Pygmalion in Management
Case Reaction Paper
Pygmalion in Management
Introduction:
Pygmalion first appeared in Greek mythology as a king of Cyprus who carved and then fell in love with a statue of a woman, which aphrodite brought to life as Galatea. Much later, George Barnard Shaw wrote a play, entitiled Pygmalion, about Henry Higgins (the gentleman) and Lisa Doolittle (the cockney flower girl whom Henry turns bets he can turn into a lady). The main idea of an article “Pygmalion in Management” is that if manager believe that subordinate is capable of achieving greatness, then the subordinate indeed achieve the greatness, In other words,believe in potential simply creates potential. The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. Or it can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite.To put it in another way every managers or supervisors have some expectations of the people who report to him or her and they consciously or unconsciously communicate these expectations to their subordinates. On the other hand people pick up on, or consciously or unconsciously read, these expectations from their managers or supervisors and people perform in the ways that are consistent with the expectations they have picked up on from the supervisors.
Points of Agreement:
“What managers expect of subordinates and the way they treat them largely determine their peerformance and career progress”( Pygmalion in Management, Harvard Business Review, P.6) I agree with this statement because the subordinates always set their own peformance standards on the basis of the managers expectations to them.
According to the James Rhem, Exuctive editor for the National Teaching and Learning Forum, "When teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways." Therefore analysing this statement what we can understand is that expectations plays important role everywhere no matter whether it is a work place or class room or etc.
“Industry’s greatest challenge is to rectify the underdevelopment, underutilization, and ineffective management and use of its most valuable resource – its young managerial and professional talent.” (Pygmalion in Management, Havard Business Review, P.10). I also agree with this statement in the article because many organization do not give required attention to the human resourses in the organization. Company invest less for the human resource of the organization and for their training and development.
Points of disagreement:
It is true that most of the time manager’s expectation plays significant role to improve the suborordinates productivity in the organization. But if the employee is egoistic in nature then he/she probably will do better if someone understimate or undermine his/her capability. Therefore, I strongely disgree that self-fulfilling prophecies is all in all to improve the productivity in the organization. It’s largely depends on the nature of the employee. Same rule and way may not apply to the thousand of the people or may not be effective for them as human beings are too dynamic in nature.
In the article it is mentioned that the way managers treat subordinate, not the way they organize them, is the key to high expectations and high productivity. (Pygmalion in Management, Harvard Business Review, 1969, P.8) I don’t think this statement is correct all the time because how managers treat their subordinate in turn is the result of how he orgnize things or organize human resources. Organizing is the basic function of the managers which largely influence the overal productivity of the entire organization therefore it can not coampared with the term ‘treating employee’ in terms of productivity.
Application of information to worldly views:
I have worked in an organization as a sales representative just after compliting my BBA for around 6 month.. Manager/Owner of that company used to behave and treat employees on the basis of their contribution to the organization’s production and he often used to communicate those expectation to the employees unknowingly. Those employee who thought that the manager do not treat them well or he considered them as a poor performer were not motivated and did not work hard which in turn reduced their actual productivity. On the other hand those employee whome the manager considered as a outstanding performer are highly moivated because of that their productivity used to be higher than what is expected from them. Therefore after reading the Pigmalion in management I realized that productivity of the employees increase and decrease on the basis of management expectation towards the employees performance . If the managers believe subordinates will perform poorly, it is virtually impossible for them to mask their expectations because the message usally is communicated unintenationnaly. This is exactly what had happened in the organization where I have worked.
Truly, management can improve the productivity of the employee, understanding and implementing the Pygmalion in management. Thats why management, can use the Pygmalion in management as a motivation tools to improve the productivity in the organization.
Integration of information with materials or concepts from the text:
Directly or indirectly our text book also mentions the main point of the article “Pygmalion in Management”. To be more specific, sixth chapter “Fundation Concepts of Motivation” provides the exactly similar view. According to the Goal Theory in this chapter, “Goal setting is a basic process. Managers widely accept goalsetting as a means to improve and sustain performance. The core motive of the goal setting theory is that individual who are provided with specific hard goals perform better than those given easy, nonspecific, or do your best goals or without goals.”(Andrew J.Durbin, Fundamentals of Organizational Behavior, 2007,P.120
In addition to this, according to “The Expectancy Theory of Motivation” in the text book, the most important motivational forces are:
§ How well the person believes he or she can perform the task.
§ How well the person believes that performance will lead to certain outcomes.
§ The value that the person attaches to the outcome.
Therefore the expetency theory of motivation is also similar with the Pygmalion in Management.
Points of Interest:
When I read this article I was surprised and excited. It is really wonderful for the business student like me. This reaction paper is my personal opinion about the article. Some of the facts which are mentioned in the article exactly resembles the reality of my own experience. Being a management student, I found this article very helpful tool and resources which helps us to be an effective manager and motivate people to improve productuctivity of the organisation.
New Questions Sparked:
§ How an effective manager determine the optimal level of the expected production or outcome from the subordinate?
§ Do all managers expect some desired level of outcome or production from their each and every subordinate for whom they are responsible?
§ Is there any scientific or logical reason behind how these whole mechanism of expectations and productivity works?
§ Is it possible to manipulate the individual’s performanace by manager using ‘Pygmalion Theory in management?
References:
§ Andrew J. Durbin,(2007). “Fundamentales of organizational Behavior”, (Thomson South-Western)
§ J. Sterling Livingston,(1969). Pygmalion in Management. Harvard Business Review
No comments:
Post a Comment