Msing022 Organisational Behaviour

MSING022 Organisational Behaviour

 Organisational Behaviour Assignment #1

 Min Xiao

 Month and Year of Submission

    October 2017

    Word count: 1030

Introduction

I was selected by the general director Mr. Mao to be a stage manager in An Evening Extravaganza Celebrating the 45th Anniversary of Establishment of China-UK Ambassadorial Relations held on the 24th October 2017 organised by UK Chinese Art Centre. On that day, I managed more than 20 volunteers to ensure that the event run smoothly. I had some experience of planning and preparing the events before, but it was the first time that I was a leader who is responsible to arrange for the staff to work for the evening extravaganza.

As a stage manager, my responsibility was charge of stage crew, backstage crew, scene shift, prompters, ticket collectors, light operators, sound designers, ritual girls and lobby crews. First of all, I recruited the volunteers who seem more proactive, hard-working and willing to deal with the issues by conducting an informal interview with them. Following this, I put the volunteers into various groups according to their individual characteristics and skills, and each group had a team leader who made arrangements for the other team members.

Performance=Motivation X Ability X Environment

Someone’s working performance relies on three main forces including motivation, ability and the environment in the organisation or company (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015). Therefore, I will use these three factors to analyse how to make the volunteers perform well in the event.

Motivation

Motivation, “the desire to achieve a goal or a certain performance level, leading to goal-directed behaviour”, is regarded as a key factor that influences performance. It means that someone who is motivated tends to work hard to complete a certain task (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015: 127).

Working meals were provided for the staff during the period of the event. Also, I bought KFC as extra meal for the volunteers to motivate them to work harder. Physiological needs (e.g., the need for food) are viewed as the most foundational needs in Maslow’s theory of motivation (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015). The volunteers tended to focus on their job once physiological needs were satisfied.

I told the volunteers that everyone is unique as well as very important in our team, and the event cannot run smoothly without them. I motivated volunteers through enhancing their sense of responsibility to the team, which is Annette’s strategy (Nicholson, 2003).

In addition, when some of volunteers, like Sun, performed well in the job, I would praise and encourage them to make them believe that their effort could make a difference. Later, they paid more effort and did better. In this case, giving encouragement and positive feedback could motivate employees (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015). It is positive reinforcement, an approach to reinforce the desired behaviour, which ensures that behaviour could lead to positive outcomes.

Last but not least, we set a goal that we tried to avoid making mistakes in the whole event as possible as we can. Goal-setting theory is regarded as the most basic theory of motivation. It is said that setting goals in the job is relevant to performance improvements. “According to one estimate, goal setting improves performance at least 10% and up to 25%” (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015). Therefore, once we set this goal, we tried not to make unnecessary mistakes when we prepared this event.

Ability

        Ability is defined as the knowledge and skills required to perform the job efficiently and effectively (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015). Individuals have their own personality, physical and mental abilities in the workplace. Through observing and knowing about volunteers’ behaviours and thoughts, I tried to provide each of them a suitable job. For example, some volunteers who major in Digital Media, I hence put them into the stage sound effects because they knew more about how to better control the stage sound.

I selected some who are more experienced, and have better leadership ability as well as decision-making competency as leaders in different groups.  Person-job fit is considered as a key point while hiring employees. It is “the degree to which a person’s skill, knowledge, abilities, and other characteristics match the job demands” (Bauer & Erdogan, 2015: 77). For instance, I selected Xu to be a leader among ritual girls. The reason was that Xu had a variety of previous experiences of being a ritual girl in the events. Also, I found that she is a responsible and hard-working person through working with her in the previous events. Thus, Xu was selected to be a leader in the VIP reception group.