Employee Alignment Research Articles

Addressing employee misfit—A crucial HR concern for organizational success

In the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary business, the strategic alignment of employees with their designated roles is a pivotal determinant of organizational success. Employee misfit, characterized by a misalignment between employees’ skills, interests, and assigned roles, poses formidable challenges to individual and collective performance. This comprehensive research report delves into the intricate implications of employee misfit, explores evolving trends in career consciousness among job seekers, outlines the multifaceted challenges HR managers face, and fervently advocates for implementing a comprehensive selection process to address this prevalent issue effectively. The report underscores the proactive role of management in cultivating a supportive work environment, fostering diverse career pathways, and embedding an inclusive selection framework to confront and mitigate the persistent issue of employee misfit.

The mediating role of employee alignment in the relationship between CEO’s skills and successful strategy execution

Regardless of the amount of research and focus on the success of the strategy execution, there does still appear to be a gap in the existing body of literature, which may lead to potential deficits in understanding the role of other factors such as chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) skills, and the alignment of the employee in the successful execution of the strategy. Therefore, the current study investigates the relationship between CEOs’ skills and successful strategy execution and the mediating effect of employee alignment on this relationship. The current study utilized quantitative and descriptive research methods with a survey research design. One hundred and thirty-nine CEOs of the service companies operating in Jordan completed the web-based survey questionnaire. The structural equation modeling (SEM) method was employed to test the study hypotheses. The findings revealed that CEOs’ skills and employee alignment have a significant and positive impact on successful strategy execution. In addition, the results indicated that employee alignment has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between CEOs’ skills and successful strategy execution. To execute the strategy successfully, CEOs in the hypercompetitive environment need to apply both the technical skills of the job and the diverse soft skills and ensure that employees understand the link between their job responsibilities and the strategy execution through an effective communicating process.

Alignment of employees’ competencies with espoused organizational values

Building on previous values- and competencies-related scholarly research, in this paper we aimed to explore the relationship between espoused organizational values and competencies. We drew on LinkedIn data and focused on the top ten companies with “the best LinkedIn company pages” according to the annual #BestofPages contest launched by LinkedIn. The analysis revealed that values emphasis varied between individual companies and that only one company, the winner of the best LinkedIn company page context, had employees’ competencies fully aligned with the espoused organizational values. From the scholarly perspective, this research offers a piece of empirical evidence on the emphasis placed on espoused values in international organizations and provides a nontraditional approach for understanding competencies almost in real-time, which was labeled by previous scholars as a difficult problem. The analysis also helps to shed light not only on the existing versus needed/wanted competencies or their gaps but also provides an alternative approach to understanding how the competencies can mirror organizational values, evolve with them over time, and be better aligned to help organizations achieve their strategic aims. This is the practical contribution of this study.

Role of Performance Management in Managing Talent Management Challenges during COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: A Conceptual Review

Significant talent management challenges have come from the COVID-19 pandemic, like (a) temporary halt for non-essential recruitment and layoff to cut cost (b) wage-freezes, wage reduction 8 bonus cancellations (c) changed mode of working i.e., teleworking (d) increased work stress etc. Furthermore, COVID-19 has revealed that many organizations do not use state-of-science performance management systems rather, they have relied on the traditional system of a performance management system which includes occasional evaluation and less effort in the alignment of employees, individual goals, and organizational goals. As a result of the lack of value provided by the traditional performance management system, many businesses are fully eliminating performance reviews. We assert that performance management meets significant managerial, strategic developmental, and organizational maintenance if executed using evidence-based recommendations and thus can solve contemporary talent management difficulties. In this paper, an attempt has been made to give some suggestions on how to accept and strengthen the performance management system to help organizations face unprecedented situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study is review of many articles, research papers, books, blogs etc. The current study is based on secondary data.

Understanding Gender Equality Policy and Practice Gaps Through the Lens of Organisational Justice: Development of an Employee Alignment Model.

Policies and actions to address gender inequalities are widespread across a range of institutional and organisational contexts. Concerns have been raised about the efficacy and impacts of such measures in the absence of sustained evaluation of these activities. It has been proposed that important contextual factors may propel or inhibit measures to promote gender equality, including a critical mass of women, role models, diverse leaders and inclusive organisational cultures. This paper explores relationships between organisational justice and equality interventions to better understand gaps between equality policies and practices using a comparative case study approach in a male-dominated sector. A combination of questionnaire and interview data analysis with employees in three case organisations in the construction sector are used to outline links between perceptions of gender equality initiatives and organisational justice, and the mechanisms used to reinforce in-group dominance. The findings culminate in the development of an Employee Alignment Model and a discussion of how this relates to the organisational climate for gender equality work. The findings suggest that the development of interactional organisational justice is an important precursor for successful gender equality interventions in organisations. These findings have implications for those looking to minimize unintentional harm of policies or interventions to improve gender equality.

On the contribution to the alignment during an organizational change: Measurement of job satisfaction with working conditions

Introduction: Modern approaches to Occupational Health and Safety have acknowledged the important contribution that continuous improvements to working conditions can make to the motivation of employees, their subsequent performance, and therefore to the competitiveness of the company. Despite this fact, organizational change initiatives represent a path less traveled by employees. Specialized literature has drawn on the fact that employees’ satisfaction presents both the foundation and catalyst for effective implementation of improvements to working conditions. Method: This paper conceptualizes the alignment of employees through measurement of job satisfaction and uses the Bayesian Network to assess the influence of human factors, particularly the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects. Toward this aim, the Bayesian Network is evaluated through a cross-validation process, and a sensitivity analysis is then conducted for each influential dimension: emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. Results: The results reveal that these three dimensions are interrelated and have a direct influence on job satisfaction and employees’ alignment during the organization change. Further, they suggest that the best strategy for enhanced alignment and smooth conduct of organizational changes is simultaneous enhancement of the three dimensions. Practical applications: This study shows the influence of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions on job satisfaction and employees’ alignment during the organizational change. Furthermore, it elaborates the way to develop efficient and effective strategies for a successful change implementation and sustained alignment.

Self Assessment Tools (SAT) as One of the Basic Tools for Performance Management: A Critique

The alignment of employees to the organizational goal, vision and mission is very imperative and cannot be emphasize enough. As such, there is need for organizations to deliberately bring their workforce on board to achieve this set goals or targets. It is also important for employees to assess themselves from time to time to ascertain that they are up-to- date with the vision, goal and mission of the organization, this literally translate into self-assessment- a process of keeping self in proper check to ascertain correctness and alignment with organizational objective. The central theme of this article is to examine the role of Self-Assessment Tool (SAT) in performance management, the article also examine the shortfall of this tool developed by Bureau for Public Service Reform (BPSR). The method adopted for this study is survey method using questionnaires, one hundred questionnaires were administered among forty (40) junior, thirty (30) senior staff in the Office of the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Enugu State, twenty (20) contract staff and ten (10) permanent staff of First Bank Plc, presidential road, Enugu. The results from the analysis shows that, the results from Self-Assessment Tool (SAT) are not made public and it gives preferences to government agencies at the detriment of private sector. The paper further X-ray the importance of performance management, ranging from reduced costs in the organization, aligns the organization directly between its employees and the strategic goals and stop project overruns. The paper concludes by noting that the result of the assessment may be made public, to guide policy making process and finally, the private sector should also be incorporated into the tool.

Political alignment between firms and employees in the United States: evidence from a new dataset

AbstractI present a novel measure of partisan alignment between firms and employees. This measure is constructed using data matching 1,691,790 US federal campaign contribution filings of 85,109 individuals to the donations of 874 Political Action Committees (PACs) of publicly listed US companies between 2003 and 2016. The alignment measure shows that employee and employer contributions are highly correlated. Furthermore, firm- and occupation-level factors are significantly associated with firm–employee alignment. Uniquely, these new data can be easily linked to external data on industries, firms, and occupations and consequently allow for in-depth analysis of precisely how companies can influence employees’ politics.

Developing an employee recognition program that promotes learning across the organization

Purpose Recognition programs have proven to be a useful tool in engaging employees and helping align them around a common purpose. In this case, study the organization created a recognition program that promoted learning across the organization. The easy to follow steps provided herein can be replicated by leaders in any organization. Design/methodology/approach The case study provides a quick reflection of the steps taken by the organization to create a recognition program that linked behaviors, tactical actions and corporate strategy in a way that engaged all toward learning together. Findings With the new program, the organization not only improved employee engagement and alignment around four critical behaviors, the organization also witnessed employee alignment around strategic vision and revenue improvements. Originality/value Studies find that employee engagement is seriously lacking. Studies also find that employee engagement is beneficial to employee contribution and employee success. Recognition programs have been described as one method to improve engagement. This case study illustrates how an organization was able to implement such a program.

Sustaining Practice Change: How to Prevent Organizational Relapse

Sustaining Practice Change: How to Prevent Organizational Relapse

Values-Based Innovation. Designing a Model to Be Applied in Management Sciences.

What is the mean reason to formulate values in the firms or organizations? The main answer is to facilitate the alignment of employees and organizational values to increase motivation and effectiveness with better outcomes in performance and investment alike. However, there are few efforts to design, implement and prove empirical models to analyze their results that conform an integral view of factors involved in a value-based management model. The mentioned above represents a great opportunity for the management sciences to show their abilities to propose a model able to determine and weight an inventory of values per industry/sector and select the values, according to the division or department of the firm or corporate organization.

Understanding Employee Alignment During Organizational Change

Despite the fact that employee alignment with an initiative is often considered a critical process of organizational change, few studies have examined processes where organizations change the individual to bring about alignment. This research aims to fill this gap by exploring whether changes in employee line of sight to the objectives and actions necessary to accomplish the objectives can improve alignment with a change initiative. To accomplish this, I examine the trajectories for line of sight objectives and line of sight actions and whether those trajectories can affect behavioral alignment. Through an intervention aimed at improving efficiency in a sample of 189 fast food employees, a change in line of sight objectives was found to influence both a change in line of sight actions and a change in behavioral alignment. A change in line of sight actions also predicted a change in behavioral alignment. Implications and future directions for research are discussed.

Employee share ownership in Germany: A cluster analysis of firms' aims

IntroductionEmployee participation in a firm's capital stock is one of the most important forms of financial participation. Stock option plans, stock bonus plans or direct accounts of a firm's shares are different kinds of employee ownership. Throughout this article we will refer to these kinds of financial participation as employee share ownership (ESO). Both academics and political actors have highlighted the significant benefits associated with ESO for employees, employers and the state (e.g., European Commission, 2014: Lampel, Bhalla, & Jha, 2012; Pendleton, Poutsma, van Ommeren, & Brewster, 2001). However, ESO still is not very common in Germany. For instance, according to most recent establishment data from Germany, in 2011 only 2 per cent of all employers provided ESO (Moller, 2013). These numbers remained stable throughout the last years (Czaya & Matiaske, 2017).Against this background, during the past two decades the body of literature on the prevalence of ESO and associated benefits has been constantly growing. Thereby, a common research approach is to estimate regression models of the incidence of an ESO scheme - i.e., the fact that a firm provides ESO - on a set of explanatory variables. However, empirical evidence is restricted by data availability, as such research typically uses data from secondary sources. Hence, these studies allow only indirect inferences about firms' aims through the provision of ESO. The following example illustrates this prevalent research approach. According to agency theory, monitoring costs increase with firm size. Larger firms are expected to adopt an ESO scheme with higher probability as compared to smaller firms, since the provision of ESO is supposed to contribute to an alignment of employees' with employers' interests and hence, will decrease monitoring costs. Thus, if research findings suggest a positive impact of firm size on ESO incidence, it can be inferred from this result that a firm's motivation to adopt an ESO scheme rests on the aim of reducing monitoring costs.However, this research approach has not remained uncriticised. As Ben-Ner and Jones (1995) put it already twenty years ago, Ignoring the reason for of an employee ownership scheme ... leads to confounding the effects of employee share ownership schemes with the reasons for their adoption (Ben-Ner & Jones, 1995, p. 552). Specifically, we see the following two shortcomings. Firstly, from a methodological point of view, measuring the motives of organisational decision makers through directly asking these individuals about their aims would imply higher validity as compared to inferring these aims from regression models. In general, without exploring individual reasoning, rational choice theories remain infallible (Popper, 1994), and the theoretically derived assumptions are rather speculative. Secondly, there is a logical gap concerning smaller firms, since the reasoning based on monitoring costs can only explain why larger firms more often than smaller firms provide ESO. In contrast, the question why smaller firms provide ESO - what actually happens - remains unanswered.Our research approach seeks to overcome these shortcomings. In line with extant literature, we investigate firms' aims through providing ESO. Yet different from previous studies we use primary data gathered through interviews with decision makers of firms that provide ESO. Furthermore, we take firm context into account, since firms may pursue different aims through ESO, according to certain firm characteristics such as size or legal form.Therewith we respond to a call by Poutsma, Blasi and Kruse (2012) for a more intense consideration of contextual factors that affect organisational decisions and for bringing agency back into our analyses of and diffusion (Poutsma et al., 2012, p. 1514). Within an exploratory approach we examine the aims that different kinds of firms pursue through ESO. …

Human and Social Capital Management Based on Complexity Paradigm: Implications for Various Stakeholders and Sustainable Development

We argue that human and social capital management models, based on complexity theory as a metaphor, may contribute to sustainable development in the long run, while at the organizational level they serve as an umbrella for strategic alignment of employees’ behavior. We propose possible linkages among complexity, a variety of constructs, and human and social capital, to stimulate creation of a sustainable management mentality based on understanding of the worldview concept, with factors that influence it more instantly (terror management), or more incrementally (simulacra), in the ways exhibited in some natural or historical phenomena (such as swarming). In this light, throughout the paper we provide novel solutions for different governance and management systems (environmental, HR, marketing, social responsibility etc.) outside their frontal actions to conclude how policy makers may use this paradigm shift to achieve stronger stakeholder engagement and establish sustainable equilibrium among human, social and other forms of capital. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Aligning Individual and Organizational Performance

Performance appraisal programs are touted as a management control tool for implementing organizational goals and driving organizational performance but how these programs do that has not been evaluated. This research examines the extent to which goal alignment in federal agency performance appraisal programs enhances organizational performance. Two aspects of goal alignment are explored: actual embedding of organizational goals in performance plans (plan alignment) and employees’ knowledge of how their work relates to the agency’s goals and priorities (employee alignment). Results indicate employee alignment increases organizational performance whereas plan alignment does not. Strategic management proponents should take note of this outcome. Furthermore, the overall quality of a performance appraisal program moderates the alignment and organizational performance relationship. Under conditions of high- and low-performance appraisal program expectations, employee alignment can influence organizational performance, but not as expected.

The role of familiness for family business innovativeness

The interplay between the business and the family from an innovativeness-perspective seems to be a promising field for family business scholars. Nonetheless, research on the relation between familiness and innovativeness is underdeveloped. This paper aims at overcoming this deficit by targeting the question how the familiness of a specific family business impacts its innovativeness. In doing so, a systems theory-based view is employed and the case study design follows a longitudinal qualitative approach. Results of objective hermeneutic analyses show that familiness plays an important role in establishing and maintaining a high innovativeness. Furthermore, the case highlights the importance of the alignment of employees with the family’s innovative visions. Additionally, findings reconstruct the role of the family in innovation from a process as well as from an outcome perspective. Systems theory allows for the location of familiness in the coupling of family and business systems, where familiness supports the transportation of norms and values from the family system into the business system.

Building Goal Alignment in Federal Agencies’ Performance Appraisal Programs

Public managers wrestle with how to influence organizational performance. Results-based management approaches point to the goal alignment’s importance in performance management programs for meeting organizational goals. This research examines the extent to which federal agency organizational factors allow for performance appraisal goal alignment. Goal alignment is operationalized in two ways: embedding of strategic plan goals into employee performance plans and employee knowledge of how their work relates to the agency’s goals and priorities. Using data from U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s evaluation of federal agency appraisal programs, results indicate leadership support of the program is a determining factor of plan alignment. Communication of the organization’s goals, the climate fit for achieving results, and whether the strategic plan was written for the agency program level tend to predict employee alignment. Strategic plan level is particularly important for strategic management literature, which has limited empirical evidence for the effectiveness of program-level strategic plans.

Employee involvement in strategy-making process and company performance: the mediating role of employee strategic alignment

This article aims to study the mediating role of employee strategic alignment in the relationship between employee involvement in the strategy making process and company performance. We used structural equation modelling techniques with a sample of 372 European organisations of different sizes and from different countries. We found that employee strategic alignment plays a total mediating role in the relationship between employee involvement in the strategy making process and company performance. Our research shows the importance of employee involvement in the strategy making process, as well as the importance of employee alignment with the organisation’s strategy. Our quantitative study can be complemented with a qualitative study in order to better understand how and why this relationship occurs. Our paper is the first to study and validate the mediating role of employee strategic alignment in the relationship between employee involvement in the strategy-making process and company performance.

Empirical validation of the importance of employees' learning motivation for workplace e-learning in Taiwanese organisations

<span>E-learning systems, adopted by organisations for employee training to enhance employees' performance, are characterised by self-directed, autonomous learning. Learning motivation is then of importance in the design of e-learning practices in workplace. However, empirical study of the alignment of e-learning with individual learning needs and organisational goals is an area with limited research. This study intends to clarify the importance of learning motivation in employees' e-learning systems use behaviour, based on the information systems success model. Data from one hundred and eighty-five employees who used e-learning systems in their work environment were gathered in Taiwan and analysed with PLS. Results showed that employees' learning motivation, reflecting their learning needs and strengths, influenced perceived usefulness and satisfaction with e-learning, and their use of the systems, which enhanced their task performance. The results validated the importance of employees' learning motivation and the need for alignment of employees' learning needs and organisational goals in e-learning training. The clarification can help facilitate an organisation's human capital management, and contributes to further advancement of the information systems success model.</span>

A two-stage analysis of the influences of employee alignment on effecting business–IT alignment

The influence of employee alignment orientations on successful implementation of business–IT alignment is investigated. Based on survey data collected from employees of Indonesian manufacturing companies, a two-stage approach is applied (i) to discover the connectivity relations among business–IT alignment and four aspects of employee alignment orientations, and then (ii) to measure the relative influence of each aspect onto one another. Employee communication is deemed to have the most direct contribution to business–IT alignment. Meanwhile, the connectivity relations show exactly how employee alignment orientations influence business–IT alignment.