Apichat’s Personality - Organizational Behavior

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the situation at Siam Traditional Carvings Limited will be analyzed accordingly to the Goal-Setting Theory. It seems that the company didn’t have any visions or specific goals other than to produce enough elephants to fulfill customers’ demands and to maintain the survival of the company financially. Since there weren’t any ambitious goals and the daily production requirement was easily achievable, the workers weren’t particularly busy and there wasn’t any challenge presented for them to make the job more exciting which makes the job boring and lack of excitement. No feedback was provided on the performance of the workers either.

The introduction of odd elephant program brings new challenges and excitements for the workers as they are allowed to use company’s materials and tools to create their own “odd elephants”, according to their ideas and creativity, which they can also sell or give to their friends and families afterwards. Instead of being bored and sitting around at their spare time, the workers start to work on the creation of odd elephants either individually or together with other fellow workers.

Although the value of such elephants are not very high in terms of money, the newfound goal to come up with new ideas and to create their very own elephants brings excitement and motivation for the employees. Workers are allowed to make their decisions on creating an odd elephant, in terms of the schedule, how it is crafted and who they would collaborate together with. Moreover, the employees can see the appreciative notes and feedbacks of the customers who have bought their odd elephants and such feedbacks could make them feel enthusiastic about their job and motivate them to perform better.

According to the Job Characteristics Theory, there are five core job dimensions that can have impact on three critical psychological states of the workers which in turn affects the five work-related outcomes.

At Siam Traditional Carvings Limited, before the Odd Elephant program, the workers had to use the same skills repeatedly while doing their job and there was hardly any identity or significance for the task they were performing. Since they are only using the same skills over and over to perform their tasks, there were no autonomy in the work, especially for the planers and spray-painters, and feedbacks were not provided for their performance either. Due to the lack of these five core dimensions of the job, the workers cannot experience the meaningfulness and responsibility for the outcomes of the job, or acquire knowledge of the actual results of work activities. The failure to experience the three critical psychological states would prevent the existence of positive work-related outcomes. Although the turnover rates and absenteeism are low as they don’t have much complaints about the job, the workers were not motivated nor have high satisfaction for the work and it wasn’t possible to obtain high performance from them.

After the Odd Elephant program has been introduced, the workers are allowed to work on their projects to create their own odd elephant using the company tools and materials as well as a variety of skills and ideas that they have and some workers started crafting their own odd elephants in order to improve their skills instead of additional income. Since the workers are involved in or work together throughout the entire process of the creating their own odd elephants, the task identity of their work increased as well. They can see how their unique products are appreciated and wanted by the customer, which also have impact on the popularity and success of the company, and they could also bring it home to their family and friends and observe how their unique product affects them emotionally, like how it’d make their close ones feel happy, excited, impressed or even inspired to be creative.

With the presence of skill variety, task identity and task significance for their work, the workers can experience the meaningfulness of the job. Moreover, the workers have full control over their work in terms of how the elephants are to be crafted, who they are going to work with and the schedule for production as well. Having such autonomy for the work leads to the experience the responsibility for the outcome of the work.

Additionally, Apichat put up a bulletin board to post appreciative notes from customers who have purchased the odd elephants so that the workers can see the feedback for their products and acquire knowledge of the actual results of the work activities. When the workers have experienced all of the three critical psychological states, the workers became more motivated, perform better and have higher satisfaction for their job which leads to lower absenteeism and turnover rates.

(b) In order for the company to be more successful in the future, Apichat should define future direction of the company by setting a vision statement and strategic SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related) goals for the company. A vision can help workers understand the meaning of their work and strategic plans cannot be defined properly without an effective vision as there won’t be any guidelines or directions for planning. Once the vision for the company has been defined, Apichat could set specific goals to progress towards the vision of the company. Setting goals for production, developing employees’ skill and creativity, and growth in sales could be the examples that can be used for Siam Traditional Carvings Limited. The company can set SMART goals to encourage and assist the workers in developing their skills and for Odd Elephants program as well in order to provide more guideline and motivation for the workers.

Another important factor for further success of the company is to define and promote corporate values and a strong organizational culture to provide a sense of direction and guidelines for the employees on how they are expected to behave, interact and perform their tasks in the company. As values are the basic of personal judgment and also play an important part in defining the organizational culture, it is also essential to define the corporate values clearly and make sure the employees are aware of and understand the values and the importance. Sharing the same values between the employees and the company assist in binding people together and increasing the employees job satisfaction, motivation, commitment and contribution to company’s strategic goals. In order to achieve the best outcomes, value congruence techniques can be used to assimilate the employee’s personal values to the corporate values.

The last but not least, Apichat should try to improve the employees’ workplace attitude. It is essential to create