Organizational Behavior (Stephen Robbins)

OBAT WORK

28 Part 1 Understanding the Workplace

contexts. Continuing to use traditional skills and practices

that worked in the past is not an option. The growth in self-

employment also indicates a need to develop more inter-

personal skills, particularly for anyone who goes on to build

a business that involves hiring and managing employees.

Exhibit 1-6 outlines the many skills required of today’s

manager. It gives you an indication of the complex roles

that managers and employees fill in the changing work-

place. The skills are organized in terms of four major roles:

maintaining flexibility, maintaining control, maintaining an

external focus, and maintaining an internal focus. The

Learning About Yourself Exerciseon page 23 helps you

identify your own strengths and weaknesses in these skill

areas so that you can have a better sense of how close you

are to becoming a successful manager. For instance, on the

flexibility side, organizations want to inspire their employees

toward high-performance behaviour. Such behaviour

includes looking ahead to the future and imagining possible

new directions for the organization. To do these things,

employees need to think and act like mentors and facilita-

tors. It is also important to have the skills of innovators and

brokers. On the control side, organizations need to set clear

goals about productivity expectations, and they have to

develop and implement systems to carry out the production

process. To be effective on the production side, employees

need to have the skills of monitors, coordinators, directors,

and producers. The Working With Others Exerciseon page

24 will help you better understand how closely your views

on the ideal skills of managers and leaders match the skills

needed to be successful in the broad range of activities that

managers and leaders encounter.

At this point, you may wonder whether it is possible for

people to learn all of the skills necessary to become a mas-

ter manager. More important, you may wonder whether

we can change our individual style, say from more control-

ling to more flexible. Here’s what Peggy Witte, who used to

be chair, president, and CEO of the now-defunct Royal Oak

Mines, said about how her managerial style changed from

controlling to more flexible over time: “I started out being

very dictatorial. Everybody in head office reported to me. I

had to learn to trust other executives so we could work

out problems together.”^42 So, while it is probably true that

each of us has a preferred style of operating, it is also the

case that we can enhance the skills we have or develop

new ones if that is something we choose to do. Learning to

EXHIBIT 1-6 Skills for Mastery in the New Workplace

Source:R. E. Quinn, Beyond Rational Management(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988), p. 86.

Flexibility

Internal External

Control

Mentor Innovator

1. Understanding
   yourself and others


2. Interpersonal
   communication


3. Developing
   subordinates


4. Team building


5. Participative
   decision making


6. Conflict
   management


7. Receiving and
   organizing information


8. Evaluating
   routine information


9. Responding to
   routine information


10. Planning


11. Organizing


12. Controlling


13. Taking initiative


14. Goal setting


15. Delegating effectively


16. Personal productivity
    and motivation


17. Motivating others


18. Time and stress
    management


19. Building and maintaining
    a power base


20. Negotiating agreement
    and commitment


21. Negotiating and
    selling ideas


22. Living with change


23. Creative thinking


24. Managing change

Facilitator

Monitor

Director

Producer

Broker

Coordinator