Stephen Young's Online Journal

Morale or Productivity?

The goal of every company around the world is to become the most efficient in that industry. There are so many factors in business that are out of a manager's control, but efficiency is something that can be addressed and controlled. In order to have an efficient company, the manager has to be able to increase morale and productivity. There are other types of efficiency (like cost efficiency), but in MGMT 250, we assume that having an efficient company as a whole will reduce the other extraneous factors. Also, through the HR simulation we are taught that resources are always limited. Given that a manager has limited resources, should he focus those resources to improve the productivity of the company, or the morale? If he pushes to much productivity, then the company will lose morale and efficiency and will collapse. An example of this was back in the 1980's, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple computer Systems, was working on a computer known as the Macintosh. This computer was supposed to revolutionize the computer industry, but ended up failing to a dominant IBM computer because the programmers and developers were pushed too hard and they fell behind. If you concentrate too much on improving morale, then again the company will be unfocused and will not succeed either. So the purpose of this post is to state the fact that there needs to be an appropriate balance between morale and productivity if efficiency needs to increase.