The level of supervision given to employees can be an element of organizational behavior.
Organizational behavior is the way in which individuals within an organization behave. This includes both general employees and managers and day-to-day as well as long-term behavioral characteristics. Elements of organizational behavior might include an organization's aversion to risk; an organization's preference for promoting from within or hiring from external sources; the level of rigidity and formality surrounding its management hierarchy; and the organization's idea development process. Organizational behavior is notoriously hard to change. This is due in part to the fact that organizational behavior is hard to define. It is not written down in a memo somewhere or posted prominently on the company website. Most employees probably are not even consciously aware of the organizational behavior of the company. Additionally, organizational behavior is a product of potentially hundreds or even thousands of employees. This means that changing organizational behavior could require changing hundreds or thousands of individual behaviors.
Instructions
1. Identify the behaviors you wish to change. What is it that you feel needs adjustment within the organizational behavior of your company? Do you feel the organization is too risk-averse? Does the organization seem to overlook input from mid-level managers? Whatever the behavior is, you must identify it and clearly define it for yourself.
2. Find the incentives underlying the behavior. Almost all behavior is driven by incentives. Some incentives are clearer than others. For example, a production company that pays managers a commission based on number of units shipped gives incentives for managers to ship as many units as possible, perhaps at the expense of quality. Changing that manager's behavior would require changing his incentives. A more subtle incentive is avoiding extra effort. There tends to be a lot of inertia regarding organizational behavior. It is easier to do things the way they have always been done than it is to consciously change behavior.
3. Determine what new behavior you wish to see from management. It's one thing to say "I dislike Behavior X" and another thing entirely to say "I believe Behavior Y is superior to Behavior X." Before you set about doing away with "bad" managerial behavior, you need to have a clear idea of what the new "good" behavior looks like.
4. Reward the "good" behavior. If the new desired organizational behavior for your managers is intended to encourage them to consider more candidates for promotion from within rather than external candidates, consider something as explicit as placing a quota on the number of managerial hires that must come from within the company. This creates an incentive -- filling the quota -- to change the previous behavior. If you wish to see organizational behavior change so that the company more frequently considers input from lower levels of the organization, have employees evaluate their supervisors on how well they do this and include these evaluations in the manager's performance review.
5. Lead by example. Managers look to their senior managers for guidance and example. A senior executive who advocates a new policy but does not visibly follow it himself is sending the message that she does not really care about the new policy. If she doesn't care, why should her subordinates? Executives who fully embrace the new organizational behavior they are promoting are likely to see much greater adoption by those around them.
Tags: organizational behavior, from within, behavior wish, behavior your, good behavior, input from