High–Performance Work Practices

High –Performance work practices (HPWP) is a perspective which can hold that effective organizations incorporate several workplace practices that leverage the potential of human capital. According to John Tomer, the essential characteristics of HPWP are employee security, selective hiring of new personnel, self-managed teams and decentralization of decision making as basic principle of organization design, extensive training, reduced status distinctions and barriers across levels, and extensive sharing of financial and performance information throughout the organization.

There are five components of HPWP, which are self-managing work teams, employee involvement, integrated production technologies, organizational learning, and total quality management.

Self-managing work teams are groups of employees that carry out interdependent work with high levels of autonomy and responsibilities. Employee involvement is the best practice used when low involvement or parallel involvement such as suggestion boxes, moderate involvement or participative management such as increased responsibilities for daily work decision, and high involvement or employee empowerment.

Integrated production technologies are sets of tools used to enhance flexibility in production of services.

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Organizational learning is a practice that developed capabilities to adapt to their working environment and to gather information in order to anticipate future environmental change. Total quality management is a set of practices designed to make employees who assemble products or deliver services more responsible for the quality of those products and services.

The HPWP perspectives are starting with the idea that knowledge, skills and abilities which known as human capital that employees possess is a vital source of competitive benefit for an organizations (McShane, 2013).

The opportunities or minimize threats in the external environment that will be realized by the organization with the help of human capital. For example, a newly formed company cannot rapidly develop a workforce identical to a workforce at an established company. Many high performance work practices have been studied over the years. Read about the forms of employee involvement

It research that four practices with strong research support are employee involvement, job autonomy, employee competence, and performance or skill-based rewards. Furthermore, employee involvement and job autonomy can strengthen employee motivation as well as improve their decision making, organizational responsiveness and commitment to change. Another key variable in the HPWP model is employee competence. Organizations are in a favor and effective when they select and recruit people with relevant values, skills, knowledge and other personal characteristics.

Next, a fourth characteristic of high-performance organizations is that they link performance and skill development to various forms of financial and non-financial rewards valued by employees. The HPWP perspective is currently popular among Organizational Behavior experts and practitioners, but it also has its critics. Many studies have been done try to find out which practices can predict organizational performance without understanding why those practices should have this effect.

Recently, researchers have investigated that numerous potential high-performance work practices, but they will concentrated on four that are recognized in most studies: employee involvement, job autonomy, competency development, and performance’s reward and competency(Von Glinow, 2010) . Telstra strengthened these four practices can improve customer service, particularly in its contact centers. Each of these four work practices individually can improve organizational performance, but study has suggested that they have a stronger effect when combined together.

The two factors – involving employee in decision making and give them more autonomy over their working activities. It tends to strengthen employee motivation as well as improve their decision making, organizational responsiveness and commitment to change. In the high–performance workplace, employee involvement and job autonomy likes to take the form of self-directed teams. The third factor, the development of employee competence, refers to recruiting, selecting and training people in order that the company will employs people with the relevant skills, values, knowledge and other personal characteristics.

The fourth high-performance work practice involves linking performance and skill development to the various forms of monetary and non-monetary rewards valued by the employees. Content Weak Leadership The workplace problem or issue that relevant to High-Performance Work Practices (HPWPs) is leadership. According to Sung and Ashton (2005), the role of leadership is very important in implementing HPWP. Leadership is the central in shaping issues such as culture and expectations within an organization. Therefore, leadership is important in both conception and developments of HPWPs.

Management levels are not only at line manager level, but also at senior level to drive HPWPs in organization. The directors who implement HPWPs have the willingness and desire to make changes, to produce excellent result through people. Strong and well-articulated purpose is vital to implement and sustain HPWPs successfully. Leadership can work through several categories of HPWPs such as high involvement practices, human resource practices and reward and commitment practices to achieve organizational goals. The diagram below will show the relationship between HPWPs and leadership. (Sung & Ashton, 2005)

In the implementation of HPWPs, there will be many kinds of leaders especially action based leaders. These leaders are powered by their narcissistic personality (Paul Robinson, 2009). However, some of these leaders are lack of interest in mentoring others. Lack of empathy and extreme independence make it difficult for narcissists to mentor and be mentored. Normally, narcissistic leaders set little intention on mentoring. Therefore, most of them may prefer to lead and control others. They do not follow advices given by others but only listen to opinions. They also make their own decisions with their gut feeling above rationale.

Besides, they actually are highly aware of whether or not people are with them passionately. They can be brutally manipulative. Therefore, they can also easily stir up people with against them. However, some people are willing to tolerate them. When come to teamwork, these leaders want a group of yes-man which followers who listen to their commands. The Organizational Behavior theory that related to the workplace issue or problem is transformational leadership theory. According to Paul Robinson, 2009, transformational leadership theories are based on the ides of some form of collaborative greater good.

Transformational leaders can be known as productive narcissism or change leadership. The leaders need to acquire skills, knowledge and qualities in the change management. Through the transformational leadership theory, awareness of value and importance of tasks can be developed, their aspirational needs can be appealed to and activated, and their attention and mind on achieving the objectives will be focused by leaders rather than just personal interest. According to Bernard M. Bass, the transformational leaders should also encourage their followers to challenge the status quo.

According to the Pachamama Alliance, there are 4 key elements of transformational leadership which are idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration. Idealized influence is that leader is a charismatic role model who builds confidence and trust. Inspirational motivation is that the leader provides meaningful work and set high standard. Intellectual simulation is that leader encourages creativity by questioning common assumption and beliefs. Individual consideration is that the leader is mentor by responding to individual needs.

In implementation of HPWPs, some leaders especially action based leaders adopt transformational leadership theory to lead their employees. They do highly emphasis on managing and monitoring their employees and group performance. They focus on their employees’ work in order to carefully assess any deviations from organizational standards. Therefore, they do not highly focus on relationship between leaders and employees. Because of high reliance on principle of “rational man”, the leaders often think that they make the right decision in every situation. Therefore, they do not follow advices given by others but only listen to opinions.

According to the Steve Jobs case, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers is highly encouraged innovation and creativity among the Apple employees. He was transformational in the work with Pixar animation and made Apple company become valuable companies. He displayed unwavering resolve when making decisions and strong ambition for company and its future success. During his return to Apple Inc. in 1997, he accomplished tasks to streamline the product line of Apple Ins. According to Linzmayer, 2004, he stripped away things that drained the attention and resources of the organization but did not deliver significant impact.

Besides, he insisted on iPod music player’s launch which was not expected to succeed, and continued its production. From the case, he did not follow advices given by others when making decision. . He made his own decisions with his gut feeling above rationale. Employee Lack of Self-efficacy One of the workplace issues related to the topic is that employee lack of defined or enforced core values. Research shows that how an individual conducts himself or herself is important to the long-term health of the team.

Without some standard of conduct usually defined by core values and enforced through a 360-degree appraisal process, collaborative behavior and team cohesion quickly erode. In another words, the issues highlighted the essential of self-efficacy in an organization. Self-efficacy, or a person’s self-belief in his ability to perform specific tasks, has been correlated with workplace performance, burnout, the experience of stress and role adjustments. Given its influential role on performance, it is critical for managers and employees to understand the role of self-efficacy in the workplace.

Be in line with Stanford University psychologist Alfred Bandura, self-efficacy affects learning and performance in the workplace in several ways. First of all, self-efficacy beliefs affects the choices individuals make, degree of challenge of their goals and their level of commitment to personal goals. Employees with high levels of self-efficacy will choose more challenging goals for themselves and vice versa. Besides, employees learn, perform and putting effort at levels consistent with their self-efficacy beliefs.

Employees with high self-efficacy will work hard to learn how to perform new tasks, because they are confident they will be successful. Self-efficacy also affects the persistence with which people attempt new and difficult tasks. Employees with high-self-efficacy also will persist longer in the face of challenging tasks because they are more confident that they will learn and successfully execute the task. Next, self-efficacy influences how resilient employees will be in the face of adverse situation and respond to disappointment. Individuals who have higher self-efficacy will recover faster from failure than those who don’t.

Furthermore, self-efficacy decides the amount of stress and anxiety individuals experience when they engage in a task. Individuals with lower levels of self-efficacy may experience a more intense physiological stress reaction in the face of challenges than those who have higher levels of self-efficacy. This might lead to low performance on the task and the degree to which they persevere in the face of the challenge Standford professor of psychology Albert Bandura (1977) developed the organizational behavior theory of self-efficacy to address how an individual perceives his ability to perform a task within a specific context.

Self-efficacy is similar to self-esteem, but the difference is that it is specific to task performance. An understanding of self-efficacy is valuable for every business professionals who depend on workplace performance and productivity, because self-efficacy levels influence thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Self-efficacy refers to what you believe about yourself, rather than how you truly are. Out-of-balance self-efficacy definitely affects productivity.

An employee with low self-efficacy run the risk of performing tasks below her actual ability level because she believes she can only perform to that level, and she may not recognize her aptitude to do the work. Besides that, self-efficacy that runs too high may give an individual an unrealistic picture of his ability to do a certain task. Work performance is a reflection of how employees feel about themselves and their work. If an employee is proud of the job that he or she does, the work quality will reflect that. Employees who have bad self-images are more likely to exhibit those negative feelings in their work.

On the other hand, behavioral plasticity theory is offered as an explanation for the moderating effects of self-efficacy on role perception-employee response relationships. According to this theory, because individuals with high self-efficacy are more reactive than their counterparts with low self-efficacy, they are more compatible to adverse role conditions, such as role conflict, ambiguity, and overload, and a poor work environment and poor supervisory support. For example, a leader with low self-ef?cacy may ?nd the task unbearable and highly stressful, whereas a self-ef?cacious leader may perceive it as easonable and not stressful, and he or she may even welcome the challenge. This is in line with research indicating that low self-ef?cacy can make people believe that tasks are harder than they actually are. They had been avoiding challenging tasks in workplace. Their inner mindset believes that difficult tasks and situations are beyond their capabilities. Let’s talk about the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg as a real life example. Zuckerberg is known to be incredibly confident and decisive in his decisions. When he strives for something he reaches it and stands strong on the decision. Mark Zuckerberg tends to have high self-efficacy.

Zuckerberg has confidence in his abilities and he strongly believes in himself that he can do more than other people cant. People with self-efficacy tend to overcome obstacles and work toward a specific goal. Zuckerberg has done this and proven his success with the achievement of Facebook. Self-efficacy beliefs are the most central and pervasive influences on the choices employees make and goals they set for themselves. It also strongly affects their approach to a task, motivation to engage in a task, the level of effort they exert, degree of persistence when facing a difficult task and their performance on the task.

It is therefore critical that managers seek to enhance self-efficacy beliefs in employees in an effort to achieve high performance work practice. Low Employee Engagement High performance work practices (HPWPs) perspective is a perspective which holds that effective organizations incorporate several workplace practices that leverage the potential of human capital. Human capital is the knowledge, skills and abilities that employees possess is an important source of competitive advantage for organizations.

Those HPWPs includes employee’s involvement and job autonomy, employee competence and performance. (Mc Shane, 2011) According to Kevin Kruse (2013), decreasing employee engagement translates to real declines in business outcomes such as service, quality, retention, and revenue was suggested by him after summarized the findings of 28 studies. For example, an 800 person hospital in Oklahoma was experiencing a high turnover of nursing and support staff and having difficulty filling the vacancies in late year 2002. It was bvious for the increased pressure on the existing staff who where responsible to provide essential services the patient resulting in the reduction of satisfaction in patient due to the lack of employees (Keith Ayers, n. d ) The hospital can continue to operate as usual because this situation is widespread in the healthcare industry and easily just accepted that their situation was unavoidable. However, things were seeing differently by President and Vice President of Support Services. They realized that most people do not leave organizations but they leave managers.

So, they understood that the starting point for creating a workplace that people want to stay and other people want to come and work in, is leadership. (Keith Ayers, n. d ) Therefore, in this case, according to the theory of employee engagement, it is important that the leaders of an organization to ensure that all their staff members are fully engaged and their jobs are fully switched on by them. The staff is fully committed is an ideal that in the same way entrepreneurs care for their businesses or people in general look after their own household.

This is because being engaged simply means that employees are fully involved and interested in the work so that it really holds their attention and inspires them to do their best. (Jon Hellevig, 2012) Besides, employee engagement is also a two-way street: a reciprocal relationship of trust and respect between employer and employee. An organization’s executives and managers are required to communicate clearly and extensively, with the employees about their expectation, the employees are empowered at the appropriate levels of their competence, and a working environment and corporate culture were created in which engagement will thrive. Jon Hellevig, 2012) However, the theory is needed to counter the habits and practices rooted in hundreds of years of mismanagement. Few employees are truly engaged in their work due to those bad practices in the organization. (Jon Hellevig, 2012) Next, according to (Jarboe, Yudken, n. d. ), there are decline in defense markets was suffered by Lockheed Martin’s Government Electronic Systems plant in Moorestown, New Jersey and layoffs were widespread in the early 1990s. By 1992, it looked as if the plant would have to shut down, elimination hundreds of jobs.

However, an enlightened decision was made by the management which it formed a joint partnership with the international Union of Electrical Workers Local 106 in order to implement a high performance work system. They understand that the employee engagement is important in this situation. Hence, Aon Hewitt defines engagement as the state of emotional and intellectual involvement that motivates employees to do their best work. Both the individual’s state of engagement as well as organizational antecedents was examined by the Aon Hewitt model.

Moreover, this employee engagement model has been tested and validated and is supported by years of research in the area of organizational psychology. (Aon Hewitt, 2012) Engagement is an individual psychological and behavioral state in this model. There are divided into three elements which are Say, Stay and Strive. Say is mean that consistently speak positively about the organization to co-worker, potential employees and customers. Stay is mean how an intense desire to be part of the organization and lastly, Strive is exert extra effort and engage in behaviors that contribute to business success. Aon Hewitt, 2012) When the management does not speak positively about the organization to their employees, and make them stay in the organization by contributing to the organization will lead to low employee engagement. Therefore, by understanding an organization’s engagement level is of little value without knowing what actions will be most effective in increasing engagement. This is a critical part of Aon Hewitt’s Engagement Model. There are typically six major categories known as “Engagement Drivers” are the factors that can potentially drive an individual’s engagement.

They are categories as work, people, opportunities, total reward, company practices and quality of life. (Aon Hewitt, 2012) Hence, in order to understand Lockheed Martin’s Government Electronic Systems plant in Moorestown’s engagement level, they have to analysis that the six major categories which are work, people, opportunities, total reward, company practices and quality of life. In their analysis describes the employment experience, what has changed, and what engages the current workforce.

By identifying these drivers, how to meet the needs of employees can understand by the employers and also they can focus on the specific areas of improvement that have the largest impact on engagement and business results. (Aon Hewitt, 2012) Recommendation One of the workplace problem or issues of HPWP is leadership that a leader do not follow advices given by others but only listen to opinions. The suggestion is a leader should be more openness to new things and new ideas. Organizations can set a company policy that every important decision must get support by more than half of the upper management people.

Those upper management people can be include CEO, COO, HOD of every department in the company and also director. The reasons to choose this suggestions is because a leader cannot easily decide what they want to do after company develop this policy and more advantage and disadvantage of the decision can be explore by more of the upper management people, because a person view normally is not enough to get the big picture of the decision compare to a group of people. So if the advantage is more than the disadvantage then they can decide to go on.

The other workplace problem or issues of HPWP that appear in leadership is action based leaders lack of interest in mentoring others. The company can set a special reward only for leaders that if they mentoring out best worker for the company, they can get high reward in money or others benefit, so leader get motivation to mentoring company employees. The reasons this suggestion be choose is because rewards always can motivate people to work more hard or done their job more efficiency and effectively, leaders will choose to give more mentoring to employees in order to get the rewards.

Next, a brutally manipulative leader is one of the workplace problem or issues of HPWP, some of the action based leaders like to control others. The company should send this type of leaders to the company counselor in order to reduce the brutally manipulative level. Even though not all company got counselor inside their company but the company can hire outside counselor go to the company. The purpose to get a counselor is because counselor can give advice to leaders how to reduce their brutally manipulative level and help them find out why they get high brutally manipulative level, maybe because of their personality, job task or others more.

Let the leaders know the way to control the brutally manipulative level can help them work well with employees. After that, transformational leader that do not highly focus on relationship between leaders and employees also is one of the workplace problem or issues of HPWP. To solve this problem or issues, company can do more events to close up the relationship of the leaders and employees. Events that can be done by company example like company employees family day, all family members of the company leaders and employees are invite to join the event.

Company annual dinner also is one of the events that can close up the relationship, by chit chatting in the dinner without work stress can let the employees close to each other’s more easily. By develop a strong relationship between leaders and employees can let the company done their target more effectively and efficiency. Furthermore, employee lack of defined or enforced core values that cause lower levels of self-efficacy may experience a more intense physiological stress reaction in the face of challenges than those who have higher levels of self-efficacy.

Company can send them to the motivation campaign or training to increase their self-efficacy. The reason this suggestion be choose is because through training, trainer will motivate employees to have more confidence when they face to their job task, they will teach them how to motivate and push themselves when they feel stress in their work or challenges. Others than that, over level of self-efficacy may give an individual an unrealistic picture of his ability to do a certain task. The over level of self-efficacy will cause people too confidence believe that he or she can done the job task successful.

To solve this problem, leaders of the company can assign some hard job task to the over level self-efficacy employee and set a date let them past up their work, if they cannot done their hard job task then just help them to done it in order to let them know that did not always confidence that they can done all the job task as aspect and always remind them that a person must have confidence to themselves but not too over confidence because every people also will be face problem in the future no matter how strong you are.

This suggestion will be choose is because if a over level self-efficacy people cannot done their job task in aspect, this will lower down their self-efficacy level and bring them back to the normal self-efficacy level, so they will think back to the reality. Last but not least, low employee engagement which will lead to low performance in the company also is a workplace problem or issues of HPWP. The first suggestion is company can increase the employee’s salary or give more bonuses at the end of the year to increase employee engagement.

After the increase in salary or bonus, employee will feel that they have been value by the company, so employee will start increasing their engagement to their job and their performance in the company also will increase. This suggestion will be choose is because money is the bests way to increase the employee happiness, if the employee is happy and satisfy, then this will increase their engagement to the job or work.

Next, the second suggestion is leader should call out those low employee engagement people and go to a room face to face ask them whether there is any problem that cause them become low engagement to their job and depend on each employee problem, leader can give some advice to them to solve their problem in order to increase their employee engagement, those example can be like for an employee feel that he or she cannot see the future of them in the company after they join this company then leader can explain to them why they cannot get promotion from the company to a higher position, maybe is due to their low employee engagement and tell them if they switch their attitude sure that they can get promotion by the company in the next few month.

The reasons that this suggestion will be choose is because leaders are always got responsible to the low employee engagement, if leader can always motivate the employee then those employee should not get low engagement. Conclusion In conclusion, weak in leadership, lack of employees’ defined or enforced core values and lack of employee engagement are the problems or issues to the High Performance Work Practices (HPWPs). HPWPs associated with organizational effectiveness as early studies were curtsied that they ignoring this question, but the expert are building and testing more theoretical explanations. (McShane 2013). One concern is that many studies try to find out which practices predicts organizational performance with understanding why those practices should have this effect.

In other words, some of the practices identified as HPWPs lack of theoretical foundation (Von Glinow, 2010), the casual connection between work practices and organizational effectiveness is disappear. The HPWP perspectives are still developing in the business world, but it has reveals vital information about specific organizational practices that enhance the input-output transformation process. At this stage, this perspective has been critised for concentrating on shareholder and customer needs at the expense of employee wellbeing. Without this explanation, it is hard to be confident that the practice will be valuable in the future and in other situations. A second concern with HPWP perspective is that it may satisfy customer and shareholder needs at the expense of employee well-being.

They also point out that HPWPs will increase the work stress and the management is refuse to delegate power or share the financial benefits of productivity increases. If HPWPs improve organizational performance at a cost to employee well-being, and then the open systems and organizational learning perspectives offer an incomplete of organizational effectiveness. Workplace problems and workplace issues are the main issues which are concerned by both employees and employers. If the organization can have a good handling these two issues mentioned above will directly motivate your entire employees in the organization. The factor above will sure can enhance the sales of the company that will increasing the profit of the company.