What managerial actions make an organization tick?
Trainers continually search for information on what makes an organization tick. In formal academic terms, we call it Organizational Behavior. Having a ground-level view of how managers impact organizational behavior is valuable to trainers, to ensure they’re focusing effort, energy, and funding on the right things.
Following other scholars in the field, and drawing on my own decades of experience and research, six common elements of Organizational Behavior are as follows:
- Clarity of Mission: Do we know where we’re going?
- Cohesion: Can we work together?
- Commitment and Resilience: Can we stay on course when things get tough?
- Leadership Commitment: How effective are leaders at getting things done?
- Communication: How effective is the communication process in this organization?
- Consequences / Accountability: Are fair and just practices used to ensure that people are treated according to their work?
Each of these elements is prevalent in leadership and organizational literature and everyday organizational life.
So, what managerial actions influence these six elements of Organizational Behavior?
I asked a room full of executives (40+) across a broad range of industries for their insights using a structured approach to harvesting data. We put up six flip charts with each of the elements of organizational behavior. Then we asked, “What managerial actions influence these elements of organizational behavior?”
The process of gathering data
Workshop attendees gathered in groups of 5-7 people, including directors, managers, and VPs. I asked them to write down behaviors that impeded or influenced each element of organizational behavior. Over a hundred responses were evaluated and placed into categories which are defined below. This study harvested a rich level of detail from organizational leaders who deal with organizational problems every day, and the study reveals some commonsense findings. This is a form of evidence-based practice.[1] Here are their insights into how managers influence the six elements of OB.
Developing data codes to categorize the output
The following codes emerged naturally from repeated (saturation) mentions of a concept, ranging from behavior to emotion to general competence. [Disclaimer: Dropping an item into a category was a judgment call on the part of the author in the presence of the participants with their agreement of my choice.]
MA = Managerial Awareness Do managers know what’s going on? Are managers paying attention? To employees? To customers? To issues? Or are they ignoring issues? Do they have insight into what creates and solves problems? Are they conscious of problems that must be addressed?
MC = Managerial Competence Do managers have the capability to do things right and fix what’s wrong? Are they skilled at their job of delegating, planning, and controlling? Do they have basic managerial skills? Writing skills? Technology skills?
MW = Managerial Willingness to resolve issues Do managers have the will to change things that are not going well? Do they play the blame game? Do they kick the can down the road and ignore tough problems? Or do they persist until problems are resolved?
MCR = Managerial Courage Are managers fearless in solving people problems? Or do they avoid conflict and do they allow poor performance to continue? Do they keep the one bad apple that is destroying the whole bunch? Do they cower in the face of struggle?
MP = Managerial Personality How frequently does managerial personality influence Organizational Behavior? Do the aspects of emotional intelligence have an impact on the elements of OB?
Process Output
To give you a sense of the work product, here is the flipchart output from a discussion of cohesion.
The word “COHESION” was listed at the top of a flipchart. Then participants were asked for managerial actions that influenced Cohesion.
Figure 1 – Flipchart Output
Combining all the data from all the flipcharts and condensing it into a chart, we get the following responses:
Chart 1. Number of responses for each element of organizational behavior
Workshop output
The fact that no one knew which element would get the most mentions adds credibility to the work. Any of the six could have stood out prominently, but Accountability was number one. Granted, the differences between accountability, comms, and leadership are not dramatic nor statistically significant (except between mission and accountability), but there is a trend.
Next, we analyzed which managerial actions most influenced organizational behaviors. Chart 10 provides the results.
Chart 10. What managerial actions influence specific organizational behavior?
Chart 10 demonstrates a fact that is not easily revealed by simply observing day-to-day operations. Accountability [24 mentions] is the most frequently mentioned element of organizational behavior influenced by managers. followed by Communications [20], Leadership [19], Cohesion [19], Resilience [18] and finally, Mission [10]. Accountability has a significant impact on Organizational Behavior.
Managerial Competence (52 mentions] including its opposite, incompetence, stands out as the key factor influencing Organizational Behavior in every category. Because of the number of mentions, I refine Managerial Competence a bit more in a later graph. Thus, Competence, the day-to-day operational decisions and skills of management, have the greatest impact overall on Organizational Behavior.
Managerial Awareness (20 total mentions) has the greatest impact on communication and collaboration. Managers who deal with issues with teams and ensure people know what’s happening are going to influence how people work together and the messages people are hearing.
Managerial Courage (17 mentions) is a major influence on the accountability element of OB. This is what we would expect. If managers don’t have the courage to address issues, non-performers will not be held accountable and thus the organization suffers with mediocrity, bullying managers, or poor performance.
Managerial Willingness to address issues (17 total mentions) has the largest impact on resilience. Again, common sense would tell us that an organization populated by managers and leaders willing to press on in the face of challenges would positively influence resilience. If managers persist, followers will persist!
Managerial Personality (6 mentions) is not a significant influence (under 20 mentions). This is interesting because we often believe that managerial personality (emotional intelligence and personality traits like narcissism) has a major impact on organizations. Personality traits are inherent and notoriously difficult to change, including ego investment and narcissistic behavior, anger, and bullying. This could also include elements of emotional intelligence. But the data tells a different story and dispels the popular notion of personality as supreme. So much of the leadership literature focuses on personality, we would expect it to be more predominant.
Bottom Line: Competence is superior to personality.
Further calibrating the study, the specific managerial behaviors influencing the elements of organizational Behavior identified in chart 2. Managerial Competence is #1.
Chart 2. Refining managerial competence
Most surprising to me is that Managerial Competence showed up so dramatically in this workshop format. We might expect things like emotional intelligence or personalities to be the biggest influencers in organizations because they are mentioned so frequently in management literature, but competence showed up as #1.
You’ll note that Managerial Courage showed up as the #1 influence on organizational accountability. Also notice Managerial Willingness showed up as #1 in organizational resilience. These findings are what we would expect from a commonsense, nonscientific look at organizational behavior.
So to analyze this a bit more, I specifically evaluated managerial competence by itself. What components of managerial competence showed up? We refined the data together.
Chart 3. Specific categories of Managerial Competence
Chart 3 breaks down the managerial competence issues. Imprecise communication is the number-one issue, followed by incomplete operational definitions (what is the mission? how do things work?), followed by lack of communication. Isn’t it remarkable that “imprecise (a.k.a. lazy) communication” tops the chart? A component of imprecise communication is “lacks operational definition,” which simply means management hasn’t taken the time to sort things out and make them workable, understandable, and usable for the team. Think of endless PowerPoint slides without any real actionable items, but lots of memes and charts and data that lead nowhere but dominating the meetings.
Conclusion: What did we learn from this data-harvesting exercise?
These specific managerial behaviors have a dramatic impact on organizations, yet I wonder how much effort, focus, funding, and leadership intent is applied to these simple, even mundane, yet critical behaviors of (1) precise communication, (2) working out how things will be done operationally, and (3) ensuring general levels of communication to an organization? After all, if we want to increase levels of organizational behavior, we need to get at the roots of the problem and take corrective actions.
Managerial competence can be, well, managed!
This workshop output provides you, the reader, with a very clear set of data to analyze the effectiveness of your own organization today – right now.
[1] The author did not know what to expect when the data was placed into categories. What emerged is simply a result of harvesting the data, also known as Grounded Theory Approach. I discovered emerging patterns in the data. Glaser, et al.
