Factors Impacting Employee Behaviour
There are set of factors that impact employee behaviour in direct and indirect ways. These factors can be internal to organisation such as work culture, leadership, job responsibilities relationships with colleagues etc., or external such as the extent of work-life balance, changes in personal circumstances, employee cultural background, the extent of interpersonal skills etc.
Work culture can be defined as “applying the general characteristics of culture to the specifics of how people work at a point of time and place” (Moran et al., 2007, p. 30) and work culture is one of the major factors impacting employee behaviour. Work culture is usually set by founder(s) of organisation, but it can change over a course of time. In simple terms, in order to survive employees have to fit in the current work culture.
The quality of organisational leadership has also great impact on employee behaviour in a way that effective organisational leaders can inspire and motivate employees for greater performance, at the same time when ineffective leaders can cause employee knowledge, skills and competencies not being fully utilised.
Employee job responsibilities can be mentioned as important factor impacting employee behaviour because extensive range of roles and responsibilities can cause burnout for employees with all the negative consequences.
In personal level, the extent of work-life balance of employees has direct and significant implications on their behaviour. Specifically, lack of work-life balance is most likely to have negative implications on employee behaviour and performance in various levels.
Similarly, employee-specific factors such as cultural background and interpersonal skills and competencies greatly affect employee behaviours. Therefore, managers need to take into account these differences when dealing with each individual employee.
References
Moran, R.T., Harris, P.R. & Moran S.V. (2007) “Managing Cultural Differences: Global Leadership Strategies for the 21st Century” 7th edition, Routledge