McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Chapter 9
Employee Development
Copyright © 2010 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction
 Development - formal education, job experiences, relationships, and assessments of personality and abilities that help employees perform effectively in their current or future job and company.
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Table 9.1 - Comparison Between
Training and Development
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Introduction (cont.)
 Why is employee development important?
 To improve quality.
 To meet the challenges of global competition and social change.
 To incorporate technological advances and changes in work design.
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Introduction (cont.)
 Development activities can help companies reduce turnover by:
 showing employees that the company is investing in the employees’ skill development.
 developing managers who can create a positive work environment that makes employees want to come to work and contribute to the company goals.
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Approaches to Employee
Development
 Formal education programs include:
 off-site and on-site programs designed specifically for the company’s employees.
 short courses offered by consultants or universities, executive MBA programs, and university programs.
 Tuition reimbursement - the practice of reimbursing employees’ costs for college and university courses and degree programs.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Assessment
 Collecting information and providing feedback to employees about their behavior, communication style, values, or skills.
 Used most frequently to identify employees with managerial potential, and measure current managers’ strengths and weaknesses.
 Companies vary in the methods and sources of information they use in developmental assessment.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
 Most popular psychological test for employee development.
 Identifies individuals’ preferences for energy, information gathering, decision making, and lifestyle.
 It is a valuable tool for understanding communication styles and the ways people prefer to interact with others.
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Table 9.4 - Personality Types Used in the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment
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Table 9.4 - Personality Types Used in the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Assessment center - multiple raters or evaluators evaluate employees’ performance on a number of exercises.
 It is used to identify:
 if employees have the abilities, personality, and behaviors for management jobs.
 if employees have the necessary skills to work in teams.
 Types of exercises used include leaderless group discussions, interviews, in-baskets, and role plays.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Benchmarks - instrument designed to measure important factors in being a successful manager.
 Items that are measured include dealing with subordinates, acquiring resources, and creating a productive work climate.
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Table 9.6 - Skills Related to
Managerial Success
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Performance appraisal - process of measuring employees’ performance.
 Different approaches for measuring performance:
 Ranking employees.
 Rating their work behaviors.
 Rating the extent to which employees have desirable traits believed to be necessary for job success.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 The appraisal system must give employees specific information about their performance problems and ways they can improve their performance.
 Managers must be trained in providing performance feedback.
 Upward feedback - involves collecting subordinates’ evaluations of managers’ behaviors or skills.
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Figure 9.1 - 360-Degree
Feedback System
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Factors necessary for a 360-degree feedback system to be effective:
 The system must provide consistent or reliable ratings.
 Feedback must be job-related (valid).
 The system must be easy to use, understandable, and relevant.
 The system must lead to managerial development.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Job Experiences - relationships, problems, demands, tasks, or other features that employees face in their jobs.
 A major assumption is that development is most likely to occur when there is a mismatch between the employee’s skills and past experiences and the skills required for the job.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Job enlargement - adding challenges or new responsibilities to an employee’s current job.
 Job rotation - providing employees with a series of job assignments in various functional areas of the company or movement among jobs in a single functional area or department.
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Table 9.10 - Characteristics of
Effective Job Rotation Systems
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Transfer - an employee is given a different job assignment in a different area of the company.
 Promotions - advancements into positions with greater challenges, more responsibility, and more authority than in the previous job.
 Downward move - occurs when an employee is given a reduced level of responsibility and authority.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Externships - employees take full-time, temporary operational roles at another company.
 Employee exchange is one example of temporary assignments in which two companies agree to exchange employees.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Volunteer assignments offer employees opportunities to manage change, to teach, to take on a higher level of responsibility, or to be exposed to other job demands.
 Interpersonal relationships
 Mentor - experienced, productive senior employee who helps develop a less experienced employee (the protégé).
 Mentors provide career support and psychosocial support to the protégé.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Provide opportunities for mentors to:
 Develop interpersonal skills, increase feelings of self-esteem and worth to the organization, and gain knowledge about important new scientific developments.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Interpersonal relationships
 Purposes of Mentoring Programs
 To socialize new employees and to increase the likelihood of skill transfer from training to the work setting.
 To enable women and minorities to gain the experience and skills needed for managerial positions.
 To develop managers for top-level management positions or to help them acquire specific skills.
 Group mentoring programs - successful senior employee is paired with four to six less experienced protégés.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Interpersonal relationships
 Coach - a peer or manager who works with employees to motivate them, help them develop skills, and provide reinforcement and feedback.
 The best coaches are empathetic, supportive, practical, and self-confident but do not appear to know all the answers or want to tell others what to do.
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Approaches to Employee
Development (cont.)
 Interpersonal relationships
 Three roles that a coach can play:
 One-on-one with an employee, providing feedback based on psychological tests, 360-degree assessment, or interviews with bosses, peers, and subordinates.
 Help employees learn for themselves by putting them in touch with experts who can help them with their concerns and by teaching them how to obtain feedback from others.
 Provide the employee with resources such as mentors, courses, or job experiences that the employee may not otherwise have access to.
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The Development Planning
Process
 It involves:
 identifying development needs.
 choosing a development goal.
 identifying the actions that need to be taken by the employee and the company to achieve the goal.
 determining how progress toward goal attainment will be measured.
 investing time and energy to achieve the goal.
 establishing a timetable for development.
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Company Strategies for Providing
Development
 The most effective development strategies involve individualization, learner control, and ongoing support.
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