Salz Review - Wall Street Journal

Salz Review
An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices
190
Being an effective employee is important, and the ability to be able to be an employee who
can work effectively in groups has a number of benefits. These include safety, social reward
and the ability to achieve more than one might alone. Research from CRESS (The Centre
for Research in to Employment, Skills and Society) argues that the definition of
performance at work has for too long been narrowly defined as the successful
accomplishment of the duties and responsibilities of a given job, or task performance. Task
performance is critical to the organisations technical core 285 and is therefore critical to the
success of the organisation. However, they argue that there are two other important
dimensions for the performance of the organisation, namely the enactment of citizenship
behaviours and the absence of withdrawal behaviours. 286 Both of these are positively
correlated with organisational success.
Citizenship behaviours 287 are often referred to as extra-role behaviours that go beyond the
task requirements of the job. They include supporting colleagues, contributing to ideas for
improving the organisation and participating in organisation-wide initiatives. Withdrawal
behaviours on the other hand have a negative impact on the functioning of the
organisation.
Withdrawal behaviours 288 include intention to leave and deviant types of behaviour such as
consistently arriving late and leaving early, neglecting work, or abusing company property.
Individuals who are emotionally engaged at work are more likely to demonstrate citizenship
behaviours and less likely to demonstrate withdrawal behaviours. In summary, setting an
organisation’s purpose in a broader sense, and encouraging employees to contribute widely,
has a positive impact on both individuals and the long term success of the organisation.
What it means to be a good employee has become somewhat confused of late, drowned in
a milieu of employment law, the proliferation of a culture of individualism and a wave of
interest in what organisations must do keep employees engaged. But, other than doing
important tasks of work, employees have important roles to play. Being a good employee
means: co-operating in teams to maximise resources and to drive productivity and
contribution; building skills which are valuable to the organisation as a whole; exercising
judgment about those we select as leaders to follow; voicing opinion about what works and
does not work in the organisation; and being a good ‘corporate citizen’, supporting fellow
employees, and fostering a social environment that is conducive to the accomplishment
of work.
Yet, in modern, large organisations, few employees are properly involved. Research from
the Kingston Consortium on Employee Engagement 289 indicates that just 34% of
employees are ‘vocally involved’ and have opportunities to voice their views. Interestingly,
the vocally involved category of workers is the most engaged. This definition of
engagement derives from the work of earlier theorists and commentators such as Kahn
(1990), May et al (2004) and Schaufeli and Bakker (2004), all of whom regard engagement
285 W.C. Borman and S.J. Motowidlo, Expanding the Criterion Domain to Include Elements of Contextual Performance,
1993.
286 CIPD Research Insight, Emotional and Transactional Engagement – does it matter?, 2012.
287 K. Lee and A.J. Allen, Organisational Citizenship Behaviour and Workplace Deviance: the Role of Affect and
Cognitions, 2002.
288 S.L. Robinson and R.J. Bennett, A typology of Deviant Workplace Behaviours: a Multidimensional Scaling Study,
1995.
289 Kingston Consortium Project on Employee Engagement, Creating an Engaged Workforce, 2010.