Employees with supervisory responsibilities organize and supervise the work of their colleagues and make critical decisions at various levels of the organization. Coaching includes planning, assigning, and explaining tasks to employees, as well as setting performance goals and deadlines, monitoring team members’ productivity, and providing feedback. Supervisors ensure the exchange of information between their subordinates and top management and maintain professional contacts with other units inside or outside the organization.
Coaching is a form of leadership: therefore, an important, albeit often indirect, part of coaching responsibilities is related to maintaining team spirit, promoting cooperative relationships within teams, and resolving problems and conflicts.
At the same time, can we be sure that the people selected or appointed to supervisory positions are the ones who should fill those positions in terms of their personality traits? This is an important question because the literature from various scientific disciplines, such as psychology, labor economics, and management sciences, provides extensive evidence on the relationship between personality traits and occupational indicators and, more generally, various social outcomes.
For example, personality indicators are strongly related to successful leadership, organizational performance, subordinate attitudes and performance, as well as abusive supervision. Management quality is also related to economic performance on a larger scale: companies with better management are more productive and grow faster, while low-income countries have lower management quality, which also hinders the economic growth of These countries.
An important aspect of the personality traits of managers and supervisors are their values: guiding principles in a person’s life. Even in everyday language, employees and managers often talk about right and wrong values, which support or do not support the achievement of the organization’s goals. With our study we wanted to give this discussion a more scientific and systematic framework.
In answering these questions, we rely primarily on Schwartz’s approach to the structure of basic human values. Schwartz defines human values as guiding principles in the life of a person or any other social entity. Values refer to “what people consider important” and guide an individual’s choice between desirable and undesirable behaviors.
Schwartz distinguishes ten different core values and four groups of broader values, or so-called higher-order values. One of these is openness to change, which includes fundamental values such as self-determination and stimulation, the willingness to respond to change. Another value is commitment: power, success and hedonism. The third is conservatism, which includes security, adaptation/conformity, and tradition. Fourth, Schwartz distinguishes between altruism, benevolence, and completeness/universalism.
What do the values determine?
In the study we hypothesized, on the one hand, that values influence who becomes a manager and supervisor. For example, all other things being equal, a person who highly values social status and prestige is more likely to accept a leadership position than a person for whom social status is less important. In contrast, a person who prioritizes safety over success and tends to avoid taking risks is less likely to accept a leadership position than someone whose priorities are the opposite.
On the other hand, we can assume that some values are more desirable than others for an employee who supervises other employees. For example, values such as thoroughness or benevolence are expected to be positively related to leadership quality. On the other hand, values such as power or social status and control of people carry the risk of autocratic behavior.
Our study provided strong evidence from several countries that people with both appropriate and inappropriate leadership values can obtain leadership positions, depending on the country and value studied.
In our study we therefore wanted to find out whether employees performing managerial and supervisory tasks differ from other employees in terms of values, in particular values that can influence the quality and effectiveness of management.
In our research we used the 7th-9th editions of the European Social Survey. round data, which is a widely used and freely available data source in social science research. We focused on selecting employees for supervisory and management tasks in nine countries in the Baltic Sea region, which included four Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark), three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), as well as Germany and Poland.
Despite their geographic and largely cultural proximity, these countries have different economic and political histories, current levels of economic development, and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, the percentage of employees who supervise others in the entire workforce varies from country to country: for example, it is 35% in Germany and 12% in Lithuania.
The main characteristic we were interested in was whether the interviewee supervised other employees in his current job. If the person was not currently working, we asked whether he supervised others in their last job.
In the analysis we used sex, age, marital status, level of education, nationality and the distinction between immigrants and natives as control variables. Analyzing data together from people of different ages and from different cycles of the European Social Survey could be supported by the fact that, according to previous studies, both baseline values and higher-order values are largely constant throughout life and not they are significantly affected by external shocks that occur throughout life.
Leader = independent and successful
In most countries examined, we found a significant positive association with working in a supervisory position for two values. Working in a managerial position was predicted by outcomes, i.e. personal success and expression of skills/competencies, and self-definition, i.e. independent thought and action, ability to make choices, creativity.
This may be good news: Striving for success, creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to act independently are certainly desirable personality traits for people who supervise and manage other employees. On the other hand, achievement and ambition certainly also carry some risk of autocratic behavior, which could be mitigated by norms and stereotypes at the organizational level.
The observed risk of autocratic behavior is particularly high in Estonia, Finland and Denmark. To a lesser extent, this is also the case in Norway and Germany, where we find evidence of unwanted selection for leadership in relation to the value of power: in other words, in relation to a preference for social status and prestige, for control and dominant people.
The values of benevolence and universality should presumably facilitate the quality of mentoring and leadership of other employees. At the same time, in our empirical analysis, benevolence, i.e. the willingness to help and care for loved ones, is positively related to workplace work related to guidance and supervision only in Norway and Sweden of the countries studied.
Furthermore, the relationship between valuing inclusiveness, including the well-being of other people and nature, tolerance and equality, with mentoring is negative in Finland, Norway, Estonia and Germany and absent in other countries in the Sea region Baltic.
We also examined the relationship between supervisors’ values and the number of subordinates as a measure of the intensity of employee coaching and supervision. We found that the values that make it easier or harder to become a supervisor generally work the same way for the number of employees supervised. This finding adds confidence to the robustness of our results: our results are not sensitive to the choice of indicators used in the analysis.
Therefore, although results vary slightly between countries and value measures analysed, our study provided strong evidence that there is positive selection in terms of personality traits when people choose or end up in positions related to driving and driving. supervision of employees. This means that in the case of certain personality traits, people with desirable traits become leaders and supervisors.
On the other hand, we found evidence of negative selection, where, in terms of some values, people who would prefer not to occupy the respective positions become leaders more often than average.
Therefore, our study confirms the conclusions of previous scientific works that the selection of managers and employees with supervisory tasks is difficult and achieving the desired result may not be easy or obvious. This concerns, for example, abusive coaching, which is increasingly being discussed. Therefore, in every organization, it is necessary to critically evaluate the procedures for promoting employees and the criteria for selecting employees for management positions.
The research based on this article was supported by the European Economic Area and Norwegian Financial Mechanisms project “Economic Integration of the Nordic Baltic Region through Work, Innovation, Foreign Investment and Foreign Trade – LIFT”.
2023-12-12 11:35:00
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