Introduction
The morale, productivity, motivation and quality of customer service are normally dependent on the way they communicate in the organization and their behavior while in organizational group (Champoux, 2016). The expectation on all employees is that they give their best input to the organization and stay productive. However, this is not always the case particularly when the workers involved are new and doing their first job. It is vital to note that employing employees for their first job usually presents the organization with various communication and behavioral problems. The case study of McDonald’s Corporation simply shows that there are strategies that can be used to solve most of the communications and group behavior challenges, which are associated with employees who are on their first job.
Communications problems
There are communications problems in organizations that employ workers on their first jobs. The first communications problem is the lack of experience on the right procedure of relaying information or messages in the organization. Workers coming on their first jobs do not have the experience to understand the common organizational procedures, which guide communication flow. Therefore, they may want to approach the top manager of the organization without following the right procedure of reaching him or her. A lot of protocol is then broken in this case.
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Another communications problem that organizations get is the language barriers. These new employees meet people from different ethnic backgrounds. The language the new workers speak may not be understandable to the rest of the employees. It is important to note that the rest of the workforce could be used to common language cues, which are unfamiliar to these new employees. Such a case means it is difficult for the new workers to operate together with the rest of the human resource as a team.
Moreover, there is the problem of cultural diversity, which then curtails communication between the new employees and the rest of the workers. It is vital to note that culture has a unique way of defining meanings in every communication sign or symbol. Moreover, similar facial expressions may imply different meanings in the various cultures. To bridge these gaps in terms of the diversity of cultures and achieve harmony in communication, organizations usually develop and entrench a common organizational culture. In this common organizational culture, various distinct jargon words are adopted for use at the work place. Furthermore, a number of signs and symbols with specific meanings are adopted and used in communication purpose. Therefore, when workers come in on their first jobs, they experience difficult in understanding the entrenched organizational culture hence cannot communicate effectively.
The new employees do not understand the significance of feedback in the process of organizational communication. Therefore, they tend to ignore a lot of messages sent to them through e-mail, taking them as trivial. This issue usually causes a significant breakdown of communication in the whole company because of one-way communication. It has to be noted that one-way communication is very ineffective in a company. For the quality of communication to be high, there must feedback to every message sent to a worker ort manager.
Finally, there is the challenge of personal issues of the new employees, which then derail effective communication in the organization. It is true that workers having their first job always possess very minimal self confidence. Moreover, they operate with a lot of anxiety. These factors make them to be poor communicators. Communication flow in the entire organization breaks down when it reaches to them. There anxiety and lack of self confidence makes them unable to even express points in their communication clearly. These are some of the significant communications problems, which organizations experience when they hire new workers coming in for their first jobs.
Group behavioral issues
An organization is also bound to experience the group behavioral issues with employees working for the first time. The first issue is the lack of courage to talk about their job opportunities and challenges. Many new employees fear talking about their strengths and weaknesses while in the organizational group. They find it quite difficult to publicly share their personal stories with other group members. They also lack the trust needed to share their personal strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, these new employees normally engage in the bad group behavior of being opaque with all information that they should share with the group members. It is important to note that the purpose of group work in organizations is to build personal capacities of each member. The group members learn from each other through open discussions and sharing of personal stories. Through these personal stories, members express their weaknesses and they are advised on the effective ways of improving. The group members also share their strengths, which others emulate. This open sharing of information leads to collective improvement of performance in the organization. Therefore, by hiding their information, the new workers always cause poor development at the group level and lead to lack of organizational improvement in terms of performance.
It is also important to note that workers who are on their first jobs always lack interpersonal skills because of the minimal experience in terms of socialization. They find difficulty associating with other group members during teamwork. Many incidences of conflicts within the group arise causing its poor performance. Dismal performance at the group level implies the organization also gets minimal output. The conflicts arise from the rude, insulting and condescending statements that these new employees use against their colleagues in the group.
The other group behavioral problem is the disrespect to the lines of authority in the group. As mentioned earlier, new workers may not understand the importance of respecting the individuals in authority. They are, thus, prone to showing disrespect group leaders. This disrespect makes them to rebel doing the assignments given to them by the group leaders. Such misbehavior is what causes poor performance by the group and the overall organization.
Strategies to solve the communications and group behavioral issues
These group behavioral issues and communication problems are also experienced by McDonald’s Corporation as indicated in the case study. This case study offers the best means of solving these problems. For instance, adopting the Leadership Circle framework of making employees grow and develop their capacities in the organization is one worthwhile solution to such problems. The Leadership Circle model aims at on-boarding the new employees in the organization and developing them into good leaders (Anderson, Anderson, Adams & Adams, 2015). This model builds trust and self-confidence in the employees and makes them have the courage and openness to share their strengths and weaknesses to the group members. Moreover, taking employees through orientation is a very important task for very organization. This orientation familiarizes the new workers with the culture of the organization and makes communication clear, easy and effective (Cummings & Worley, 2014).
Conclusion
Many employees hired on their first jobs cause communication and group behavioral issues. These problems can lead to poor performance of the entire organization if they are not solved using the strategies suggested in this paper. The strategies suggested in this paper have been adapted from McDonald’s case study on how it nurtures its leaders. In general, hiring from within the organization is an effective recommendation for organizations that may not want to incur the cost of training and orientation for the new employees.
References
Anderson, R. J., Anderson, B., Adams, W. A., & Adams, B. (2015). Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results . Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Champoux, J. E. (2016). Organizational behavior: Integrating individuals, groups, and organizations . Abidgon-on-Thames: Routledge.
Cummings, T. G., & Worley, C. G. (2014). Organization development and change . Boston , MA: Cengage learning.
