Monday, December 31, 2007

Outstanding NPR Series on Blogging

See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17613637

It's a very interesting and valuable contribution. Very helpful to have the material in text with podcasts.

Happy New Year -- May your blogging contribute to that happiness.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Psychological climate benefits . . .

We can consider psychological climate as individual employees’ experiences of organizational climate. (I know there is a distinction.) Recent research in India by Biswas & Varma (2007) found that organizational citizenship behavior and job satisfaction mediated between psychological climate and employee performance. The survey questions and constructs are similar to ones in my investigation on social media and organizational climate.
I’m looking for opportunities for surveys in US firms to add to my surveys of MBA students. There is no conflict between research and theory on the one hand, and practical employee attitude surveys on the other.

The reference is
Biswas, Soumendu & Varma, Arup (2007). Psychological climate and individual performance in India: test of a mediated model. Employee Relations, 29(6), pp. 664 – 676.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Listening to customers

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee wrote a good article in the Nov. 26, 2007 Information Week about the efforts of Fedex, eBay, Schwab and others to get ideas from customers. Communities and networks are approaches frequently used to find out what the customers want and then make it easy to get the products and services. A relatively small group of active customers can provide lots of insight. But let’s not neglect employees too in the focus on customers. Follow the Southwest philosophy: Treat (and listen to) your employees well and they will take care of the customers well.

FedEx’s Rob Carter is quoted about customers wanting services that span several companies. Reminds me of an experience I had this past week pleading with some vendors for a unified proposal that did not force me to do a lot of work putting together a multi-vendor solution in which nobody would take responsibility.

She also wrote about one highly-resourced blog that few people read – a reminder that just because it’s a blog or online community does not mean that it’s useful.

Friday, December 14, 2007

New Article: Trust & Empower

Another recent study is consistent with my hypothesis that blogging and other social, participatory media promote behaviors that increase productivity. Jossy Mathew (2007) found that mission, agreement, concern for employees and trust, customer focus, organizational learning, empowerment, and high performance work orientation all significantly correlated with perceptual measures of quality and productivity. Both qualitative interviews and surveys were used.
I would put it as, clarify the mission, set clear goals, set high expectations then trust and empower the employees. Inexpensive facilitating technologies include social media. Sure it takes courage but less than say 360 evaluations in which employees evaluate upwards anonymously.

Mathew, Jossy (2007). The relationship of organisational culture with productivity and quality: A study of Indian software organizations. Employee Relations, 29 (6), 677-695.