Assessment Brief
Module name:Business Psychology Module code: 6BM500
1. Module Overview
This module will introduce you to key topics about Psychology in the workplace such as leadership, corporate crime, and workplace motivation – there will be a focus on the application of psychology to real business problems. In particular, this module will focus on fundamental applications of psychology, as a science, for understanding important business, work, and workforce problems. Throughout the module, students will be encouraged to apply contemporary psychological concepts and methods to understand the application of psychology to core work and organisational issues. The module will also cover people’s behaviour, thoughts and emotions related to their work. Students will consider how ideas from psychology are used to increase people’s effectiveness at work and how these ideas can assist in the development of personal and organisational change needed by people and organisations.
2. Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this learning, and this module, you will be able to:
3. Summative and Formative Assessment
Formative Activities and Assessments are opportunities for you to apply, practice and make sense of the learning materials and content that you have encountered. These may take the form of individual tasks, such as reading some text or watching a video and documenting your reaction to it, responding to some discussion points on the discussion forum, considering a case study, or participating in a live online classroom session. The main aim of formative activities is for you to receive feedback on your contribution or performance that will help you prepare for and complete your final module assessment.
You are normally given ONE opportunity to submit a summary of your idea for each assessment. Please refer to the policy for details and check with your module tutors for details.
Summative Assessment
Summative assessments are the pieces of coursework that you complete which contribute towards your final grade in this module. You should take the feedback that you receive from the completion of coursework in this module and use it to help you improve your performance in future assessments.
Summative assessment in this module is two piece/s of submitted coursework. You will be expected to submit your summative assignments via the submission points in the Assessment folder of your module, unless specified otherwise by your module tutor.
4. Summative Assessment Guidelines
| Assessment Type: | Discussion forum activity. An individual grade is awarded. (LO 2) |
| Assessment weighting: | 40% |
| Word count/Length | 1500 words |
In your initial posting, consider the following question: What drives motivation in the workplace?
Your engagement will be assessed based upon participation, and quality of your work in the discussion forum, academic writing skills and original thoughts. Remember to support your arguments with academic literature and reference correctly throughout your posts.
This is not an essay rather a discussion with your peers and thus you are expected to:s 56er7yk m
Due to the nature of this assignment, the Anonymous marking policy does not apply
| Assessment Type: | Individual report (LOs 1, 3) |
| Assessment weighting: | 60% |
| Word count/ | 2000 words |
For this final module assignment students will be asked to provide a response to set questions that seek to reveal their grasp of business psychological theories and their application to their workplace or preferred business environment. From module specification
In recent years the economic downturn, recession, the global banking crisis, political and social unrest in some regions have an impact on organisations of all shapes and sizes on a global scale. This has resulted in organisations having to assess their business strategy and to align their human resource strategy to meet these new organisational imperatives in order to survive, let alone grow and prosper.
In the report, you will develop a human resource strategy for the globalised world of the 21st century, which applies the theory and literature in the following areas of business psychology:
You should choose an organisation (either the one you work for or one you know well or one you can research in detail on the internet) and undertake the following tasks.
6BM500 Business Psychology
1.0 Identification of the personality profiles and leadership development needs of Tesco Management
In this paper, the author will investigate the leadership style of Tesco plc. Founded in 1919, Tesco is a British multinational groceries retailer and a market leader in the UK's retail industry (Wunsch, 2020). Globally this organisation employs around 450,000 employees and this, as a result, makes Tesco an excellent organisation for leadership style study.
In order to assess the strengths of the leadership personalities of Tesco, MBTI or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test was conducted. This MBTI test enabled the author to psychometric score to assess the strengths of Tesco's leadership personalities. According to this MBTI test, there are 16 types of leadership personalities and the test score suggests the leadership personality of Tesco is ESTJ (refer to Appendix). Now, according to this personality test, ESTJ demonstrates that the leadership personality types are the following: efficient, outgoing, systematic, analytical, realistic and dependable. According to Stein and Swan (2019), ESTJ leadership personality type also suggests that this personality type prefers to stay in control of their subordinates and also prefers things to be completed in an orderly fashion as well. Thus, based on this assessment the leadership personality of Tesco Plc is decisive in nature as well as in terms of decision execution they also prefer systematic and pre-planned interventions. Moreover, the leading personality of Tesco is forceful when it comes to the facilitation of their plans or strategies and which sometimes can be challenges for the workforce, however, their dependable nature and efficiency helps to overcome the challenges.
According to Farrell (2017), there are 16 leadership personality types in the Myers-Briggs psychometric test and they each have some strengths or advantages as well as challenges. There are differences in leadership and management, while management is all about the attainment of goals or objectives, leadership focuses on influencing and motivating people in order to inspire them to attain the perceived goals. Therefore, the approach is different between leadership and management. The personality types of Tesco leadership demonstrates that they have leadership personality which emphasises on the efficiency, systematic approach as well as can be depended by the subordinates or team members. In this regard, Azanza et al. (2018) stated that in the retail business it is important for the leaders to possess personalities such as humbleness and dependency. However, the assessment of the Tesco's leadership personality suggests that while the leadership is dependable based on their psychometric scores, the leadership personality focuses on the forceful execution of strategies. This, as a result, identifies that the organisation has room for improvements as the leading personalities are not as humble as the present personality type relies on the forceful implementation of planning and strategies. Therefore, while other personality types such as efficient nature as well as outgoing, systematic, analytical, realistic and dependable attributes are there, this personality trait can be improved and the appropriate spread of personality types would also benefit from humbleness or friendly and caring personality type inclusion.
2.0 Critical analysis of leadership styles and assessment
There are various leadership styles and depending on the personalities of the leaders, their leadership styles vary. As stated by Boss (2020), some of the common leadership styles in the retail business segments are Democratic Leadership, Autocratic Leadership, Laissez-faire Leadership and so on. Now, there are different implications for each of these leadership styles and undertaking them has the potential to attain different results for Tesco.
| Leadership Styles | Implications |
| Democratic Leadership | According to this style, the democratic leader allows all or most of the members to participate in the decision making processes. According to Salehzadeh (2017), this leadership style emphasises on equality. Facilitation of this leadership style will encourage creativity from the employees and which as a result will enable Tesco to enhance the flow of ideas during challenging business situations. |
| Autocratic Leadership | This leadership style tends to facilitate centralised control over the team (Fiaz et al. 2017). Although this style sounds negative, the benefit of this style is that the goals and objectives of the Tesco employees will be clearly communicated to them. This, as a result, enhances the productivity of the workforce. |
| Laissez-faire Leadership | This leadership style prefers to provide autonomy to the employees even though leaders are responsible for decision making (Fiaz et al. 2017). This style will enable the employees to decide and plan how they will achieve their goals. This autonomy will increase employee engagement and satisfaction as a result of Tesco. |
| Transformational Leadership | This leadership style focuses on the inspirational aspects in order to increase the productivity of the employees (Hawkins, 2017). Therefore, facilitation of such leadership style in Tesco will enhance the employee involvement towards the tasks and as a result, will increase their productivity. |
| Transactional Leadership | As the term suggests this style depends on transactions as the employees are required to obey the leaders and for the achievements of assigned tasks they are rewarded (Kark et al. 2018). Implementation of this style will instigate a motivational aspect among the employees and which as a result has the ability to improve their productivity. |
| Coach Style Leadership | These leaders spend their time and effort into the skill-building of the team members. Although this style focuses on the enhancements of the skills, however, it sometimes creates a frustrating environment for employees (Ibarra and Scoular, 2019). Therefore, although facilitation of this style in Tesco will improve the employee skill levels, it will affect the motivational aspect of the employees. |
Table 1: Leadership style
Source: Created by author
Based on the previous discussion some of the leadership styles such as Transformational Leadership, Autocratic Leadership or Democratic Leadership seemed to be beneficial for Tesco in order to help the organisation with success. However, it is important for the leaders to adapt their leadership style thus the requirement for leadership style flexibility. Adapting or flexibility requires an individual to improvise according to the requirements.
Theory X: According to this theory people are reluctant to work or take responsibilities. Thus requires the leaders to force employees to perform and in order to motivate them for their performance they use rewards (Mindtools, 2020).
Theory Y: According to this theory, people are motivated to perform better and thus they are willing to take responsibilities and solve issues proactively. Thus, leaders are required to give them space and the ability to decide for themselves (Mindtools, 2020).
Tesco leadership need to implement one of these theories in order to adapt their leadership styles.
As stated by Quinn et al. (1992), leaders possess the ability to enhance the growth of an organisation as they have the ability to increase the productivity and engagement factors of the employees. Although the prior discussion has suggested that Tesco can benefit from a change in leadership style, however, it would require the leaders to change their leadership style. As some of the leadership styles have been identified to be beneficial to improve the productivity and engagement of the Tesco employees if implemented, it can be stated that implementation of such leadership styles will increase the growth opportunity for Tesco due to the improved productivity of the employees.
3.0 Development of high-level project plan
According to Hartner-Tiefenthaler et al. (2018), great leaders are always flexible and they use their experiences to adapt to different situations. Furthermore, leaders are also required to understand that every employee is a different individual and they have different expectations. According to the ERG theory, if the leadership's focus is on one need at a time it will not be able to drive the employees successfully. Based on the anger-regression component of this theory, an employee always needs some kind of motivation, therefore a leader has to continuously ensure motivation from career growth, benefits or monetary rewards and so on. Therefore, the leadership style needs to proactively focus into the motivational aspect of the employees in order to enhance their productivity as well as satisfaction and which in return will help Tesco to survive and ensure further growth.
Maharajan (2018) has identified that employee satisfaction enhancements are necessary as their engagement and motivation depends on their job satisfaction. Therefore, based on the ERG theory, Tesco leaders have to put their emphasis on the enhancements of employee satisfaction in order to enhance their motivation and engagement towards the organisation. This, as a result, will naturally help Tesco to achieve their goals or objectives while the leaders are focusing on the enhancements of employee engagement and motivation. In similar notion, Lee and Raschke (2016) suggest that leaders need to realise that the workforce is not an individual but a group of individuals, thus requiring different motivators to be implemented in order to enhance their engagement and motivational aspects to improve their performance.
Said (2019) states that improved recruiting as well as the selection process for employees is a contributor to the improved organisational outcomes. The key objective of the staff selection process is to identify the skill and psychological requirement for the organisation from their workforce and recruit individuals on the basis of such requirements. Said (2019) also stated that one of the effective ways of recruiting new employees is to focus into the existing employee review as the reviews identify some emphasised areas which can be used by the HRM to select new employees. Furthermore, organisations also consider cost-benefit while recruiting new human resources as well. The current recruitment or selection process of Tesco includes an industry-standard systematic process: Recruitment - Selection - Reference - Interview - Hiring - Performance Review.
Alvesson (1990) identifies that the organisation should establish a predefined selection process as it provides them with a framework to conduct the selection and recruitment processes. In order to ensure success for the recruitment system, the recruitment system needs to attract skilled individuals and should not attract or hire unskilled individuals. According to Alvesson (1990), an effective and successful selection process should involve an 8 steps process: Reception - Screening Interview - Application - Selection Test - Selection Interview - Medical Examination - Reference Verification and finally Hiring Decisions. Therefore, Tesco can adhere to this selection process framework and assess the new staff members to hire for the job requirements at Tesco. However, leaders will play a crucial role in future staff recruitment as they will be required to communicate the skill requirements to the HRM in order to ensure the skilled individuals are being recruited by Tesco.
According to Heathfield (2019), it is important to continuously work on coaching and improve employee performance so the organisation can attain its goals. However, according to the Theory X based management style, employee coaching and development activities is a challenging task for the leaders as according to this theory employees are reluctant towards new learnings, improvements and tasks. On the other hand, Theory Y states that employees are naturally self-motivated and they can proactively complete their tasks and requires little supervision to maintain the self-motivational aspects. Therefore, while Theory X suggests that the Tesco leadership will find it challenging to coach and develop their team members, Theory Y contradicts with the suggestions of Theory X and indicates that leadership can improve the skills and abilities of the employees through coaching and mentoring as the employees are enthusiasts.
Therefore, Tesco first required to identify the performance and productivity level of their employees. This will enable them to identify the organisation or the leaders to identify the aspects which require coaching and based on these findings they can emphasise on them. Furthermore, understanding of the prevalence of theory x or theory y in the Tesco workforce will also help the leaders to devise a coaching plan in order to benefit from the opportunities and overcome the obstacles to coach their employees in order to motivate them and enhance their performance to benefit the organisation itself.
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