Politics exist in all organizations but it is interesting to consider whether organizational politics can be a blessing or a curse. This blog post draws on scientific evidence to illustrate how politics can be effective for an organization through a) drawing on the political skills of the talent within the firm and b) implementing strategies that curtail ineffective organizational politics.
This blog discusses the importance of being politically skilled within work organizations. Organizational science researchers have highlighted the importance of political skills in being effective in the workplace. There is a body of research to show that those who have strong political skills tend to be better performers and enables the organization to be more effective. This blog describes the behaviors of politically skilled individuals and describes the positive outcomes associated with political skills. The blog also describes how organizations can implement interventions to enable employees to hone political skills.
The capability to lead and influence people is essential for success even beyond management. Professionals without a formal leadership role find themselves more and more often in situations where it is key to deliberately influence people, teams, divisions or the whole organization. Thus despite – or perhaps precisely because of its great relevance, leadership is often seen as something mystic. This impression is reinforced by a large number of popular business bestsellers about leadership, CEO biographies, and executive consultants who rely on individual experiences and anecdotal evidence when writing and talking about leadership. These sources generally provide only a limited informative value and therefore are of questionable use for the development of leaders and professionals.
The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been on the radar since the 1950s and has altered the way many organizations conduct business:To which extent should organizations align their goals to be socially responsible?Is it worth making a commitment to the social good?Which management practices help drive CSR?Insights from evidence-based management (EBM or EBMgt) show that CSR has many positive effects and does not have to mean altering a strategy - rather, small steps can yield big outcomes and help firms create sustainable value in mindset and organizational culture.
Organizations often face tensions in reconciling their social and ethical values with daily practice. Drawing from broader literature across sectors, it emerges that social justice management is an approach with useful practices for all organizations. Learning to balance moral value with material interest can help organizations stay on top of change, remain flexible, and gain more commitment from employees. Through social justice-based strategies for management organizations can learn to ‘practice what they preach’, reconcile tensions, and stay true to their values.
In the wake of the #MeToo Movement, more and more industries are grappling with the fact that sexual harassment is both a widespread and under-reported phenomenon (Khomami, 2017; Jagsi, 2018). Numerous victims, of a variety of genders, have suffered in silence for years while supervisors and colleagues subjected them to unwanted sexual attention. Now, suddenly, accusations are being made public, and victims are being met with greater public understanding and empathy.
For the past few decades, psychological researchers have been aware of a phenomenon called ego depletion: the wearing down of willpower and self-control. The most common understanding of the subject holds that willpower is a finite resource, which can be used up or exhausted over the course of a single day (Baumeister et al, 1998). This has been supported by research showing that when a person is asked to exert a ton of willpower (for example, by ignoring loud noises to complete a difficult task), they make more impulsive decisions afterward.
Here at CQ Net, we support managers and professionals to develop their employees, teams and organizations with evidence-based practices to the next performance level. This approach is based on the assumption that learning and development (L&D) is a key leadership responsibility. This is in contrast to the mainstream understanding of L&D which is mainly seen as a responsibility of the human resource (HR) department or external organizational development consultants. Taking this into consideration the question arises how managers and professionals can get into the driver seat when it comes to L&D. We collected a set of interventions that will help you to strengthen your and your organization’s L&D competencies.
High Reliability Organizations, also called HROs, manage to consistently deliver high performance over a long period of time in an extremely challenging environment. Learning the hard way is no option for HROs as they operate in areas where any mistake can have severe consequences. On top of this HROs manage to quickly adapt to changing circumstances and come up with innovative solutions to complex problems (Bierly et al. 2008). As managers from the private and public sector we were wondering what lessons we could learn from HROs. Starting from here, we had a look at research and theory behind HROs and derived five evidence-based practices you can implement in your organization.
Recently, there has been a trend among top-performing companies to reinvent their performance management systems. Organizations are discarding the traditional practice of evaluation through a system of training, promotion, and reward to a nimble system that works in the present moment (Buckingham & Goodall, 2015). These new systems focus on assessing future performance or potential rather than a focus on the past. This blog post will describe the latest innovations in performance management and their viability.
