The Ideal Employee, from a German leadership perspective

Early 2012 I conducted a research study in the USA, asking 200 leaders about their Ideal Employee image and about their work context. I wanted to find out if a company’s external market conditions and/or internal coordination mechanisms are associated with the traits and behaviors leaders want to see in employees. These results are out, the publication in press and you can read a summary on my blog here.

Currently I am conducting a similar study with leaders in Germany!

This time, I am asking if and how an organization’s internal culture is related to leaders’ Ideal Employee image. Since participants are currently responding as you read this, I can’t reveal much more – for the moment!

Why should organizations know about their managers’ Ideal Employee image?

First, managers base many personnel related decisions on so-called ‘lay theories’ about the way employees generally are or should be. Their internal images of (ideal) employees are the result of past experiences with others and they develop into a conglomerate of expectations and hopes as well as misperceptions, biases and prejudices about subordinates. Either way, these “folk theories” about employees have been shown to impact employee performance as well as interpersonal relationships, and are powerful and vastly underestimated factors in the leader-follower dynamic.

Second, personal expectations for co-workers or employees are often implicit - meaning unspoken, not always expressed and hidden somewhere in managers’ thought processes.  Since leaders are not always aware of their Ideal Employee Image, they may make biased, hasty and sometimes bad hiring decisions (German link). In the case of searching for leadership personnel, biased hiring decisions this could be causing major problems for organizations, employees and other stakeholders, so that more elaborate top executive assessment services might be called for.

In any case, the question of leaders’ Ideal Employee image is very relevant for organizations, and the more we learn about it the better. Sit tight for more to come!

As always, your feedback and comments are welcome. You may also email me at andrea.derler@gmail.com

References:

Ferreira, A. I. (2013). Competing Values Framework and its impact on the intellectual capital dimensions: evidence from different Portuguese organizational sectors. Knowledge Management Research & Practice. doi:10.1057/kmrp.2012.62

Sy, T. (2010). What do you think of followers? Examining the content, structure, and consequences of implicit followership theories. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113, 73–84.

Whiteley, P., Sy, T., & Johnson, S. K. (2012). Leaders’ conceptions of followers: Implications for naturally occurring Pygmalion effects. The Leadership Quarterly. doi:10