Given the fact that the employment of different types of power might influence a team member’s satisfaction, and thus his or her motivation to continue, in regards to your current industry and/or the culture of your current organization, write a reflection paper that considers the following:
My organization is titled “Govitall”. The company specializes in e-commerce solutions and business development. It has been present on the market for 10 years so far. Its boss, Alex, is quite a loyal and yet strict person. His leadership style has greatly shaped since the first office was opened. His power is the ability to lead people and make them follow his instructions. He is coping perfectly with this goal as he has a perfect HR management system, which hires only the best candidates. Each employee knows exactly his or her responsibilities. His influence depends on his personal qualities as well as employees’ attitudes.
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I would like to highlight five types of leadership power: expert, referent, legitimate, reward, and coercive. A good leader should possess the elements of each, but Alex is still far from being an excellent boss. To my mind, our leader has an expert power mixed with the referent power. Alex has a deep knowledge in IT, international marketing, economics, and management that allows him to be admired by his co-workers. They follow him because his skills are supported by the amazing results this company has achieved just in the first five years when it moved to the elite office. Now, it has a big private house purchased due to the increasing number of new departments and employees. He knows how many people and who he needs to achieve both short-term and long-term goals. He makes decisions very fast. Alex is also organizing schedules and picks the proper team’s members to become supervisors. As for the features of referent power, the followers trust Alex and they think he has enough competence and experience they would like to be shared. I have noticed that many of our employees, especially CEO and team leaders, identify themselves with our boss. From the other hand, it sometimes has a negative outcome: some people have simply stolen his business idea in order to launch similar companies. Anyway, most of us rely on our leader’s vision of strong personality. Alex has amazing charisma to inspire current and future workers.
Among all content motivational theories, I would like to draw examples from my company Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Alderder’s ERG. I have noticed that self-esteem has played the most important role in Alexander’s becoming. As I was told, he could not implement a single idea on his own. When his first colleagues did not trust in his resume writing business, it soon failed. He is that type of leader who needs people to support him all the time. His loyal CEO helps to develop most of his ideas, while he just provides a general vision and background. Despite Alex is already an owner of the successful company, he still feels the need for growth. As for the rest of my co-workers, they come to this company for growth. Content writers dream of reaching the level of Content Manager first, and then transfer to professional copywriters and advertisers. Our junior front-end developers arrive to evolve into the senior Java and CSS-developers or even professional back-end developers. So, “Govitall” stands for the unlimited growth opportunities and self-actualization. That is why so many applicants submit their CVs every day.
Among all motivational theories, I believe process theory fits my organization the best. First, a lot of attention is paid to the way each individual behaves at his workplace. Alex believes personal actions are the key to explaining certain outcomes for the whole organization. Reinforcement theory helps him to solve problems with the performance of particular individuals whose actions may have influence on the entire company’s activity. That is why he keeps team leaders and CEO close to him. Alex praises employees who accomplish their tasks at a quality level and before the deadline. H punishes those who are late for the job. It all leads to positive reinforcement. As the company is extremely dynamic, goal-setting theory is another useful strategy. Workers have to realize short-term and long-term goals clearly. Regular meetings and training programs assist in setting goals.
According to French and Raven, there are five types of power. As I have mentioned above, Expert and Referent power suits our motivational theory perfectly, and I explained why. But I would also add which types of power I believe should be avoided. While I would recommend Alex focusing more on reward power, I am against applying legitimate power. It reminds of bad politics as an individual thinks he has formal right to demand and expect obedience no matter what others think and how efficient his decision is. This type of power is destructive for both leader and his followers. Coercive power is needed for supporting the discipline, especially taking into account most of the workers are under 25.
To sum up, I should stress that employee motivation is the key to perfect company performance. Labor component of any organization should be considered and improved all time. To do so, not only HR management structure is important, but the way company’s leader treats his or her employees. He should never forget about the rewards, but implementing punishment measures is also crucial for the overall discipline. The leader should know whom he hires, while his followers have to see short-term and long-term goals as well as their opportunities for growth to perform at respectively high level.
