Background: Development Opportunity

An online meal delivery organization has established a significant market presence in its third year of operation. Tremendous customer increases have required new service representatives to be hired. Their responsibilities included telephonic operations to respond to new customer account establishment, customer orders and returns, customer comments and complaints, billing and refunds, product availability and substitutions, and general service inquiries. Each area has a service team of individuals and a leader unique to the customer response category handled by each team.

To ensure customer service initiatives align with organizational values and goals, the human resources department has consulted with the organization’s stakeholders to establish a performance management program. The program will provide the service representative employees with tangible metrics from which a performance rating process will be implemented. The leaders of each team will be accountable for executing a perpetual program of performance measurement, performance appraisal, and performance management for each of their subordinates. The organization values “people and their collective skills, abilities, and experience, coupled with their ability to deploy interests of the organization are recognized as making a significant contribution to organizational success and as constituting a significant source of competitive advantage” (Armstrong, 2006, p. 38).

Strategic Leadership Development: Mitigating Liability

The employee handbook is the foundation for the human resources department’s content from which the rating system program is formulated. The guidelines provide an organizational structure for performance management by calibrating necessary actions, activities, and process steps that diagnose team cultures, organizational culture, and the strategic initiatives at the business core. Managers and leaders rely upon published guidelines to monitor performance metrics from a source that is equitable to all employees and as insurance that leadership perspectives, as they relate to employee conduct and performance, are objective, unbiased, and supported by organizational integrity.

Initial guidelines for leader execution of the new program include:

| – Leaders are responsible for managing employees’ performance with fairness, consistency, and substantiation during coaching and performance appraisal execution. | – Team leaders must confer with vertical leadership to determine performance benchmarks and coaching or corrective action indicators. | – Leaders must use sound business judgment representative of organizational guidelines and compliance policies. | – Leaders must communicate with human resources partners before performance appraisals, or corrective actions occur to ensure organizational risk for litigation due to actual or perceived bias is not evident (Seibert, 2017).

Documentation procedures for the performance management process significantly reduce the organizational risk for litigation due to actual or perceived bias. In addition, the accountability shared between contributors, the vertical of leadership, and human resources partners inherently build protection from exposure. Strict adherence also mitigates the potential for wrongful corrective actions, prejudice, and subjective terminations. All leaders must complete annual training and certification to attest to U.S. Labor Department legislation accountability, such as those required by the Equal Opportunity Employment Act, Anti-Discrimination Act, and Reasonable Accommodations Act. Cultural training to adopt the practices required for compliance further indemnifies the organization from repercussions due to sexual harassment or other non-objective criteria based on employee performance.

PSY FPX 6720 Assessment 6 Human Resources Strategic Plan for Leadership Development

The limitations of negative performance appraisal may include “value as it relates to contributing to organizational profitability, client and customer satisfaction, teamwork and collaboration, and professional skills” (McKenna, 2011, p. 11).

Strategic Leadership Development: Action Plan

Leaders will regularly monitor employee performance through a combination of reported metrics, scheduled discussions, feedback solicited from customers, clients, and business partners, and a thorough review of verbal and documented communications. Performance indicators during normal operations are systematically collected for extrapolation and analysis. Performance indicators are reviewed weekly to allow for troubleshooting, corrective steps, and identification of best practices to benefit the entire team. That recognition for good performance is emphasized.

At the start of each measurement year, the customer service representatives formally provide organizational goals and performance targets. A template for each staff member is housed in the employee file; leaders, employees, and human resources partners may access the template at any time to share visibility to active performance strategy and adherence factors. The common objectives and expected performance outcomes are transparent and allow for tangible progress benchmarking. “Structure involves the manipulation of task assignments, resources, as well as vertical and horizontal role relationships” (Hollenbeck et al., 2002, p. 599).

Analysis of Implementation: Benefits, Challenges, and Limitations

Purposeful delivery of the customer service representative’s performance management program consists of “reconciling the requirements of the organization with the capabilities of the operational resources” (Coghlan & Coughlan, 2014, p. 376). The followership achieves collective performance metric achievement when it receives coaching from the leadership that is prequalified as being emergent from existing collaborative relationships.

Expectancy Theory (Vroom, 1964) can be applied to leader-facilitator training to build collective motivation for implementing the performance management process. First, there is appreciation and empathy for the leaders; the new performance management initiative will require additional responsibilities for leaders to integrate into their existing roles. Performance monitoring requires additional energy for individualized relationship investments through one-to-one discussions, routine team and group meetings, documentation of interactive experiences and performance metrics, data analytics, and vertical communications with stakeholders.

Plan for Post-Intervention Measurement

Irrespective of the purpose for evaluating performance, Schrauger’s self-enhancement theory (1975) presents findings that suggest favorable appraisals are conducive to favorable outcome feedback while receiving a negative performance evaluation is equated to an unfavorable experience rating. For this reason, post-intervention deployment measurement should consist of multiple exercises and data analysis from which comprehensive feedback is constructed.

360-degree rating is an inclusive methodology that provides experience rating from various relationship sources: stakeholders, leaders, subordinates, peers, and customers. The organization will most effectively interpret the return-on-investment value for implementing a formalized performance management program by measuring outcomes from each perspective to determine if metrics improvement has been achieved as anticipated.

Conclusion

Beer, Eisenstat, and Spector (1990) corroborate a strategy for blending intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems in their depiction of fundamental employee performance improvement. They relate to the reader how extrinsic rewards such as praise, pay, and training opportunities are the essential incentive for solving concrete business issues when they are combined with intrinsic motivators that renew the organizational context. Leadership must engage in rigorous human capital-centric programs that consist of training, shared leadership, scorecard and metrics reporting tools, communication proficiencies, and standardized performance review methodology to ensure the foundation for success is available to every employee.

Mobilizing commitment through shared vision and teamwork encourages employee participation, coordination, and collaboration which culminates in the development of self-commitment to learning new behaviors. Leaders encourage continuous improvement initiatives through management delivery by installing an oversight team to monitor new behavioral processes and planning initiatives. Finally, employee assessments in the performance management process must be geared in such a fashion as to provide strong indicators as to whether or not the workforce will ultimately remain capital assets of the organization. For modern organizations to survive relentless paces of changes or face extinction, leadership engagement with employees must demonstrate the ability to expand adaptability for improving performance results through expansive development patterns.

References

Armstrong, M. (2006). A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice (10th ed.). Kogan Page Ltd.

Coghlan, D., & Coughlan, P. (2014). Effecting Change and learning in networks through network action learning. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 50(3), 375-400.

Hollenbeck, J. R.

et al. (2002). Structural contingency theory and individual differences: Examination of external and internal person-team fit. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(3), 599-606.

McKenna, P. (2011). Addressing Performance Issues. Of Counsel, 35(11), 5-13.

Seibert, K. (2017, May 17). Performance Manager Leader Toolkit. Retrieved from HubConnect: https://hubconnect.uhg.com/docs/DOC-88456

Schrauger, S. (1975). Self-enhancement theory.

PSY FPX 6720 Assessment 6 Human Resources Strategic Plan for Leadership Development

Vroom, V. H. (1964). Work and motivation. John Wiley & Sons.