8.8 THE SKILLS YOU NEED TO BE A GREAT BOSS: Turning Negative Back to Positive

(EXTRACTION FROM TEAM MANAGEMENT: Rewarding And Engaging People at http://www.mindtools.com)

 

Disengaged people exist in all types of businesses.  They don't care about the company, they probably don't like their jobs, and they send negative signals everywhere they go.  Disengaged people are like poison.  They don't perform their own jobs well.  They have a bad influence on your other staff.  It's typically a process that happens over time, as employee and employer expectations grow further and further apart.

Back in the '70s and '80s, Japanese organizations were arguably the most productive and efficient in the world.  The secret to their success was how they were managing their people.  Japanese employees were engaged, empowered, and highly productive.  Management professor William Ouchi argued that Western organizations could learn from their Japanese counterparts. He created Theory Z – a model that, he said, blended the best of Eastern and Western management practices.  Ouchi first wrote about Theory Z in his 1981 book, "Theory Z: How American Management Can Meet the Japanese Challenge”.

For Ouchi, Theory Z focused on increasing employee loyalty to the company by providing a job for life with a strong focus on the well-being of the employee, both on and off the job.  According to Ouchi, Theory Z management tends to promote stable employment, high productivity, and high employee morale and satisfaction.  William Ouchi doesn't say that the Japanese culture for business is necessarily the best strategy for the American companies.  He takes Japanese business techniques and adapts them to the American corporate environment.

The most important pieces of this theory is:

·        management must have a high degree of confidence in its workers

·        assumes that workers will be participating in the decisions of the company to a great degree

·        employees must be very knowledgeable about the various issues of the company

·        employees possessing the competence to make those decisions

·        the need for the workers to become generalists, rather than specialists

·        to increase their knowledge of the company and its processes through job rotations and constant training

·        develop a work force, which has more of a loyalty towards staying with the company for an entire career

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AMERICAN AND JAPENESE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS	JAPENESE ORGANIZATION
Short-term employment	Lifetime employment
Rapid evaluation and promotion	Slow evaluation and promotion
Specialized career path	Non specialized career path
Individual decision making	Collective decision making
Individual responsibility	Collective responsibility
Explicit control mechanism	Implicit control mechanism
Segmented concern for employee as employee	Holistic concern for employee as a person

 

Theory Z of Ouchi believes that people are innately self-motivated to do their work, loyal towards the company and want to make the company succeed.  The theory Z managers would have to have a great deal of trust that their workers could make sound decisions.  This type of leader is more likely to act as ‘coach’ and let the workers make most of the decision.

The manager’s ability to exercise power and authority comes from the worker’s trusting the management to take care of them and allow them to do their jobs.  The workers have a great deal of input and weight in the decision making process.  Conflict in the Theory Z would involve a great deal of discussion, collaboration, and negotiation.  The workers would be the ones solving the conflicts, while the managers would play more of a third party arbitrator role.