Guest editorial
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Team Performance Management, Volume 18, Issue 7/8
About the Guest Editor
Prof. (Dr) Vidhi AgrawalAssistant Professor in the area of Human Resource Management and Law at Ajay Kumar Garg Institute of Management, Ghaziabad, India. Professor Agrawal holds the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and is the Associate Member of The Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI). Prof. Agrawal also holds the degree of Master of Commerce (MCom) and Bachelor of legislative Law (LLB). She has taught and published papers in the area of Organisational effectiveness, Performance Appraisal and Leadership.
Introduction
Welcome to the special issue of Team Performance Management, in conjunction with the ICON 2011 (International Conference on Organisations in the new Millennium Challenges and Opportunities), organised by the Ajay Kumar Garg Institute of Management in Ghaziabad, India. The Special Issue received an overwhelming response and received a number of submissions for consideration,and it proved quite a difficult guest editorial role in sifting through them for those which are most exemplary of the special issue theme. This special issue of Team Performance Management contains three original articles, which take a wider disciplinary perspective, from human resource management and team performance management, to address this theme. A mix of conceptual, empirical and case based research is presented in this issue.
The need for the special issue in this area
The challenges of the imminent new millennium require a transformation in organisations and in the thinking and behaviour of their leaders, a leadership paradigm shift that matches a shift from a bureaucratic to a post-modernist organizational paradigm. There has been no shortage of commentators imparting this view since Kuhn (1962) wrote that we are witnessing and participating in an organizational paradigm shift.
Evidence for the existence of such a transition is readily available. Post-industrialism (Bell, 1973), super-industrialism (Toffler, 1980), the age of discontinuity (Drucker, 1968), the information age (Tapscott and Larson, 1993),the post-modernist/post-Fordist organisation (Clegg, 1990) and the re-engineered organization (Hammer and Champy, 1993) are some of the metaphors-in-use to describe the future shape of organisations.
Organisations in the new millennium will require people with knowledge, and they will be the organisation’s most important assets. There is likely to be less value placed on physical assets than on intellectual assets. Organisations will have big opportunities to leverage success by sustaining a talented workforce. The next millennium will be for the organisations with big and well-managed talent pools.
Discussion of the contributions
This special issue of Team Performance Management comprises of three original articles. All of the articles are relevant to the theme of the journal. A brief description of each article is given below.
The first article “Leadership Style and Team Processes as Predictors of Organisational Learning” by Aruna Bhat, Neha Verma, Santosh Rangnekar and Mukesh Barua uses the team effectiveness IPO model (input-process-output). The paper considers leadership behavior (style) as an input factor and team processes as the process factor. It examines the impact of these two independently and interactively on the output factor: organisational learning within a sample of Indian manufacturing organisations. The study provides support to statement Senge’s (1990) statement that “the concept of organizational learning may hold the key to facilitate the future by improving organisation learning capabilities through effective leadership behaviors.”The study included a new and possibly significant independent variable i.e. Team Processes (TP) in the model. The authors find that team processes are essential for better organizational learning and that the combination of team processes and leadership style is particularly important to improve organizational learning.
The second article “An Empirical Study of the Relationship Among Occupational Self Efficacy, Human Resource Development Climate and Work Engagement” by Richa Chaudhary, Santosh Rangnekar and Mukesh Barua focuses on occupational self efficacy as a personal variable and aims to contribute to the literature by expanding the work engagement research to a wider international context. The study includes employee perceptions of human resource development climate in the organizations as the potential mediator of the relationship between self efficacy and work engagement. The results of the study provide support for the positive relationship between occupation self efficacy and work engagement in a sample of business executives in India. The results indicate that occupational self efficacy significantly predicts work engagement. As a result employees with higher self efficacy are more likely to be engaged than others.
The third article “Managing the Diversified Team – Challenges and Strategy for Improving the Performance” is by Dr Vidhi Agrawal. The paper aims to highlight the key factors which need to be taken in to consideration to manage a diversified team. It also provides business managers and executives with a framework of how to best utilize and implement teams in the workplace so as to maximize both the internal and external diversified skill sets capabilities in team members. The analysis in the paper shows that the organization, as represented by management, can provide the tools to assist employees improve their work climate, in terms of diversity and knowledge transfer. However cognitive and behavioral change, and the benefits to be realized from such initiatives, can only emanate from the individual.
Conclusions
All of the papers emphasize the value of teams in the success of an organisation. The authors have given case examples to show that tomorrow’s organisations need to retain talent for their ongoing sustainability. It is commonly opined that the performance of the organization depends upon the performance of the team. The leaders have to play a crucial role in managing a diversified team. A good organizational environment depends upon the people who are a key part of the organization.
Vidhi AgrawalGuest Editor
