Supervisor and subordinate communication in organizational contexts

Supervisor & Subordinate Communication

Supervisor Effectiveness

As consumer needs are changing globally, countless corporations are turning towards strategies that will lend them a competitive edge over their competitors that focus and foster innovation in various spheres of their business activities. These competitive strategies have made it necessary that the taskforce of any organization turn towards acquiring new knowledge and skills, maybe even to carry out the same jobs (Salas & Cannon-Bowers, 2001). According to American Society for Training and Development (2007) organizations in the United States have spent $134.9 billion for learning and development expense.

Alongside the escalating focus on-job learning, empirical studies also suggest a takeover of responsibilities by supervisors and line managers from the HR function of the company so as to see an improvement in the overall performance of the workforce (Hall & Torrington, 1998; McGovern, Gratton, Hope-Hailey, Stiles, & Truss, 1997). This shift in the responsibilities has added to the duties of front-line supervisors from just of monitoring and administrating to assessing and appraising performance related jobs of employees and aligning it with the long-term strategic aims of the corporation (Hales, 2005; Purcell & Hutchinson, 2007).

One of the ways supervisors emphasize upon performance enhancement of employees is to provide them with one-to-one counseling and training to assist in their daily work-related dealings. Even though this process can be termed informal training, it in reality involves the pursuit of an unstructured and a developmental approach, like with coaching that revolves around individualized feedback on the employees' performance (Heslin, VandeWalle, & Latham, 2006). As compared to a formal training, coaching costs much less and suits the present demands of the continuous learning process at the workplace more appropriately.

However, supervisors may not necessarily stay with one approach in order to enhance the performance of the employees. Even though they are not directly concerned with the primary functions of an HR department of a company, such as recruiting, remuneration and etc. their main duties does include interacting and managing the taskforce of an organization. They can influence the development of a corporate atmosphere that facilitates communications between groups and encourages continuous learning and teamwork (Argote and McGrath, 1993) and fortifies the individualized sessions with employees. Group management practices, which are activities that improve work relationships, can be an effective way to deal with work that is not heavily reliant on closely organized groups (Hackman, 1987; Hackman and Wageman, 2005).

The literature available for HR describes three aspects to the performance enhancing system: training investment, interactive and skill-based work, problem solving capabilities and incentive driven efforts (Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, & Kalleberg, 2000; Batt, 2002; Delery, 1998). Studies have shown that trained supervisors can enhance the performance of employees by an understanding of these three dimensions and the connection between coaching and other HR activities. The difference between the various supervisory sessions that including one-to-one counseling and group management practices has both direct and collective impacts on employee performance. The collective benefits vary depending upon whether the activities are aligned to a certain factor or occur regularly (Kozlowski & Salas, 1997). Moreover, practices of management that are developed to enhance performance needs to be comprehended keeping in mind the technologies in the workplace that both enable and limit those practices.

Training Sessions: individualized or organization-wide

There is an understanding that the research related to training should have a more organization-wide focus then be individualized. One set of studies has considered the workplace as influencing a person's notions and beliefs such as training motivation (Quinones, 1995), opportunities to perform (Ford, Quinones, Sego, & Sorra, 1992), and supervisors' support (SmithJentsch, Salas, & Brannick, 2001). Again, the limitation of these approaches is that they assess things at an individual level.

A second set of studies has perceived the workplace in the context of employees' opinion of the training culture and the results show a positive relationship between shared perceptions of training culture with post-training attitudes of employees (Rouiller & Goldstein, 1993; Tracey, Tannenbaum, & Kavanaugh, 1995). None of these studies point out the role of managers.

The approach developed by Eduardo Salas, Kevin Kozlowski, and colleagues (Kozlowski & Salas, 1997; Salas & CannonBowers, 2001), on the other hand is based on a more integrated and a "systems" approach. The studies reflect the concept of collective organization wide effects rather than focusing on individual effects. This model is multilevel and focuses on organizational factors operating at a higher level of analysis.

Coaching

Effective supervisors have been seen to use coaching as a method to communicate and clarify their aims and expectations to the workforce, offer pointers and opinions and make problem solving easier for employees (Heslin et al., 2006). The process revolves around continuous discussions that facilitate employees in developing skills and productive behavior (Chao, 1997; D'Abate, Eddy, & Tannenbaum, 2003). While coaching emphasizes on short-term and specific enhancements on performance, mentoring focuses on the long-term providing psychological counseling.

Coaching does not always have an expert of a field transferring knowledge to the employees but it involves the employees acquiring more confidence and strategies to improve their performance. For instance, helping employees with problem solving, goal setting, task assistance etc. are all part of coaching (Ellinger, Ellinger, & Keller, 2003). The impact of supervising on employees can be identified in three main areas such as in the acquisition of training and skills, in the improvement of motivation and developments in their learning process.

It is an effective method of acquiring skills because of the constructive feedback mechanism that coaching entails (Heslin et al., 2006). The one-to-one counseling and guidance sessions carried out by supervisors help develop an individual's declarative and procedural knowledge (Kraiger, Ford, & Salas, 1993). Supervisor can be effective in assisting the taskforce in developing an understanding of an organization's products, consumers, processes, technologies etc. And enable them to emphatically communicate and deliver their services.

Effective supervision through coaching can also have a marked improvement on the motivation level of employees. It can clarify an organization's aims and objectives and help employees take initiatives that are aligned with the strategic objectives of an organization (Locke & Latham, 1990). According to Smither et al. (2003) employees who had access to counselors and supervisors were better able to set clear goals and seek constructive feedback on their performance. As coaching involves continuous interactions, it helps in improving peer relations and facilitating employees in understanding the use of synergestic efforts and knowledge (Mulec & Roth, 2005). Thus, when an employee is effectively supervised he is more likely to enhance his performance over period of time.

Managing work-groups

Aside from coaching, supervisors can have an impact on employee performance by influencing the work relationships they manage. One way of influencing peer relationships is to foster competitiveness, assuming that it will encourage employees to perform better and keep them self-motivated. Another way of achieving the same results could be of promoting an environment that rewards teamwork assuming that strengthening work relationships will increase the likelihood of employees learning from each other and will increase job satisfaction.

Trained and effective supervisors have a positive impact by influencing social relationships at workplace so that it fosters a motivated environment and facilitates problem solving through teamwork. One way of doing that is to put new employees with more senior ones who have experience to deal with idiosyncratic work systems (Stajkovic & Luthans, 1997). Rewards are also an effective way of encouraging team work (Sewell, 1998).

Business processes and supervisor effectiveness

Supervisors are generally not involved in the designing of technical systems which facilitate or limit learning opportunities but these systems set the undertone for employee performance. There are two types of technologies that are involved in call center performance and that is, the level of process automation and the extent of process change. Process automation enhances performance by increasing effectiveness. However, the level of automation differs from setting to setting.

When employees attain the relevant knowledge and skills required to perform a certain set of duties, the benefits of training increases with the number of opportunities employees are exposed to, to implement the things they were trained for. When the level of automation rises in an organization opportunities to implement acquired knowledge decreases as human involvement becomes less. In such situation coaching may not play as bigger a part as it does generally thereby giving evidence to suggest that there is negative correlation between the benefits of coaching and process automation.

Continuous alternations in technical systems are a regular occurrence in corporations in modern times as employers continuously keep their technologies up-to-dated or as corporations undergo changes in their structures or product lines. Technical changes do not always improve efficiencies even if they are made with that purpose in mind (McAfee, 2002) and are likely to reduce the level of performance the first time they are implemented. Thus, process changes result in lower employee performance over the following time period as compared to process automation.

Supervisors can effectively enhance performance if they are able to adjust to the process upgrades quickly and by advising the employees to do the same through coaching and providing guidance. This is unlikely to occur as it is the employees themselves who are most familiar with the changes as they are the ones being directly impacted. Supervisors may be find it difficult to keep abreast of the continual changes so their coaching method is likely to reap lesser benefits than usual. Thus it can be assumed that performance will not as improved through coaching in times of process upgrades.

Ethical methods adopted by effective supervisors

Ethical supervisory methods in coaching and group management practices can turn out to be a great way of maintaining and improving performance while also managing to keep the costs of an organization in check. Employees are likely to become more productive and motivated as a direct result of ethical counseling and guidance provided by the supervisors who has to step up and take that role because of the demands of modern times. Handling administrative and monitoring tasks is not the only domain of supervisors any more (Gittell, 2001; Hales, 2005; McGovem et al., 1997; Purcell & Hutchinson, 2007).

As has been seen in the paper, effective supervisory function can improve the quality of the service being provided as it helps employees take new challenges while also improving their critical thinking and problem solving abilities. Such initiatives make employees better motivated and competent to handle tasks that require self-motivated efforts. Employees also acquire more motivation and job satisfaction from an environment where work relationships and team work are encouraged and rewarded -- something that a supervisory can effectively facilitate by performing his/her function of coaching, mentoring and offering guidance (Gittell, 2001; Hales, 2005; McGovem et al., 1997; Purcell & Hutchinson, 2007).