The purpose of this blog is to illustrate the importance of a manager cultivating a productive and positive work environment for the employees in case of events that may lower team morale. This would include ways to boost employee engagement which in turn leads to improvement in performance and efficiency.

Green, P. I., Finkel, E. J., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Gino, F. (2018, January 17). The energizing nature of work engagement: Toward a new need-based theory of work motivation. Research in Organizational Behavior. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37102937.

Cogliser, C. C., Gardner, W. L., Gavin, M. B., & Broberg, J. C. (2012). Big Five Personality Factors and Leader Emergence in Virtual Teams. Group & Organization Management, 37(6), 752–784. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601112464266

Peterson, R. S., & Behfar, K. J. (2003). The dynamic relationship between performance feedback, trust, and conflict in groups: A longitudinal study. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 92(1-2), 102–112. https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/science/article/pii/S0749597803000906.

Cameron, K., & Seppala, E. (2015, December 1). Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/12/proof-that-positive-work-cultures-are-more-productive.

Allas, T., & Schaninger, B. (2020, September 22). The boss factor: Making the world a better place through workplace relationships . Bellingham. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=76821df0-6ded-4ebf-823a-3f16eb4ac2aa%40pdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=148060595&db=bth.

1. This article, The Energizing Nature of Work Engagement, brings up the idea that employee engagement and job productivity goes past just meeting the basic needs of employees and goes into employee work engagement now heavily depends on how fulfilled they feel with their job and their expectations of the job. This article goes into the main ideas of work engagement theory and how it has evolved over time as have the needs of employees. This idea is centered around the emotional state of the employee and how positive and negative states affect the work environment, and how the energy of the work environment produced by the employees affects the overall work-oriented behaviors.

From these essential ideas, we can apply it to company workplaces. The goal of meeting these essential worker needs is to achieve the best possible company efficiency and performance. This will overall benefit the company and its employees along with its clients and the community around it.

2. In this article, the importance of emotional stability within leaders is analyzed. In the paper they predicted that people with higher emotional stability were more likely to be more successful leaders in virtual settings. From how much emphasis the article puts on the importance of emotional stability between leaders and teams as a manager it would be important to know the personality of each employee to be able to create a productive team where all the employees work well together.

This is important to the encouragement of a positive and engaging work environment with the creation of effective teams especially in virtual settings that are beginning to be more common. These interpersonal connections between employees that work together will lead to a more productive environment that will overall improve company performance.

3. Within the article, “The dynamic relationship between performance feedback, trust, and conflict in groups: A longitudinal study” written by Randall S. Peterson and Kristin Jackson Behfar took a sample of 252 students within 67 teams to see if their three hypothesis of; “Poor initial group performance feedback will predict later increased relationship conflict”, “Poor initial group performance feedback will predict later increased task conflict”, and “Established intragroup trust will moderate the effect of increased task conflict that results from receiving negative performance feedback” were true. Then seeing how these all relate to one another. The study showed that poor performance feedback does lead to task and relationship conflict. Having said this, the results also showed that task and relationship conflict can lead to poor performance as negative feelings for one another grow so they are consistently clashing with one another leading to poor performance.

This connects to our interest in productivity and engaging work environments by talking about how managers giving poor performance feedback causes issues like task and relationship conflicts in the future.. Management must make sure to be constructive when speaking to employees on how to improve their job performance because it is just as important to strive for improvement but you shouldn’t give harsh feedback with no suggestions on how to improve. It’s also important to make sure our work environment is positive and productive because poor work environments lead to task and relationship conflicts which also ends up contributing to poor performance.

4. This article highlights the importance of having a positive work environment that is as stress free and pressure free as possible. The article further goes into detail regarding the downfalls of having a high pressure and high stress working environment and the detrimental effects this can have on the employees within the company whether it is physically, mentally, and emotionally. This article then goes into detail on how as a boss you can implement a more positive and inviting work environment that will ultimately lead to a better performing company.

Things that we can take note from this article and apply to the work environment are things such as fostering social connections between workers, showing empathy to employees, going out of your way as a manager to ensure each employee’s needs are met, and encouraging your employees to be transparent and have a open communication line between you and them as well as with each other for any issues that they may be having.

5. In “The boss factor: Making the world a better place through workplace relationships”, this article goes over the pressure leaders go through, how good managers push employees to perform better, why servant leaders are very rare to come across, how bosses can improve on their job, and how organizations can help support managers in creating better employee experiences. This article also lists out key terms to provide great managerial experience such as, understanding, awareness, positivity and gratitude.

This article shows how important it is to have a good manager. When employees feel that they can trust their manager and see a confident leader, they in turn become more productive and are able to produce more quality work. As stated in the paper, when employee satisfaction is high, so is customer loyalty. These two in combination create profit for the company.   Sarah Allen Russell Young Tammie Chong Vidhya Rao Yousef Amini