The Competitive Imperative of Learning by Amy C. Edmondson

There are five major components of job satisfaction, one being monetary benefits (Ghillyer 2010). According to Ghillyer (2012) an employee’s behavior towards their pay may affect their work performance. The issue that arises with employee motivation is that management is unable to satisfy all (Ghillyer 2010). This becomes an even larger problem when employees being joining unions, resigning and being frequently absent (Ghillyer 2010).

For most companies, identifying what a learning organization should be and actually becoming one is tricky at best, impossible at worst. One way that manager's and companies can promote the concept of being a learning organization is to assess whether the company is in need of a short-term fix or whether it is more focused on long-term results. Organizational learning is a long-term activity that will build competitive advantage over time and requires sustained management attention, commitment, and effort. Learning organizations maximize their competitive positions during strong economic times and they prudently train their employees and prepare for change even in turbulent times. As a result, learning organizations and learning

The author assesses that “the more rewards are used the more they are needed”. People get unsatisfied with what they are getting eventually and the stakes rise. People only perform if there is an incentive for a reward, else they will not try hard at all. Sometimes rewards can be given for wrong reasons, make the judgements of individuals altruistic and even detrimental. If it pays must be good, the better the pay the better the reward, the greater the incentive. The value and purpose of rewards have become destructive for the convenience of the people who want to control behavior.

“Year after year, as executive pay continues its inexorable climb, it's amusing to watch corporate directors try to justify the piles of shareholder money they throw at the hired help (Morgenson 1)”. There are many employees that go the extra mile and produce more for their company, but they often never receive anything extra in return. Due to this, they are less motivated to go the extra mile in the future. In contrast, incentive pay is beneficial to an organization’s overall production efficiency and effectiveness.

Ever since Rachel McBride was young she was taught that without education you won’t become anything in life, and she strongly believed in that. When Rachel’s kids grew old enough to start school she made sure that education was one of their top priorities. All of her children were A students and if one of them got lower than an A she went down to the school to find out for herself why. The reason why the McBride family relied so much on education is because they didn’t have a lot of money. They all work so hard so that they could have bright future which evidently happened .they all graduated from college, to become doctors, professors, teachers, and

Today’s managers have a lot of tasks on their plate, even more so than managers of the past due to stricter rules and regulations imposed by the Federal Government, as well as the arduous amount of paperwork involved with documenting employees work habits and interactions be they good or bad. Ad on top of all this the need for annual or quarterly performance appraisals and daily supervision, it can make a manager feel overwhelmed, especially if they have employees who don’t seem to be overly motivated to do their jobs, or do them adequately. With this in mind, it is important to understand the motivational theories that make employees want to excel, management theories that we can use to better guide our employees, and their effect on leadership styles today. It is also important as well to understand how they relate to our personal lives, career enhancement opportunities, and ultimately and most importantly, our relationship with God.

Employees require motivation, reward and encouragement for maximum productivity. Punishment to workers not performing is also mandatory to prevent cases of poor performance. Ethical considerations must be looked at and employees must follow rules and company policies for plans made by management to be successful. Workers and management relate like a family and this has enabled the company perform to its expectation. These plans are aimed at ensuring total customer satisfaction and delight.

Throughout our final semester of study at Maryville, our cohort has studied Peter Senge’s, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Rather than set of management practices, the book describes how organizations, especially those that are sustainably competitive, know how to learn. These “learning organizations” are continuously learning how to work together, where the norm is producing their best. In the book, Senge identifies five essential elements, that when practiced together, create perfect conditions for an effective learning organization. These five practices are Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision,

“While Mangers complain about lack of motivation in their workers, they might as well consider the possibility that the reward systems they’ve installed are paying off for the opposite”.

An organization’s capability to learn and convey that learning into action quickly, is the supreme competitive advantage. The learning organization is the structure that eases the realization of such competitive advantage, it empowers employees, it deepens and enhances the customer experience and cooperation with main business partners and eventually improves business performance. Organizational learning is considered as the suitable process to develop knowledge resources and capabilities/core competencies (human capital, social capital and organizational capital) that engender ongoing values; which in turn yield persistence superior performance; which lead to sustainable competitive advantage within the context of the strategic management.

The case study “Equity of Demand: The NETFLIX Approach to Compensation” includes information regarding the company, named Netflix. The case study provides useful information regarding the organizational culture of Netflix. The case is usually associated with the practices of Human Resource Management. It shows how organizations like Netflix can come up with different strategies in order better keep the employees motivated and directed towards goal achieving behavior. It is extremely important for organizations running around the globe to find ways of keeping employees motivated and satisfied in order to increase employees’ productivity. Employees can be seen as backbone for any type of organization running around the globe. It is because the productivity of employees is directly related with the productivity of an organization. The better the employees perform the better the organization would be in terms of customer satisfaction, brand awareness, customer loyalty, profitability and so on so forth. Normally, organizations have different compensation plans to pay the employees for their efforts they make. For instance; some organizations would use money as a source of motivating employees. Such organizations will pay high amount

Keeping employees motivated in addition to creating incentives and/or additional ways for employees to receive more compensation will create better performance overall within an organization. Contrary if company B gives their employees incentives to perform, without any motivational tactics they probably will not have as many top performances as company A, in addition the company may only seek short term rewards verses have long term success. Lack of motivation for employees within an organization, can cause long term damage for the company’s success. Different things motivate everyone; therefore there should be a system in place to keep employees motivated for the long term success of the company. In the MBM textbook under the concept of incentives, compensation, and motivation, there are a couple of different views of how it should be applied within an organization. We will discuss The Social Role of Profit, Personal Profit and Losses, and the way Market-Based Management view how incentives, compensation, and motivation should be applied and the things that effectively drive employees’ actions while at work.

According to Herzberg, the factors leading to job satisfaction are distinctly different from those that lead to job-dissatisfaction. Therefore, the managers who seek to eliminate factors that create job-dissatisfaction can bring about peace at the workplace but cannot motivate the employees. These factors are termed as hygiene factors comprising administration, supervision, working conditions, salary and wages etc. While absence of hygiene factors will lead to dissatisfaction, mere presence of these factors will not satisfy (i.e. motivate) the employees. In order to motivate the employees, managers must resort to ‘motivators’ (those factors that motivate the employees towards better performance) such as recognition, challenging assignment, responsibility, opportunities for growth and self-fulfillment etc.

Peter Senge argues that not only we humans learn, but organizations also. However, learning itself may not be enough for the organization to survive in this ever-challenging era. In his book, The Fifth Discipline, Senge introduced five ‘disciplines’, namely systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning, that characterizes an organization as a learning organization.

Being rewarded and recognised for their work or contribution is what keeps an employee motivated to work towards achieving the organisational as well as personal goals. When the employees is motivated by rewards, they will have job satisfaction consequently increasing the productivity of the organisation. It necessitates the need of managers to pay more attention in understanding their employees and come up with suitable types of reward systems for the organisation so that the employees are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated all the time. The hypotheses that I put forward here is to support this statement that effective reward management is critical to