Employee Portfolio: Motivation Action Plan
Team D
Shamaine (Jessica) Alvarez, Salim Underwood
MGT/311 Organizational Development
May 13th, 2015
Brigitte Bullon

When leadership influences the behavior of the workplace through dependency, they are demonstrating the act of motivation. Advantages in motivation create vision and traditional values are stressed less because employees have a sense of freedom to do what they believe is best to do. A disadvantage of power can cause corruption on how others perceive one another. Powerful people usually will not consider the ideas and emotions of others because they think too highly of their own thoughts. Power in the workplace can create a hostile behavior and make it difficult to work with one another. Sources of power are broken down into formal and personal categories. According to Robbins and Judge (2011), “Formal power is based on an individual’s position in an organization.” Formal powers include coercive power, reward power, and legitimate power. Personal power “which comes from an individual’s unique characteristics” (Robbins and Judge, pg. 422, 2011). Personal power includes expert power and referent power. Coercive power drives fear based on negative results if there is failure to comply. The opposite of fear is reward power. Employees obtain benefits of some value by achieving compliance. The most common source of formal power is legitimate power as “It represents the formal authority to control and use organizational resources based on structural position in the organization” (Robbins and Judge Pg. 422, 2011). It is believed personal power is the most effective form of power in the workplace because personal power affects individual characteristics (personal power), skills, knowledge (expert power) and individual identification (referent power). Organizational politics affect the decisions and behavior in an organization through the use of power. Political behavior is the attempt to influence employees outside of their defined roles in an organization. If used ethically and as needed, political behavior can be a positive way for organizations to resolve conflict when dealing with individual values, goals, and interests. Perception and interpretation in an organization creates the need for political behavior in the structure of an organization. Organizational structure sets the foundation for dividing and coordinating the tasks of employees. There are six forms for this structure that include work specialization, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, centralization and decentralization, and formalization. The most effective organizational structure for Riordan Manufacturing to use that will help them accomplish their planned changes is departmentalization. Through departmentalization, Riordan Manufacturing can group activities by functions. The manufacturing of the newly designed heart valves could be grouped into production, supply chain, purchasing, personnel, and engineering, finance, and customer relations. The heart valves are a specific product so increased accountability and performance is managed more efficiently under one manager. Geographic departmentalization is another key factor to consider when the customer is spread out over a large global region. Focusing on the needs of a particular region will increase supply and demand. The next 12 months will be challenging for Riordan Manufacturing and a method to evaluate the organization’s successes and failures will be implemented during this planned change. There are four key underlying principles for the best organizational change practices. First, business processes must support business needs. Every process should increase the value by supporting the business vision and strategies. Second, the staff must have people to fully support and execute the business processes. The support of management personnel at all levels within the organization is critical to the