7 03 / 22 PERSONALquarterly PERSONALquarterly: What role do line managers play in the communication of organizational goals? David Guest: Line managers are the important lynchpin between senior management and staff on the ground. They have the potential to act as a filter of information both down and up the hierarchy. They also have the main day-to-day responsibility for interpreting and implementing HR practices. Attribution theory can help to put this role in context. It is concerned with how people explain actions and events and the consequences of these explanations. This can be applied to how employees explain why certain policy priorities or HR practices are in place. For example, if performance management is revised, employees may attribute this to management’s desire to help improve the quality of their work or, alternatively, to make them work harder; and our research shows that the choice of attribution – whether employees attribute management decisions to positive or negative reasons – influences their satisfaction, commitment and motivation. Line managers, particularly lower level managers, have a good understanding of how their staff are likely to react and with this in mind have an important role in communicating the “why” as well as the “what” of HR practices. It is the same with organizational goals. When these are set at a senior level in the organization, they can often seem to have little relevance to employees in the office or on the shop floor. Line managers have to put flesh on what can sometimes be rather general messages from senior management and explain to staff why they are relevant and important. In doing so, they help to shape attributions about whether the goals are beneficial to those they manage. It is sometimes forgotten that line managers are also on the receiving end of organizational goals and HR practices and their own attributions may well influence how they communicate them to their staff. Whether it is communication up or down the hierarchy, line managers have a vital role to play in shaping the messages they convey. PERSONALquarterly: What are some of the most important research findings that might surprise practitioners? David Guest: When we did research about communicating the psychological contract, we were surprised to find that managers acknowledged that they were more likely to breach the psychological contract by not keeping their promises and commitments than workers were. This seems to be partly the result of over-promising and then failing to deliver. It is important that managers don’t make promises they can’t keep - but some seem to keep on doing this. PERSONALquarterly: What are the biggest threats to effective employer-employee communication in your opinion? David Guest: One of the greatest threats to effective communication, often acknowledged by managers, is that they are too busy to give sufficient time to interact with their staff and in partiPROFESSOR DAVID GUEST Emeritus Professor of Organizational Psychology and Human Resource Management E-Mail: david.guest@kcl.ac.uk www.kcl.ac.uk/people/david-guest David Guest is Emeritus Professor of Organizational Psychology and Human Resource Management at King’s College, London. He is also Adjunct Professor at Griffith University in Australia. He has worked with many leading companies and as well as a number of UK government departments. He has published well over 100 academic articles and book chapters on various aspects of human resource management including the relationship between HRM, performance and well-being, participation and partnership, the psychological contract and the quality of working life. His recent publications have addressed the implications of signalling theory and attribution theory for HRM as well as the need to advance quality of working life in the context of contemporary employment arrangements and Industrie 4. Among various awards, he is the only non-American to be awarded the prestigious Career Achievement Award of the Human Resources Division of the American Academy of Management.
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