Motel Inn, Essay Example

Causes of Stress

Motel Inn has no shortage of factors that can cause stress. Employees experience uncertainty about which actions they should take in performing their job most effectively. As Ricky W. Griffin and Gregory Moorhead (2011, p. 184) point out,role conflict occurs when demands from different sources are incompatible. There may also involve conflict between organizational demands of employee’s own values, or conflict among obligations to several different co-workers. Motel Inn is best thought of as an open system in which employees interact with its environment. That means that there is ample opportunity for role conflict and ambiguity, because every time an entity interacts with an environment, opportunity for confusion exists.

A more specific form of conflict in Motel Inn is role overload, a stressor that occurs “when an employee is expected to fulfill too many roles at the same time, another result of interacting with the environment (e.g., customers, supervisors)” (Griffin and Moorhead, 2011, p. 185). Role overload cause employees to work at Motel Inn very long hours, increasing stress and subsequent strains. Some workers complain that they are stressed from working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

By letting staff know exactly what is anticipated of them, role conflict and ambiguity can be reduced (Griffin & Moorhead, 2011, p. 186). Redesigning jobs can also help ease work overload-related stressors (p. 186). Employees at Motel Inn should have some input in those decisions and aspects of the job that affect them. Their involvement and participation have been found to help lessen stress.

Managers at Motel Inn must recognize that no matter what they do to eliminate organizational stressors, some employees will be “stressed out”. They simply have little or no control over the personal factors. They also face an ethical issue when personal factors are causing stress. That is, just how fact can they intrude in an employee’s personal life? To help deal with this issue, Motel Inn should offer employee assistance and wellness programs. These employer-sponsored programs are designed to assist employees in areas where they might be having stress.

Use of Groups and Teams

Traditional use of groups has been based on the functional production of the factory, supply chain purchasing and shipping, and process to product engineering. As the company has grown, Motel Inn, Inc. has incorporated multiple levels of management from corporate to production. Each faction has been able to operate as a group. Yet current changes are forcing changes in the traditional top-down management grouping. Communication between functional groups has also been top-down dissemination. The use of groups and teams must also become idea-generating, with strategies towards development and implementation of new paradigms that break the traditional, often refereed to (as in the communication plan above) as entrepreneurship.

Kaplan (2003, p. 15) defines entrepreneurship as “including the generation and implementation of an idea” and stresses the importance of team-work in regards to the entrepreneurial spirit. To implement a stronger use of teams to generate, develop and implement ideas for improvement and encouragement as Motel Inn enters new phases of the business, we turn to a creative coaching strategy.

Wayne Hart, Ph D from the Center for Creative Leadership, in his ASTD presentation Developing a Coaching Culture (2006) believes that motivation and relationship management are strongly tied into coaching capabilities. Hart states that the coaching culture is “an organizational setting in which not only formal coaching occurs, but also, most or a large segment of individuals in the organization practice coaching behaviors as a means of relating to, supporting and influencing each other” (2006, p. 9). The goals are “motivating development and improved performance; cost savings over using external coaches; self and others focused”, in a manner that is “assessing, challenging and supporting” (2006, p. 16).

A plan for coaching development and implementation will have two focuses, the first towards enhancing motivation in the workplace, and the second to increase relationships in the team dynamics. A good coaching program can effectively empower employees by delivering both goals and a support system. This will empower employees to build relationships with one another and to build relationships with managerial staff.

Leadership

Motel Inn in today’s business world is having a very hard time finding good leaders for their businesses and employees. As a large firm, however, Motel Inn is often imbued with strategic processes and policies disseminated from a formal planning system. Motel Inn has traditionally held high employee morale but is currently faced with low production and changes should be approached by open communication.  In this, the “ideal strategic management team includes decision-makers from all three company levels (the corporate, business, and functional)” (Pearce and Robinson, 2004, p. 15).

The effective learning leadership strategy focuses on four key points, as outlined by Kouzes and Posner (2002): seize the initiative; make challenges meaningful; innovate and create; look outward for fresh ideas. A leader seizes the initiative through enthusiasm, determination and desire (Kouzes & Posner, 2002, p. 170). This includes embracing obstacles and challenges as the environment changes. Leaders in the organizational learning environment recognize that employees have goals, in as much as the business has goals, and strive to relate those goals together (Kouzes & Posner, 2002). The leader is extremely proactive by investing time not only in opportunity development and implementation, but also in recognizing and overcoming adversity (Kouzes & Posner, 2002, p. 175).

In the corporate culture, the impact of change management on employees is highly important. Kaplan (2003, p. 15) explains this as “including the generation and implementation of an idea” and stresses the importance of teamwork in regards to the organizational culture. He (Kaplan, 2003, p. 15) suggests that in a highly competitive environment the firm must share knowledge resources, and incorporate team vision with the basic goals of a change management strategy.

This is the growth perspective, where Motel Inn, Inc. should incorporate the strengths as a brand name, loyal employee and consumer segment base as well as established production and supply to value chains. The impact to employees is the changes in communication and expectations.

Interpersonal Conflicts

Negative interactions with co-workers, supervisors, or clients, or interpersonal conflict, can range from heated arguments to subtle incidents of unsociable behavior (Bruk-Lee & Spector, 2006). Interpersonal conflicts can occur when resources at work are scarce (e.g., who gets to use the color copy machine first), when employees have incompatible interests (e.g., one member of a team is a sticker for detail, whereas another likes to complete the project as quickly as possible), or when employees feel they are not being treated fairly (e.g., bosses get big bonuses, but workers are told no funds are available for salary increases for the rest of the workforce). Interpersonal conflict distracts workers from important job tasks, and it can have physical health consequences. Negative work outcomes of interpersonal conflict range from depression and job dissatisfaction to aggression, theft, and sabotage (Frone, 2000). Interpersonal conflict may also play a part in workplace violence.

Cultural differences in communication styles, values and beliefs affect interpersonal conflicts in several ways. They influence an employee’s propensity to engage in conflict, the nature of conflict, and perception or satisfaction with conflict management or resolution strategies. Diversity training is designed to raise multicultural awareness and tolerance among employees by addressing these issues. Conflict management in the workplace is designed to mitigate interpersonal conflicts among employees (Sonnenschein, 1999). An increasingly diverse workforce means that diversity training and conflict management in the workplace (Tinsley & Brett, 2000, p. 360). Experiential learning is one approach to integrating multicultural issues and conflict management.

References

Bruk-Lee, V., & Spector, P.E. (2006). The social stressors-counterproductive work behaviors link: Are conflicts with supervisors and coworkers the same? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 11, 145-156

Griffin, Ricky W., & Moorhead, Gregory. (2011). Organizational Behavior. Cengage Learning.

Hart, Wayne E. (2006).Developing a Coaching Culture. Center for Creative Leadership http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/news/releases/hartcoachingastd.pdf

Kaplan, Jack. (2003).Patterns of Entrepreneurship, 1e. John Wiley & Sons, Inc NY.

Kouzes, James, & Posner, Barry Z. (2002). The Leadership Challenge, 3e. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. N.Y.

Noe, Raymond, & Hollenbeck, John R, & Gerhart, Barry, & Wright, Patricia M. (2002).Human Resource Management. The McGraw-Hill Companies. New York

Pearce, Jack, & Robinson, Richard (2004).Strategic Management: Formulation, Implementation, and Control, 9e. The McGraw-Hill Companies East Patchogue, N.Y.

Sonnenschein, W. (1999). The Diversity Toolkit: How You can Build and Benefit from a Diverse Workforce. Contemporary Books: Chicago, IL.

Tinsley, C.H., & Brett, J. M. (2000). Managing Workplace Conflict in the United States and Hong Kong. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 85(2): 360-381