Contemporary Issues of Management

¶ … close correlation between the concepts and applications of job rotation, job enlargement, and job enrichment. Job rotation is a managerial strategy in which employees rotate performing specific tasks or jobs within an organization at fairly regular periods of time. The point of this strategy is to make employees well rounded, and to see who has the greatest propensity of performing certain types of work. This strategy is distinct from job enlargement in that the latter involves increasing the quantity of tasks or assignments that employees have.

That increase may occur at regular intervals, or it may not. The chief difference is that the employee is still responsible for completing his original tasks as well as the additional ones. This is appropriate in situations in which organizations might be understaffed. The main distinction between job enrichment and job enlargement is the quality of the additional tasks included in an employee's list of responsibilities, which can include career development opportunities (Duffield et al., 2014, p. 697).

The tasks typically have more meaning and prestige within the organization -- which is not necessarily true of the tasks assigned via job enlargement. This method is advantageous for employees that are ambitious, and deservingly so. 2. Expectancy theory is a theory of management and motivation that was initially propagated by Victor Vroom (Renko et al., 2011, p. 667). This theory is best used in the workplace when management has a thorough knowledge of its employees, and therefore knows the best means of motivating them.

The three most important tenets of this theory are valence, expectancy, and instrumentality. Expectancy is the amount of confidence that an employee has in his or her own abilities, and what sorts of resources (training, tools, etc.) he or she needs to increase that confidence and his or her output. Valence refers to an employee's values in terms of emotional involvement. It is the degree to which employees are motivated by extrinsic and intrinsic motivating factors.

Instrumentality is the amount of belief employees have that management can actually deliver those rewards that employees want. This theory is best used to give employees what they want as a way of motivating them. 3. One of the chief responsibilities of management is to help employees manage their stress. Employees who have difficulty managing their stress are not as effective as they would be otherwise (Friedrich et al., 2015, p. 2). Therefore, it is the job of a manager to improve employee efficiency, which partly involves stress management.

In this regard, management is tasked with perceiving exactly what factors are contributing to employee stress and how they are doing so. After understanding both of these two facets of stress management, managers must determine ways to mitigate both those sources of stress and their effects on employees. Moreover, they must do so in a way that both helps individual employees as well as the unit they are managing altogether. They should make the necessary adjustments to support those they manage in both of these regards.

A critical element of contemporary management is relationships and shaping the way that people and individuals interact with each other. Stress is one of the priorities in this regard, as employees with low levels of stress are more efficacious than they are with high levels of stress. 4.There are a couple of reasons why merely using monetary rewards to motivate a workforce may not always be a good idea. For one, it is possible to induce an element of greed in one's company culture with an over-reliance on monetary compensation.

It is possible to result in situations in which employees turn cutthroat and attempt to sabotage one another simply so they can earn more money. Additionally, only using monetary compensation as a means of reward can become taxing to an organization and its capital. Utilizing other forms of motivation such as telecommuting, reduced hours, greater workplace and organizational responsibility, serve as viable means of motivating workers without necessarily draining an organization's capital.

It is also possible for organizations to reap monetary benefits by utilizing forms of motivation that are not strictly based on payment. For instance, companies can get health insurance packages that are less expensive to finance if there are an allotted number of employees than if they were simply to get a few such plans. These types of benefits are viable means of motivating employees. 5. The strategic argument for workplace diversity is distinct from those involving ethics or legality.

The crux of that argument is that it is advantageous in a number of ways for organizations to incorporate diversity in the workplace, particularly in a "supportive environment" (Rawt and Basergekar, 2016, p. 488). Perhaps the most salient way in which workplace diversity benefits the enterprise is by increasing the knowledge and skills pool.