Abstract
Influencing employees means changing their working behavior. The ability to influence employees is very important to human resource managers. This influence inspires employees to function optimally. Human resource managers can use various tactics to influence employees. These tactics include logical persuasion, inspirational appealing, consultation, collaboration, employee personality, perception, and managers’ emotional intelligence. This essay discusses three tactics of influencing the employees’ performance, which include personality, perception, and emotional intelligence.
Introduction
Influencing means changing someone’s behavior. Influence allows an individual to determine some aspects, which would otherwise be impossible under normal situations. The ability to influence others is very important to human resource managers. Managers use influence to inspire their employees to deliver optimally. In a team setup, the leaders employ influence in the process of ensuring that all team members are involved. Influencing the employees’ performance involves several management practices, which may include learning and development. The process leads to the effective management of individuals and teams, which translates into improved performance for the organization. Individual employees or teams have to be responsible for the continuous development of their service delivery, behavior, and skills. Therefore, influence is a long-term strategic process, which aims at developing an appropriate culture that connects individuals with long-term goals.
Effective employee management creates a collaborative approach that influences the individual performance, development, and goals of an organization. It pushes human recourses managers to come up with ways of managing the working relationships in the organization as well as improving their performance and that of the employees.
Human resource managers can use various methods to influence their employees. Logical persuasion involves laying out an argument based on the available data. In inspirational appealing, the manager links the desired results to specified values, which are honored by the team. In consultation, managers know what to do, but they consult with staff members on how to do it. Managers can also employ collaboration as a way of influencing their staff members. In this case, they offer assistance and work with the employees to achieve the desired goals. This paper discusses three tactics of influencing the employees’ performance. These tactics are personality, perception, and emotional intelligence.
The Employees’ Personality
Every person has a unique characteristic that makes him/her different from other people. By understanding the personality of staff members, managers gain insights on how they are likely to feel or act in various situations. In a bid to motivate staff members effectively, it is important to understand their personalities. This knowledge also helps in placing the staff members in their appropriate job positions.
Personality changes from time to time. According to Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer (2006), between twenty and forty years, people show high social dominance, emotionality, and conscientiousness. In addition, openness to new experiences declines as people age. One’s personality can change even in childhood and this aspect is said to have lasting consequences on people. A study by Williams (2001) shows that some part of the job satisfaction and success in a given career path can be attributed to childhood personality. Apparently, things that happen to an individual during childhood stick in the mind even in adulthood. In essence, what happens to an individual at childhood shapes his/her future personality. The employees’ personality determines how they behave in the workplace.
For instance, sociable individuals are normally outgoing and they establish relationships quickly and they can influence the workplace by promoting social activities and team spirit. In jobs that require working independently or freedom, personality influences the employees’ behavior strongly (Barrick & Ryan, 2003). Five traits explain the variations in personalities. These traits describe employees as being open, conscientious, extraverts, agreeable, and neurotic. Altogether, the traits form the acronym OCAEN. Every person has a level of each of these traits, which are regarded as the big five structures. The big five structure is shown below.
Openness
This trait means being inquisitive, creative, showing originality, and desire for new knowledge. Staff members with a high level of openness perform excellently is situations that involve learning new ideas. According to Barrick and Ryan (2003), these staff members are highly motivated to acquire new skills on top of being well suited for training. When in a new workplace, they use their openness to get feedback about their performance and build relations. Therefore, they adjust easily to new environments (Williams, 2001). When faced with a problem, open-minded people tend to be creative. In addition, they are highly adaptable to change. Unfortunately, such individuals may lack zeal when activities turn into routines, and this aspect underscores the greatest weakness with open employees. A human resource manager can achieve the best out of open-minded staff members by putting them in a team of other individuals of their nature together with rotating them across challenging projects (LePine, 2003).
Conscientiousness
This trait measures how an employee is systematic, time-conscious, organized, result-driven, and dependable. According to Barrick and Ryan (2003), this trait predicts uniformly how an individual performs across varying occupations. Conscientious persons perform well and they are highly motivated. They have few instances of changing jobs, being absent, and they demonstrate a high level of work safety. Therefore, conscientiousness can be used to define job satisfaction among employees. In a bid to get the best performance from conscientious employees, managers should promote goal-focused leadership. They should communicate SMART goals to the employees. The staff performance goals should be aligned with the organization’s goals.
Extraversion
This trait measures the extent to which the employee is “talkative, outgoing, sociable, and enjoys socializing” (Ryan, 2003, p. 84). According to Barrick and Ryan (2003), these employees are suitable for jobs like sales. They are effective managers with an inspirational kind of leadership. Extraverts suit well in social situations, for example, where strong networks are needed. Due to being sociable, they adapt quickly to new jobs and they are happy in their work environments. The talkative and outgoing nature of extraverts may be annoying and disturbing to other employees. Therefore, managers can influence the performance of such individuals by assigning them duties singly or jobs that require social influence.
Agreeableness
This trait measures the “degree to which employees are sensitive, kind, tolerant, affable, trusting, and warm” (Ryan, 2003, p. 84). Agreeable employees get along well with their workmates. Their mood does not affect this trait. When they take leadership roles, they create an enabling work environment for the employees, which increases work productivity. High agreeable individuals are suitable for jobs that need change-oriented communications. This assertion holds because when in a conflict, they may avoid it, thus missing a chance for constructive change. Managers can influence the performance of high agreeable employees by assigning tasks that require patience and friendly interactions. Some examples are sales, beverage services, and front office operations among others.
Neuroticism
This trait measures the “degree to which a person is irritable, anxious, moody, and temperamental and such people have problems in adjusting their emotions, hence they experience stress and depression often” (Ryan, 2003, p. 92). They have challenges in forging and maintaining relationships. They are not approachable by their colleagues. These personalities complain about being unhappy at work, and thus they threaten to leave. When they are at the management level, they create an unfavorable work environment. On the other hand, less neurotic personalities have more positive than negative moods. They show satisfaction with their jobs as well as the commitment to the company’s values. Neuroticism is the only trait where scoring high is not desirable. Therefore, human resource managers should look for employees with low neuroticism.
Perception
Perception underscores how human beings detect and interpret stimuli from the environment. In most cases, people are not sensitive to all aspects of the environment. They tend to ignore some elements that appear to be apparent to other people. Whatever people see in their environment depends on their values, fears, needs, and emotions (Maloa, 2001). Consequently, what people see may be entirely wrong due to these mental tendencies. Some types of perceptions are described below.
Visual Perception
Managers use visual perception to build opinions about their employees. This aspect also helps them to draw conclusions from the surrounding environment, whether social or physical, coupled with making proper inferences in the available data. Consequently, recognizing the aspect of biases in visual perception is very important.
As an example, a staff member sees his/her colleagues browsing the web during office hours. If this staff member has a negative attitude towards his/her peers, s/he may report this case to the relevant authorities not factoring in that the peers may have been looking for work-related information. This tendency to fill gaps creates biasness. In essence, if an employee’s visual perception is slanted, s/he will draw wrong conclusions on a given issue.
Self-perception: Conventionally, when assessing themselves, people tend to make slanted decisions due to personal distorted views. In self-enhancement bias, a person exaggerates his/her performance and capabilities. People perceive themselves as being more powerful or able than how their colleagues see them. In most cases, this aspect affects staff members with egotistic personalities (Maloa, 2001). Another form of self-perception is self-effacement bias. In this case, people tend to underrate their capabilities or performance. They see events from a negative perspective. In a work setting, all these biases affect the employees’ performance. As an example, staff members with self-enhancement bias may wonder why they are not getting promotions, rewards, or other perquisites.
Social perception: This aspect underscores how people understand others in a given setup. This perception is subject to bias and thus people make distorted opinions about others. An example of social bias is a stereotype, which means the generalizations of characteristics of a group. These generalizations may be negative or positive (Kusluvan, 2003). For instance, people may generalize that women are more trustworthy as compared to men or a certain race produces better workers than the other. Stereotypes arise from selective perception. This assertion means paying “selective attention to some parts of the environment and ignoring others” (Kusluvan, 2003, p. 101). For example, a manager with a marketing background favors changes and improvements in that field. Due to this bias, individuals are not likely to see activities that do not conform to their beliefs. The first impression that enters a person’s mind concerning a certain individual lasts for long and such people are resistant to contrary information. Any information received to counter the first one does not work effectively due to the already formed impression (Dykes & Monroe, 2010).
How employees perceive their work influences the efficiency of attaining the organizations’ goals. If employees have positive perceptions of their jobs, organizations tend to achieve great worker retention, staff loyalty, and improved financial performance. The employees’ perceptions can be influenced positively by communicating clear goals to them including how they can contribute towards achieving the goals. This aspect makes employees feel being part of the company, and thus they become composed and work towards a common goal. Human resources should include their employees in the planning process, consult them, and implement their inputs. This way, employees will have a favorable perception.
Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Emotional intelligence is a skill that requires a manager to recognize, understand, and manage his/her emotions as well as the emotions of other employees in the organization. Managers with high emotional intelligence recognize and understand their emotional state and that of the employees. They then use this knowledge to create good relations and achieve great success by managing better. The four major attributes of emotional intelligence include
Self- awareness
This attribute refers to the ability of managers to recognize and name their emotions together with detailing how these aspects influence their thoughts and behavioral conduct. Self-awareness helps managers to understand and accept their strengths and weaknesses objectively. This aspect results in high self-confidence.
Self-management
This attribute underscores the ability of a manager to control impetuous feelings and behaviors. This aspect leads to demonstrating and managing emotions healthily.
Social awareness
This dimension highlights the ability to understand the views of others and empathizing with them at the same time.
Relationship management
This aspect refers to “building and maintaining good relationships, communicating clearly, inspiring and influencing others, and managing conflict effectively using social awareness” (Kite & Kay, 2012, p. 86).
Emotional intelligence can help human resources managers to build a high performing team with a great working culture. This goal can be achieved by improving their communication skills, building relationships, and creating an attractive work environment. In all workplaces, conflicts influence the employees’ performance adversely (Goleman, 2009). Influencing the welfare of the staff members is likely to result in unnecessary stress. For small organizations, emotional intelligence is very important. This assertion holds because the teams are small and they work closely. This aspect makes such teams highly sensitive to conflict or emotional situations.
An emotionally intelligent leader motivates and inspires employees to function optimally, thus increasing their job satisfaction. Emotional intelligence helps human resource managers to improve their retention, raise the employees’ morale, improve communication, and encourage teamwork spirit. When combined, these elements move forward the organizations’ objectives.
Traditionally, emotions were seen as character traits that should be controlled because they are a sign of weakness and instability. The major focus was on the task as the only way of increasing efficiency. However, emotionally intelligent managers are self-aware. They know their strengths and the areas of improvement. Such managers know how their conduct affects staff members. This aspect helps them to manage their emotions effectively (Kite & Kay, 2012). In order to work professionally, managers have to accept and manage their emotions and those of the employees. This aspect encourages the smooth flow of information and it reduces chances of conflicts.
Managers should not ignore or hold up their emotions because this aspect may lead to stress. In addition, this aspect may result in petty conflict issues in the workplace, which may sometimes run out of control. According to Goleman (2009), emotional intelligence is the knowledge of one’s feelings and ability to handle feelings without being stressed up. In addition, it underscores the ability to motivate oneself to get the work done. It also involves being creative to perform at one’s peak. Emotional intelligence may also mean having a sense of others’ feelings and handling relationships effectively.
The ability to read one’s own emotions varies from one person to the other. However, human resource managers can employ some of the tips below to increase their emotional intelligence as well as that of other employees. The managers should
- Get feedback to know their own strengths and weaknesses
- Study their teams to understand their mindset and emotional state
- Encourage the open and honest flow of information,
- Take time with their teams to recognize, acknowledge, and appreciate their efforts.
With Emotional Intelligence, human resources managers should take time and walk in the shoes of their colleagues and staff members whom they differ in socioeconomic status. This way, they are involved in intense conversations with the employees (Goleman, 2009). Consequently, managers become better coaches and good mentors in the workplace. They obtain frontline staff experiences and activities suitable for their positions.
Emotional Intelligence helps managers to recognize when anyone is stressed. This awareness results in taking proactive steps to control or manage stressors in the workplace. Emotionally Intelligent managers have enhanced the ability to recognize signs of stress in others at an early stage. This aspect helps to take the necessary measures that prevent further development. This way, conflicts that threaten performance in the workplace are mitigated (Neale et al., 2011)
Recommendations
When managers are faced with a personality problem, most of them confront the troublesome employee, thus escalating the hostility or ignore him or her, which leads to unresolved problems. None of this approach is an effective solution for the manager. It is recommended that instead of being rigid and dismissing the issue, the manager should use good communication skills to channel the energies of the troublesome employees in ways that benefit themselves, their workmates, and the company.
Managers should take a frontline in eliminating the perception problem from the practice of their employees. If the staff members that associate a problem to other employees’ perceptions come to the manager, the manager should be straightforward. As a leader and a mentor to the staff members, the manager should advise such persons on how to be highly effective in evaluating other employees in a bid to eliminate potential grievances. If the individual is of the same or higher rank, like a boss, the situation becomes complicated. The manager should employ some diplomatic skills in order to break the perception problem. As noted earlier, “emotional intelligence is a skill that requires managers to recognize, understand, and manage their emotions as well as emotions of other employees in the organization” (Goleman, 2009, p. 132). When the situation is tense, the manager may be tempted to respond to any part of the conversation, which should not be the case. The manager should remain calm and allow the conversation to proceed. This way, the manager can gather relevant information without even asking a question.
Conclusion
Each individual displays a unique personality. The five major personality traits are represented under the acronym OCEAN (open, conscientious, extravert, agreeable, and neurotic). Personality influences the work attitude strongly. However, it influences job performance weakly. However, human resources managers should understand their employees’ personalities and place them where their personalities will function optimally. Perception underscores how employees see their environment when responding to an environmental stimulus. The employees’ perception is subject to their needs, values, and emotions.
In perceiving the environment, staff members and managers tend to draw personal conclusions by extrapolating the provided information. In the workplace, the existence of stereotypes influences workers’ behavior. Human resources managers should appreciate the perception process because it helps them in understanding employees’ behavior. In addition, managers should not ignore or bottle up their emotions because this aspect leads to stress. In addition, this tendency may cause petty conflict issues in the workplace, which may run out of control at times. Emotional intelligence helps managers to recognize when the employees are stressed. This awareness results in taking proactive steps to control or manage stressors in the workplace.
References
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