Comparing Employee Engagement And Banning Cigarettes: An Essay.

Definition and Importance of Employee Engagement

As per researchers there is no exact definition available for employee engagement. Most of the organizations do not prefer to define employee engagement, rather they prefer to discuss about building a great place to work or similar thoughts. The term “employee engagement” has become so universal that it is often used easily within the organization to mean different things to different people.in order to improve engagement within the organization it is important to develop a definition or express what an employee understands about the employee engagement within the organization where they are working.

The term “engagement” was first referred to in a article in 1990 by William Kahn. Though the article was not about employee engagement but it discussed about personal engagement & disengagements. The research focused particularly on the psychological conditions of personal engagement & disengagement at work. Personal engagement can be defined as to how individuals employ & express themselves at their workplace & disagreement is defined as the extent to which individuals quit & defend themselves at work. The factors that influence personal engagement at work include availability safety & meaningfulness.

There has been a rise seen in the interest of people regarding to know about employee engagement. Also, companies are conducting ore & more surveys to measure the employee engagement score. Mostly organizations use Q12© tool which was designed by Gallup, which is basically a 12 question survey developed to measure engagement.

There are various definitions available for employee engagement by different researchers. These definitions make reference from a wide range of organizational behaviour & human resource management concepts like optimal functions, motivations, job satisfaction, commitment towards organization& wok efforts. All these terms tend to have in common is that engagement is viewed as an internal state of being. Engagement is something that the employee has to offer and cannot be the part of their contract with the organization or the process of objective setting.

Employee engagement can be defined as the workplace approach developed to safeguard that personnel are committed to the values & goals of the organization, motivated to contribute to the success of the organization and at the same time able to boost their own sense of well-being.

There are 3 dimensions to employee engagement i.e.

• Intellectual engagement, which means thinking hard about the job & how to perform better.
• Affective engagement, which means felling positive about doing a good job
• Social engagement, which means actively taking opportunities to discuss work related improvements with other colleagues.

Employees should have a positive attitude towards the organization & its values. An employee who is engaged would be aware of the business context and works with colleagues to increase the performance within the job for the organization’s benefit. The organization should work to develop & nature engagement, that needs a two-way relationship between employer & employee.

Rise in Interest Regarding Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is considered both as behaviour and an outcome because it completely depends on the results of the attitudes & beliefs an employee holds about the company where they are working (Bridger, 2014).

References

Bridger, E., 2014, Employee Engagement, [e-book] London: Kogan Page, . Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [Accessed 16 August 2016].

According to the recent research conducted nationwide with the registered voters by Zogby International, 48% of the respondents said yes the cigarette should be made illegal and rest of the 42% responded that no it is fine to sell and smoke cigarette.

If the cigarettes are made illegal or prohibited millions of smokers would quit smoking & million will never star smoking. Diseases & deaths happening due to smoking will obviously be dropped significantly. But this would not be the only scenario that will happen. Tens of million people will keep puffing. Bing tobacco will not going to be disappeared, it will just going to change the hands & go underground, disposing its high priced activists in favour of individuals more skilled in bullying & violence. Few farmers that grow tobacco will find some other work but thousands that would be left will become criminals, farming their crops secretly. Tobacco related to murders will rise intensely as criminal organization contended with one another for meadow & markets, & regular crime will rise speedily as thousands of tobacco junkies will sought ways to feed their fulfil their costly addiction. People might start experimenting even more dangerous tobacco forms, because of this some people will die in their 60s because of emphysema & cancer, but more people will die at a young age because of the life style & harms linked with illicit tobacco addiction. Also, most of the takes in a economy are collected from the tobacco producing industries/companies (Lam, Leung & LM, 2011).

The effects of smoking on an individual are so dreadful & dangerous, that actually there is not a single reason that it should be made legal for anyone. There are thousands of harmful effects that cigarette smoking creates; some of the diseases include Emphysema, heart disease, cancers, lung diseases, etc. One cigarette contains over 4700 toxic chemicals that enter the human body as poisons. Every day there are 8 people who die because of lung cancer & 37000 deaths in a year from heart disease. There are also more than 300000 cases of bronchitis and pneumonia each year. All these diseases & problems are caused just because of a little thing (Evans, Farrelly & Montgomery, 2009).

Comparing and Contrasting Scientific Management and Motivational Management

Cigarette smoking not only affects the health of smokers but also people near to him/her. It’s not about affecting people health but also it is not good for our environment. These are the reason cigarette should be made illegal. So, next time when you are about to smoke a cigarette, recall all the lives of people other than your life that will get affected. If smoking is made illegal, I think the world will be safer, happier & healthier (Becker, Grossman & Murphy, 2014).

To conclude I would like to say that why should anyone smoke if they know that it will going to kill them and why people are keeping it legal to use in first place. Together as a society we can bring a transformation. All we require a strong voice & teamwork to bring an end to smoking.  There are four words if we say together, i.e. “We can do it!”, we can for surely put an end to smoking (Adda & Cornaglia, 2016).

References

Adda J and F Cornaglia (2016) “Taxes, Cigarette Consumption and Smoking Intensity“, American Economic Review, 96, 4, 1013-1028.

Becker G, Grossman M and K Murphy (2014) “An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction”, American Economic Review, 84, 3, 396-418.

Evans W, Farrelly M and E. Montgomery (20009) “Do Workplace Smoking Bans Reduce Smoking?”, American Economic Review, 89, 4, 728-747.

Lam T, Leung GM, and LM Ho (2011), “The effects of environmental tobacco smoke on health services utilization in the first eighteen months of life”, Pediatrics, 107, 6.

In the essay I would be discussing my personal experience with a cloth manufacturing organization and will try to apply and draw the comparison between the Taylors’s Scientific Management Theory & Mayo’s Theory of Motivational Management.

Frederick Winslow Taylors’s Scientific Management Theory put forward the idea that employees are motivated mainly by the pay the get. The theory argued that:

Employees don’t naturally enjoy the work & so they require the close control & supervision. Hence, managers should break down production into series of small tasks. Employees must be provided with appropriate tools & trainings which can assist them in working efficiently as possible on one defined task. Then workers are paid according to the units they produce in a defined period of time (which is commonly known as piece rate pay). This will as a result encourage employees to work hard & maximise their productivity (Taylor, 2004).

Personal Experience in a Cloth Manufacturing Organization

I would like to reflect on my personal experience, I was working with a cloth manufacturing firm as an Assistant manager, there were around 1000 employees who were working on the production line. The labours that were working, their work was to take a denim cloth, cut into pieces, stitch it and then pack it in a plastic bag and keep it in a rack. They management there was following Taylors’s scientific management theory & autocratic management style, i.e., management was taking all the decisions without taking any suggestions from the workers and were giving orders to the workers, the workers were following their orders and they were doing what was asked to them (Hoffman, 2009). They use to come in the morning and stitch several jeans and go back home. They were being paid as per the unit of jeans they were stitching. For example if they are working for 6 days a week and are stitching 10 jeans in a day and the price per unit is suppose $5, on the weekly basis they were paid the total of $120. In the initial days, workers were happy and motivated, they use to stitch as many as they could, and the motivating factor was money, which was encouraging them to work more. This approach was also making profits for the organization, because the cost per unit was reducing, which was keeping management happy. But over the period of time, workers started disliking this approach because, if someone was not well and was not able to stitch more, then the pay reduced; there was no job security or the minimum pay the workers would be getting, because the pay solely depend on their output & the jeans they stich, if they are not stitching they’ll not be paid. Also, workers started feeling boring because they were getting the repetitive tasks to carry out & were treated just like a human machines. The work quality was reducing because the workers were not satisfied with the job they were doing. Companies could also afford lay off workers as the levels of productivity rises. This was resulting in an increase in the strikes & other forms of industrial action by dis-satisfied workers (Porter & Mckibbin, 2009).

After seeing this situation, company decided to switch to switch to Mayo’s theory of motivational management, Elton Mayo believed that workers are not just worried about the money but can be motivated better by fulfilling their social needs at work (Mayo, 2013).

Following this approach, managers of the firm started focusing more on the interest in the workers, started treating them as individuals that have worthwhile opinions & realizing the workers enjoy interacting together. So according to this theory and practice, the workers were found best motivated by better communication between workers & managers, now the workers got an opportunity to share feedback. There was a greater involvement from management side, the management was taking more interest in the lives of the workers at office and continuously making efforts to provide the best to the employees, which could make them happy and work more efficiently at the workplace (Donaldson, 2002). People started working in teams, i.e. few personnel were bringing the denim cloth, few were cutting it, rest were stitching it and few were packaging it (Bennis, 2000). Also, they use to work on the rotational changes and were interchanging the activities, so that people are getting new job daily which was not making their lives boring and also motivated the workers to work on a common set objective. This approach made the employees as well as management happy because workers were getting social & financial security on the other hand management was getting quality jeans (Williamson, 2004).

By analysing both the management theory we can conclude that in order to motivate employees we require the mix of Taylors’s Scientific Management Theory & Management Theory & Mayo’s Theory of Motivational Management because the only factor “pay” cannot make an employee happy, they get motivated better by fulfilling their social needs at workplace (Bailey & Ford, 2006).

References

Bailey,J., & Ford,C. (2006). Management as a science versus management as practice in post graduate business education. Business Strategy Review, 7, 7-12

Bennis,W. (2000). Managing the dream: Reflection on Leadership and change. New York: Perseus.

Mayo,E. (2013). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-96.

Donaldson, L. 20002. Dammed by own theories: Contradictions between theories and management education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 1, 96-106.

Porter, L.W., & Mckibbin, L.E. (2009). Management education and development: Drift or thrust into the 21st century. New York: McGraw Hill.

Taylor, F.W. (2004). Markets and hierarchies: Analysis and antitrust implications. New York: Free Press.

Hoffman, Edward (2009). The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.