Organisational Behaviour

A telecommunication firm is facing difficulties in the financial year 2002-2003 and I am the line manager of the software development group in this company. Chapter 4, in the book "Essentials of Organizational Behavior" by Stephen P. Robbins states that motivation theories are culture-bound (Page 53), hence to give this paper and the situation described in the question a different perspective I am going to set this telecommunications company named BPL Mobile in India and I am going to take into account the cultural factors affecting motivation and productivity and explain them in this paper.

My software development group has 15 employees working under me and we lost 3 employees due to lay offs. We supply software and training to about 25 stores in Bombay, India and those are specialty stores supplying only BPL cellular phone handsets and call plans (contract and prepaid) to the customers. Overall BPL Mobile is one of the major cellular phone companies in India, its main competitors being Orange (the British Telecommunications giant). In India Orange and BPL Mobile have a fair and equal share in the market of about 30% each and the rest belongs to the smaller companies. As chapter 2 describes the framework for assessing cultures, I would apply the following characteristics to Indian employees and customers (Page 18). The power distance in India is largely unequal, there exists an equal blend of individualism and collectivism, it is the quantity in life that has more importance and that is because India is a poor country, as far as uncertainty avoidance is concerned they prefer structured situations and finally people are long term oriented. Hopefully this gives you an idea of the corporate life in India. I will now go on to explain how I will handle the situation described in the question.

There are many people fighting for jobs in India but since I have collected a good team, which is now demoralized, it is my job to motivate them to perform better. According to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory (Page 43) the need for physiological needs will be primary but in the work environment safety and security needs will be of growing concern. The reason for this is that, since there is a vast population of qualified people waiting to be hired, people who have jobs are under pressure to maintain them. In such a situation, knowing that I have a qualified and valuable team with me, I would not like to hire different people and train them. For the same reason I would as a manager like to adopt Douglas McGregor's Theory Y and the assumptions entailed within it (Page 45) to apply to my workforce. Knowing that my people value their jobs, I would try and assure that they feel they are valuable to the company and to me. That I would do by periodically and critically reviewing their performance and getting feedback through them about the direction the company is taking. Talking with my team as a group and individually will ensure that I know what they expect and can reassure them of their place in the company. The Expectancy theory validates this point by stating "the strength of a tendency to act in a certain way depends on the strength of an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual" (Page 52).

Knowing what Frederick Herzberg says of the two-factor theory that "an individual's relation to work is basic and that one's attitude towards work can very well determine success or failure" (Page 45). The attitude of my workforce is what I as a manger have to maintain. To do so I would try and keep the optimism factor alive in the workforce and within myself.I would try and present examples of companies

in trouble and maintain that the work environment today calls for meeting such challenges with a positive attitude and that can make a difference between success and failure. It is important that a two way communication channel is left open all the time for me as a manager to be considered approachable by my team. Since power distance is largely unequal in India I would try and do things in a different way by reducing the gap between employees and their superiors. I believe that such communication can be useful to motivate the employees to stay with the company.

Goals, I believe are important guidelines to good performances. I will apply the goal setting theory because I would like my team to project themselves out of the box to fulfill these goals. Knowing that goals will set boundaries for my team I would like to set difficult goals that are determined with the help of my team. The knowledge that the team has participated in the goal setting process would enable the team members to think of the goals as personal achievements and that should motivate them to fulfill the goals even if they are hard to achieve (Page 49). The Reinforcement theory states "people will exert more effort on tasks that are reinforced than on tasks that are not" (Page 50). Applying this theory would ensure that people will be wary of the consequences of their actions. Adequately I will appreciate good performances and evaluate and redesign poor performances. Threatening people or demoralizing people will not help in the given situation. I will stress on the fact that I believe that communication is the strength with which I would like my team to operate. Of course I would make sure that respect and boundaries