Question:
Identify how to effectively delegate tasks within the workplace. Understand how to empower individuals via effective delegation. Understand the role of the middle manager in the delegation process.
Answer:
Introduction
The word “delegation” refers to the process of management style that helps to identify the problems within the workers and then try to improve their performance level through providing training and development programs (Graham et al. 2015). Delegation is used in different ways that is not understood by everyone properly. The word can be used in different ways, in the workplaces it is used to understand the flaws of the role-playing of the employees, and then to allocate them with proper work schedule to improve the performance. It can be used either as an excuse for dumping failure onto the shoulders of subordinates, or as a dynamic tool for motivating and training a team to realize their full potential (Shin et al. 2015). In this study, the role of delegation will be discussed in the context of workplace. The study will help to understand the procedure of applying the delegation effectively in an organisation to train the workers in EFP organisation.
The case study has presented the conflict emerged in the EFP organisation that has identified over the last week or so on. In this case, the company has introduced a new manager to look after this condition. The foremost responsibility of the manager is now to recognise the capabilities of the employees in the OSD team and then to allocate particular duties for them. Therefore, the manager has to identify the drawbacks first in the employees that should be expected to change by him or her. In order to delegate a new project in this organisation, the manager should have to provide a new timetable in weekly basic to arrange the staffs for the new responsibility. The new task should be allocated to the team members in a way that the productivity will increase as per the requirement. The team members are not having all the experienced workers and therefore, the workers should be analysed first to understand the capacity of them to allocate the task. In the organisation, there are many criteria based on which the new project will be allocated. Therefore, before developing the timetable for the employees to produce the new project, the manager have to detect their skills. This will enable the manager to evaluate the skills of the staffs based on the existing knowledge of assigning leads in sales system, knowledge and skills in extracting the ideas as well as the information from the sales system, knowledge of the type of source or lead the team members convert, fully understanding and ability to operate the sales system. The manager will allocate the works on these criteria to the members Liz, John, Katy, Stephen, Phil, Matt, Donna, Naila, Tracey and James. The members have differences in their capacity of skills. Some of them have the competency in every criterion and some of them have not the quality to satisfy all the criteria. Therefore, the staffs that have not the competency in all skills will not be able to perform the new task in proper way.
In this case, the best employee who will be able to lead the task in future is Donna. The member has the qualities that are needed in performing the task. Therefore, Donna will be the best member of the team who has the quality to assigning leads in the sales system. Additionally, the members has the potentiality to fully understand the task and then able to operate the Sales system which will help to perform the task properly in future. Therefore, the manager should allocate the task to the best member of the team, Donna, to give the new responsibility of the work. The other members of this team lacks minimum a criteria to fulfil the capabilities that can disqualify them to satisfy the manager. The team members of this OSD Team have to manage a new project therefore, the manager has to study the member’s quality before deciding the best leader for the task. The qualities of the other members, such as, Liz, Katy, Naila and James have the capacity of the three qualities that they can do very well. However, in one criterion they failed to satisfy the manager. Therefore, the manager cannot able to rely on them to give the whole responsibility to these members. Then the manager has analysed the other members who have the capability of performing in a partly manner. These members are capable of doing the sales system in partly competent manner. Therefore, if the manager will allocate the task to these members such as, Stephen and Phil, then the task will not be completely in the hand of dependable member. Therefore, the best person to take the lead responsibility of this task should be Donna, who is capable of doing this in every manner.
It would not be possible to allocate the task to John, as he is not capable of doing this new project. John has not the capability of existing knowledge of assigning leads in the sales system and this skill has to be improved that he can be appropriate for the work. Additionally, John is not capable of this work as he lacks the understanding to deal and operate the sales system that cannot conduct the things for the new task. The manager has analysed that most of the skills that is required for completing the new task was not present in John. He lacks the skill to extract data from the sales system as well as lacks the consistency in converting leads. Therefore, these are the reasons considering which the manager has decided not to involve John in this delegation process.
In this case study, the main focus is on the conflict, which refers to the disagreeing parties working together without considering others values are incorrect (Bradley et al. 2013). If there is more than one person then the conflict is must I that organisation. These organisational conflicts are generally come from the disagreement of the team members on a particular topic. In this study, conflict has been discussed in the organisation regarding developing a team work performance. Although in every organisation conflict is a very common thing, but if it is not removed in the initial stage, then a small conflict can grown to a huge issue. As a result, this conflict can ruin the overall performance of a team. As the performance of a team depends on the performances of every team member therefore, it cannot be possible for the OSD team to perform well while the two members of them have problem with each other.
In this case, it has seen that the team members were performing well before but when they went for a social night out, the conflict has entered into the team. Donna and James, the most capable workers of the team has fall into a quarrel that has been stretched for a long time. However, as a manager it cannot be tolerable as he know that if the problem will continue then the performance level will also decrease. In order to resolve this problem the manager has applied the CUDSA framework. According to Wolff and Yakinthou (2013), some conflicts can be resolved by a simple informal way while there are other conflicts that cannot be solved with a simple way. In those cases a systematic process or framework is required to remove the conflict. CUDSA is the systematic framework that will help the manager to resolve the problem between Donna and James (Beri et al. 2015). The framework suggests five steps, such as,
- Confronting the main problem
- Try to understand Donna and James’s point of views
- Defining the problem
- Evaluate the problem and then try to find out solutions for this
- Decide the best path to solve the conflict and then applying it
These five steps will help the manager to understand the actual problem between them and the conflict can be removed very easily with applying the CUDSA framework.
The condition was too bad that the team has been divided into two parts already. Therefore, if the manager does not resolve the problem then it will increase more and the difference between the two parts in the team will increase too. This situation has damaged the team spirit and the targets of team as well as the individuals were also affecting. The performance stage has become storming phase due to this conflict. Therefore, the manager has to solve this problem first to get a good performance from the team.
Conclusion
In concluding the study, it can be said that the case studies has presented two business problems that seems very easy but in reality plays a crucial role in team building and team performance. The first part of the study has analysed the role of delegation in the workplace while the second part has discussed the conflict management in a team. The delegation of work has been explained with the case study of EPF organisation’s task delegation for training and performance development program for the new project. On the other hand, the conflict management has been evaluated with resolving the conflict between Donna and James through applying CUDSA framework. Therefore, the study has analysed these two tools to understand and then to solve the problem to improve the team’s performance.
Reference List
Graham, J.R., Harvey, C.R. and Puri, M., 2015. Capital allocation and delegation of decision-making authority within firms. Journal of Financial Economics, 115(3), pp.449-470.
Shin, H., Shin, J., Yoo, S., Song, J. and Kim, A., 2015. Strategic delegation, quality competition, and new product profitability. Management Decision,53(3), pp.713-729.
Bradley, B.H., Klotz, A., Baur, J.E. and Banford, C.G., 2013, January. When Does Conflict Improve Team Performance? A Review of Evidence and Framework for Future Research. In Academy of Management Proceedings(Vol. 2013, No. 1, p. 17093). Academy of Management.
Wolff, S. and Yakinthou, C. eds., 2013. Conflict management in divided societies: theories and practice. Routledge.
Beri, T., Bansal, S. and Kumar, S., 2015, May. A scheduling and runtime framework for a cluster of heterogeneous machines with multiple accelerators. In Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2015 IEEE International (pp. 146-155). IEEE.
