Your employees can be very competent and motivated, but if they do
not have the opportunity to contribute, or if they do not thrive, it affects
their performance on the job.
According to the AMO theory, our job performance is determined by Abilities,
Motivation and Opportunities. That is, the employee’s ability, motivation and
opportunity to make a contribution.
These three factors should not stand alone when it comes to employees’
actual job performance. If you recruit and work with employees with high A, M
and O, and they work for their own gain and do not cooperate, it will impact
the employee’s well-being and overall work performance.
Therefore, well-being is a further element in the equation, which will be called
A x M x O x well-being. If one of the factors is zero, then the total balance, i.e.
the overall performance, also amounts to zero.
This article presents the AMO theory as a management tool for employees
and organisations and when putting together teams.
What can you do as a leader to increase A, M and O?
To increase A, M and O, you can use the three factors as a structure for
appraisal interviews by comparing your employee’s responses to your own
perception of what they can do, desire, and have the opportunity for in order
to gain a mutual understanding.
Ability: What do your employees find that they are capable of?
Motivation: What motivates your employees, and in which tasks do they
specifically find meaning?
Opportunity: Which opportunities do your employees experience having? An
employee development plan should be based on the specific role and
responsibilities of each employee. I.e. how does their role / responsibility
match the strategy of the business? What contribution does the employee
offer with his or her given function for the organisation to succeed in its
objectives?
And how can you unfold his or her AMO potential even more?
Develop robust organisations with AMO
Looking at the organisation as an organism, all body parts must work together
cross-functionally. It is not enough that the lungs utilise their vitality to the
fullest, if capacity is weaker in other parts of the body.
To create well-functioning teams, it is crucial that managers look inwards and
assess the composition of their employee profiles. The risk of a wrong team
composition is solely that the management will not succeed in creating a
culture of trust, which increases the risk of disabling necessary synergies
between Ability, Motivation and Opportunity in overall team performance.
With well-being as part of the equation
You can hire the most executing, analytical project managers, specialists, and
managers (Ability), develop them and involve them (Motivation) and offer
opportunities (Opportunity). But if these people cannot cooperate, take
responsibility towards a common goal, and show a proper attitude in their
daily work, their satisfaction rate and well-being will be weakened.
Over time, the organisation can fall into a ditch of several sub-optimising
cultures, where common values are missing in daily practice. If, for example,
many of the employees who execute for their own benefit are being promoted
as high performers, there is a risk that the spotlight shines on stars that lead
to short-term results with a short-term behaviour and stagnant bottom-up
feedback, which has a critical impact on the business and organisational flow.
This can result in a lack of feedback, tactical silo thinking in communication
and relevant knowledge that is not shared – if it does not benefit their own
perspective to share it.
Goal-oriented passion as a prerequisite
To develop employee potential, you as a leader are required to know yourself
and be willing to work on your own development.
As a leader, you should therefore at least semi-annually ask yourself these
questions:
1) What are my skills (A), my motivation (M) and my opportunities (O), when I
look back, look at the present and imagine the future? How do I thrive in
working with my colleagues?
2) How does my overall AMO fit with the AMO of my employees and their
well- being?
3) How does my overall AMO and well-being fit with my leadership peers at
the same level and our overall strategy?
If you as a leader ensure this self-knowledge and self-management top down,
you enhance knowledge, and you gain an effective management toolbox to
create daily direction, employee development and involvement bottom up.
A trust culture creates results
To create a culture where work performance is high, management must make
a conscious effort to ensure proper allocation of both management and
employee profiles. And put this work on their strategic agenda.
If companies are successful at this very component, a culture of trust will
have the best conditions. And in return, it will heighten job satisfaction, the
everyday desire to go an extra mile and the individual courage to share knowledge that
management relies on to navigate their business proactively.
Most managers and employees want to work for a common goal rather than
their own. It creates robust organisations where employees thrive and work
passionately. This top down and bottom-up connectedness amongst
employees also minimises prestige and political power as the main
behavioural business drivers, building everyday performance with cultural
distrust and sub-optimisation.
A culture built on trust is difficult to document on the short term, and
therefore, key business goals for each employee and department – with the
related important human functional skills rather than interpersonal as to what
kind of person you are in the day-to-day cross-functional corporation – have
taken over and can serve as the goal rather than the means to success.
Companies should not only pay the necessary strategic attention to how you
build an organisational infrastructure with the strategically necessary people
functions, but also focus on the important factor of what kind of people skills
you need to increase the level of trust in your company.
Are you focusing solely on hiring and retaining highly effective people striving
to be the no. 1 without having much preference to cooperate, understand and
connect with their colleagues and employees – unless it has a specific
business result pay-off?
Does your company primarily reward people working for themselves and their
own business siloes as the present and future company stars, or does your
company reward people working together to reach a common goal? And does
your company know the difference between the two and know which
employees and high performers belong to each of the two groups of
employee values?
It may seem right to play down the qualitative, which culture is, for fast
results. But the risk of developing a non-robust organisation increases
significantly, as culture is created by people only. A non-cooperative system
lacks trust and confidence in everyday life, and the necessary value chain
knowledge sharing stagnates.
The article is based on the following literature:
Boselie, P.: “High performance work practices in the healthcare
sector: a Dutch case study”. International Journal of Manpower. Vol.
No. 31 1, 2010, pp. 42-58.
Boxall, P. and Purcell, J.: “Strategy and Human Resource
Management”. Palgrave MacMil-lan, 2008.
Harney, B.: “Unlocking the black box: line managers and HRM
performance in a call center context”. International Journal of
Productivity and Performance Management. Vol. No. 57 4, 2008, pp.
275-296.
Na Fu et al.: “Exploring the performance effect of HPWS on
professional service supply chain management”. Supply Chain
Management: An International Journal. 18/3 (2013) 292-307.
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