Different Organizational Practices Accomplish Different Objectives

Anybody who has ever designed and attempted to implement an organizational practice to accomplish an objective such as higher performance, improved customer satisfaction, or higher quality, can tell you that not all of them work on all of these objectives. Gibson and her colleagues took a closer look at organizational practices and come away with a much more fine-grained understanding of which organizational practices do accomplish which objectives most predictably.

This blend of Texas and California researchers examined three kinds of practices: information sharing, boundary setting, and team enabling. They define these terms as follows:

• Information sharing: distribution of information about firm financial results, is this unit outcomes, new technology, and competitors’ performance.
• Boundary setting: practices that establish acceptable and desirable behaviors in the firm by establishing clear goals, responsibilities, and procedures. This might include a clear mission statement, integrated strategic objectives, and firm-level priorities.
• Team enabling: these practices promote the role of teams and organizations, encouraging individuals to identify with teams and behave consistently with a team approach.

No single set of practices among those that they examined predicted financial performance, customer service, and quality.  The researchers found a clear relationship between:

• “information-sharing practices and… firm financial performance”
• “boundary-setting practices and firm-level customer service”
• "team-enabling practices and firm-level quality."

The moral of the story is, share information if you want to make more money, establish clear policies about desired behavior to improve customer service, and empower your teams to raise the quality of your products or services.

(From "What Results When Firms Implement Practices: Differential Relationship Between Specific Practices, Firm Financial Performance, Customer Service, and Quality," by Gibson, Benson, Porath, and Lawler, 2008 JAP 92(6), 1467-1480).

Telecommuting: "It's Mainly a Good Thing"

In a meta-analysis of 46 studies of telecommuting, involving over 12,000 employees, Gajedran and Harrison of Pennsylvania State University concluded that existing research generally supports the well-publicized claims that telecommuting is good for employers and employees alike. However, “telecommuting intensity”, or the extent of scheduled time that employees spend doing tasks away from a central work location, can play a role in the impact of telecommuting.

“Telecommuting is mainly a good thing,” the authors concluded, positively associated with employee perceptions of autonomy, lower work-family conflict, and the quality of employee-supervisor relations. As a result, it is associated with increased job satisfaction, lower turnover intent, lower role stress, higher supervisor ratings, and higher objective ratings of job performance.

The study also highlighted perceived autonomy as the key “conveyor” of the benefits of telecommuting. In other words, it is the employees’ sense of autonomy that is the largest psychological contributor to job satisfaction, lower turnover intent, and the rest of the “good news” about telecommuting.

Finally, the intensity of telecommuting did have the effect on the employee’s role-stress. Women in particular benefit for more intense telecommuting than do men, particularly in terms of family-work conflict. About the only significant downside to intense telecommuting was a negative impact on coworker relationships.

Thus, the implications of this meta-analysis for employers are:

• There are several modest benefits to be had from telcommuting, both for the employer and the employees.
• Those benefits, for the most part, can be enhanced by allowing intense telecommuting (over half time away from the central office).
• Most of the downside of intense telecommuting likely can be reduced through interventions to manage the damaged coworker relationships that can result from intense telecommuting.
• Telecommuting arrangements “should be designed to allow employees to experience increased control while simultaneously meeting managers’ need to monitor employees’ performance.”

(Gajendran, R.S. and Harrison, D. A., “The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: Meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual concequences,” (2007). Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), 1524-1541.)