Ideal Organizational Behavior
The key to attaining positive organizational behavior within a company primarily depends upon the leadership's ability to clearly articulate a change strategy for how the leader moves the team towards a strategic vision through a logical and well-organized process.
For this paper, I argue that to attain ideal organizational behavior, the organization must have a clear plan for the company's strategic vision before it can achieve it. Better stated: the company must have a vision for its purpose and future, a clearly understood vision that helps to motivate both the cognitive and emotional components of the workforce, leadership, board, and stakeholders. This vision must be inspirational and achievable. As a result, there is a need for the leader to share a clear vision for the journey that must be traveled to attain this overarching company vision, the road or path to get there, and do so in such a manner that it begins to build or improve the company's current organizational behavior.
These two concepts are symbiotic in that the clarity of each helps to build transparency and trust within the workforce. By providing a clear path to an end state (vision), leadership respects and engages their workforce as active participants and not just cogs in the wheel who do not need to know. The need to share the company's long-term vision and provide a framework for its achievement has manifested as millennials have moved into the U.S. workforce's middle and upper management levels. Millennials are not motivated by mere money or compensation; they want and need value in the workplace, ensuring their efforts, ideas, and contributions significantly impact the world more than their baby boomer predecessors. "They need an emotional stake in the game—on an emotional, rather than cognitive level" (Hagemann, 2017, p. 13).
A Clearly Articulated Vision
To achieve this cognitive and emotional stake in the game, leadership must take the time to develop a strategic vision that empowers their teams to truly understand and embrace where the company aspires to be in five to 10 years and why. Hagemann (2017) contends that the world needs leaders who can create a compelling vision and engage others around it. Visionary leaders can communicate what lies beyond the horizon and inspire confidence. They attract talent to the organization and motivate team members to make more effective decisions (Hagemann, 2017).
Antonakis (2015) furthers this idea by describing leaders who lean into their teams, share ideas, and articulate and assess their vision by being physically observable. They are more likely to motivate their workforce and improve organizational behavior and culture. By giving the workforce a stake in the game through a shared and articulated vision for the future and an understandable path to get there, leaders help to inspire their teams to do something greater than themselves. As a result, transparency, trust, and innovation stimulate positive organizational behavior across the collective workforce (Seligman, 1980).
Using a Process to Achieve the Strategic Vision
Once the leader has provided an articulated and understood vision for where the company is going, the path must also be clearly understood and perceived as attainable by the workforce. The vision for achieving the strategic goal will determine the degree of motivation and organizational buy-in achieved and, therefore, directly impacts an organization's behavior. The workforce must be motivated to act beyond self-interests and collectively pursue the leader's higher goal or vision (Burns, 2012). As such, having an articulated path to achieving the strategic vision, the leader provides the rationale and sense of urgency driving the workforce's intellectual and emotional needs in embracing the path to achieving the new strategic vision (Kotter, 2012). This sense of urgency and motivation begins to help achieve the environment and conditions for the work ahead. When done right, the organizational buy-in will generate workforce advocacy for the company's vision internally and externally (Grau, 2014), thus improving the overall organizational behavior.
Engaging and Empowering the Workforce
Once the workforce is briefed on management's plan and they begin to understand the logic for the change, leadership must take the next step and build a coalition by formulating a Tiger Team (Kotter, 2012). Developing a Tiger Team helps engage the workforce and leverage their talents and diversity to help develop a clear and quantifiable approach to attaining the new normal or intended change. By creating a sense of urgency and forming a Tiger Team, management demonstrates their intention to empower their employees, making them a part of the solution through active involvement. This sharing of authority is an overt sign of trust from management, providing a formalized vehicle for the workforce to participate, share ideas, and have a say in the company’s future (Kotter, 2012). This kind of workforce shares knowledge because they trust their leadership, motivating them to worktoward the organization's vision proactively, and they live within an organizational culture that rewards crosstalk, knowledge sharing, and proactiveness, an environment that provides meaning and instills pride (Seligman, 1980).
Investing in the Workforce
Formulating a Tiger Team and its associated training is a second overt commitment by management to investing in their people. This investment continues to drive organizational behavior positively (Carson, 2020). The Tiger Team members start to advocate internally to the rest of the workforce for their experience on the team. They advocate for the outcomes of using the Tiger Team by management and tell others about the experience, additional training, newfound skills, and direct access to discuss ideas and recommendations with senior management. This access and involvement help shape the new vision's narrative and drive workforce buy-in (Bunn, 2013).
Codifying the Mechanics of the Vision
As the Tiger Team produces quick wins and begins to develop new systems, policies, procedures, and processes, management must begin to codify these concurrent changes and take time to staff and socialize with the total workforce. “Successfully implementing a new or emerging change in an organization requires removal of organizational hindrances coupled with the institution of incentives to promote the change” (Kamara, 2018, p.78).
The Tiger Team should be the entity that briefs the workforce to provide a more vital buy-in approach by allowing the team members, the workforce, to advocate and explain the logic from their perspective on why the change is necessary and why it should be incrementally implemented as they aspire to the strategic vision (Kotter, 2012).
When the Tiger Team achieves this level of credibility and trust with the workforce, it is the management’s responsibility to codify, train, and implement these changes. Also critical is the management's responsibility to lead by monitoring the newly codified systems to see if they work and, if not, assess why and return the challenges to the Tiger Team.
Adjusting to and Leading within the New Vision
Although a strategic vision is rarely achieved, the aspiration of striving toward this vision leads to a culture of continuous improvement and workforce development. When the workforce begins to believe and trust in their leaders, the circle of trust is closed, and the organizational behavior galvanizes into a particular form of organizational citizenship (Grau, 2014).
No two companies are the same, nor are any company cultures/behaviors. What is shared is the mutual trust between management and the workforce and the workforce's willingness to feel empowered to lean forward, innovate, take prudent risks, and openly advocate for the company. Employees with a strong organizational behavior believe their “leaders are willing [to stimulate their employees intellectually] and able to show their employees new ways of looking at old problems, to teach them to see difficulties as problems to be solved and to emphasize rational solutions” (Bass, 1990, p.4).
Conclusion
Presenting a clear strategic vision of what a company's purpose is and outlining a clear path to aspire to and or eventually achieve this vision is one of the most logical and clearcut methods leaders can use to create a solid and positive organizational behavior. Trust breeds innovation, empowerment, and internal and external advocation for what the company stands for and how management is expertly navigating the workforce toward an inspirational, and mutually supporting outcome. (Bass, 1990).
Organizations that can achieve this level of trust are more likely to be successful, motivated, and proactive companies with exceptional company culture and behavior…attracting exceptional talent. As Carson (2020) contends, ideal organizations are self-motivated and leverage the totality of their entire workforce. A clear strategic vision and an empowered and engaged workforce that embraces change is a great place to work and thrive (Barbuto, 2005).
References
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