Management Technique

Employee behavior forms the basis for all commerce. Without employee behavior companies could create no products, no services and would have no business. While it may be easy to agree that employee behavior is a central concern to any business, managers often use their personal and highly varied experiences with employee behavior as a means of shaping their managerial technique, believing they "understand people" and "know what makes people tick," etc. Although extensive managerial experience can generate effective managerial technique, themethod of developing effective management solely through experience can sometimes be counterproductive. For example, managers with military experience may emphasize discipline in their civilian management style. While military management methods can certainly improve a lax team, the effectiveness of this style of management is generally maintained by an underlying and inescapable threat of coercion or punishment. Thus, while a military style of management adapted to the civilian workplace may show short-term advantages, it can also correlated with increases in undesirable or unproductive employee behavior, e.g., reduced quality, absenteeism, theft, etc., in response to the overall harshness of the techniques.

At the opposite end of the managerial spectrum we may find a more compassionate approach based on the view that employee satisfaction directly promotes performance excellence. Thus, to increase employee performance, we must first increase job satisfaction. While job satisfaction can be an important measure of managerial effectiveness it is doubtful whether satisfaction can produce superior employee performance. It is suggested that job satisfaction is at best a measure of one aspect of positive management technique rather than a direct cause of increased employee performance.

Improving performance through job satisfaction seems logical and legitimate. However, satisfied employees can be as unproductive and disruptive as unhappy, unsatisfied employees. Measures of job satisfaction are similar to measures of “awareness” commonly used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. While an interesting measure of marketing effectiveness, awareness does not always correlate with increased sales. Like awareness, satisfaction is a measure, but not necessarily a direct influence over employee performance necessary to increase corporate performance.

Behavior Management offers a more direct approach to improving managerial technique: train specific managerial actions that will directly facilitate employee improvement. Combining job skill training with effective performance feedback enables your managers to communicate to their direct reports the job that needs to be done, when to do it, and what will happen after they do it. The recognition they receive will directly support their success and will naturally foster job satisfaction.