Performance Management is an integrated process in which managers work with their employees to set expectations, measure and review results, and reward performance, in order to improve employee performance, with the ultimate aim of positively affecting organizational success.

A company needs a set of systematic management in order to achieve organization’s objectives and targets. A capable manager will lead the employees on the right track and work together to accomplish organization’s mission. Company top managers affect both the internal and external audience. In an organization, employees will follow manager’s instructions and orders. Manager is the role model for all employees, everything the manager do, will affect the employee as well. For example, if the manager is a punctual person, the employees will never dare to be late for work or meetings. Top manager has to show positive behaviour such as hardworking, punctual, serious in work, work effectively, all these are to motivate employees to copy top management behaviour and apply it to their own positions. Top manager with top management will make stakeholders gain confidence towards the organization.

In addition, senior managers should join the employees regularly, this is to bridge the gap between the top management and front line personnel. This procedure is to emphasise the function of a senior manager as a role model.