By Heather Swartz, M.S.W., C.Med., Partner, Agree Incorporated
The increased diversity in Ontario workplaces, the benefits and challenges that diversity presents to organizations, and initiatives to increase awareness and make our workplaces more inclusive have been an important focus of Canadian businesses and their human resource professionals over the past several decades. (More)
People working collectively make organizations hum. No matter the task - a radical productivity improvement, a breakthrough innovation, the development of an exceptional customer service culture - people must join together and invest their heads, hearts, and wills to get the job done. When people, with various and relevant skills and perspectives, join around challenges that matter, their collective efforts produce innovations that get implemented.(More)
By Richard A. Russell, Principal, Agree Incorporated
Jean passed the talking piece to Kimberly. You could see her shoulders straighten, a deep intake of breath, a glance around the circle of her assembled colleagues. She was steeling herself to say what was difficult but necessary. Kimberly explained that, for her, the constant putting down of customers and negativity around workplace conditions was unacceptable and made it difficult to enjoy and take pride in her work. She asked that the team demonstrate professionalism toward clients and respect the fact that everyone ought to be able to come to work and expect a reasonably supportive environment.(More)
Globalization means HR/OD professionals are facing a new jobrequirement – learning to work in diverse and virtual teams, says WynneChisholm, an IRC faculty member on Organizational Design.Wynne, who worked abroad for several years as principal of her ownAlberta-based management consultancy, tells tales from the field in thefollowing Q&A.
In conversation with Dr. Jana Raver
Jana Raver, Assistant Professor and E. Marie Shantz Research Fellow in Organizational Behaviour at the Queen's School of Business, is an expert in counterproductive behaviours at work. We spoke to her upon the release of her ground-breaking study, “Beyond the individual victim: Linking sexual harassment, team processes, and team performance.” Managers and leaders may be startled by her findings: that sexual harassment is widespread and is not just a problem for its direct targets; it's also bad for team performance and the bottom line.(More)
We asked John Phelan – who teaches leadership at the Queen's School of Business and has been the mental skills coach for the Ottawa Senators hockey team since 2000 – about the similarities between sports teams and organizational teams. He says that building relationships is the key to good teams and good leadership – both on the ice and off.(More)
By Dr. Carol A. Beatty, Director, Queen's Industrial Relations Centre.
The managers who gathered around the table to plan a large budgetcut didn't look much like a cohesive team. In fact, they resembledcompeting animals around a shrinking watering hole. Each had his or herown staff and mandate to protect. And everyone realized how high thestakes were: if the downsizing wasn't done judiciously, a damagingpolitical backlash would certainly result. How were they to proceed?(More)
EMS can help conflicting groups move from disagreement to consensus and help enable management and unions to become strategic partners says the author of the study, which provides a detailed account of the operation of an EMS system, potential benefits, and pitfalls to avoid.
What skills need to be mastered for an academic team to succeed? The most important are the ability to establish effective team management practices, and developing advanced communications and problem-solving skills.
This review of the academic literature considers the prevalence of work teams in industry, and what factors influence whether self-managing teams become high-powered, or low-performing.
The use of 'high-performance' workplace practices and incentive pay plans have received considerable attention from researchers. Little is known, however, about human resource practices in non-manufacturing and non-case study settings. Moreover, for incentive pay, few studies have actually observed compensation contracts. This paper examines the relationship between several workplace practices and earnings using unique employee-employer linked personnel data where the explicit nature of compensation contracts is observed.
One of the fundamental challenges of Primary Health Care Reform is the establishment of collaborative health care teams to meet the needs of patients and society in a timely and effective manner. The characteristics of effective primary care team function have not been well studied. Millward and Ramsay (1998) used the Cognitive Motivational Model to develop a survey tool, first used in industry and subsequently in the health care field in Britain, to examine the characteristics of effective teams. In this study we investigated whether the Team Survey developed by Millward and Jeffries (2001) for the National Health Service in Britain was valid and reliable for use in predicting primary care team effectiveness in the Canadian health care context.
Building Smart Teams is an essential guide to creating high-performance teams fast. The approach is to help team members build skills and implement processes to increase success. (More)
