Differentiate between grievance and discipline Essay

Organization’s effectiveness is based on its culture and management practice structure that lead towards maintaining the harmony of organizational performance and regulating the behavior and attitude of its employees. Managers are required to maintain the workplace environment through identifying the potential weak areas that lead towards in-disciplinary behaviors of employees. Discipline at workplace helps control and normalize the behavior of employees through various procedures. Company may use strict disciplinary actions to make employees conform their actions to the expectations of management or may go for group norm pressure to standardize employees’ behavior. Manager’s role is critical in such situation as it places great responsibility on him for leading the employees for subsequent higher performance. Manager may exercise strict rules to align the behavior of employees that are accompanied by penalties/punishment sanctions on employees. Corporate culture understanding needs to clearly convey towards employees for productive group behavior. However, it has been observed that sometimes strict discipline also leads towards lower performance affecting the organizational effectiveness. Inequality among employees concerning rewards and treatment b management result in great dissatisfaction; discipline actions when over exhibited on some people, it lead towards discriminatory behavior. Grievance is therefore a mechanism to present the viewpoint to senior management concerning the inequality and inappropriateness of disciplinary actions of organization. Discipline is thus a set of actions to regulate and standardize the employee attitude & behavior, whereas grievance is a procedure to report the injustice and inequality being faced by employees to higher decision making authority. Organizational justice framework is based on these two components that enable managers to figure out the sources that lead towards grievance in employees. Discipline helps organizations maintain the harmony and effectiveness of workplace environment; rules, policies and standard procedures enables regulate the employee behavior and maintain organization culture. Inequality in organizational culture and inability of management to provide diverse workplace environment either due to stereotypical response towards a particular group or restricting the decisions only to a particular group referring to nepotism. Incompetence of organizational framework to manage the situations and employees behavior results in discrimination and group based structure in employees for the protection of their rights. Union based culture is more common in government managed organization where employees have joined separate unions for the protection of their workplace rights. Discipline requires adjustments in rules and workplace policies addressing the dimensional aspects of negligence, employee safety, incompetency, rights protection, workplace norms, and organizational culture expectations. Rules relating to employee behavior, punishment and penalties, warnings, and other organizational aspects present a clear expectation to employees related to workplace environment and operational management style. Induction of rules is necessary to be conveyed to new comers in organization so that procedural mechanism becomes clear related to employee actions, group norms, and managerial actions pertaining to employee behavior. Managers must provide employees clear insight about the work setting and organizational culture through their actions and responses towards managing the equality at workplace. Stereotypical responses by employees, and group formation based on race/ethnic rights protection in workplace that are depicted as discrimination in employee treatment, rewards and pay scale offering, and career growth opportunities restrictions to a particular group result in job dissatisfaction and reduction in organizational commitment. In such case, if an employee wants to present his viewpoints concerning inequality at workplace manager must assess the situation sensitivity and factors that lead towards grievance filing. Senior management must form a clear objective grievance channel in order to address such issues raised in organization. Management must place emphasis on fairness of decision by providing equal representation rights to employees. Procedural steps for grievance hearing and decisions must be limited to certain extent of hierarchy for increasing the response time to resolve grievance issues. Senior management can form a committee addressing grievance issues of employee having representation of lower level manager and at least one member representation from senior management holding decision making power. This leads towards maintaining organization justice and shows effectiveness of organizations structure for formalizing the framework. This way, discipline and grievance in combine are very essential component of strategic organization’s framework for justice. Manager need to maintain the discipline of employee and must equalize the grievance procedure to maintain the organizational effectiveness by providing equal opportunity to all employees to report any factors that lead towards job dissatisfaction. Complaint filing procedure formalization simplifies the ambiguity concerning the management perspective and ability of employees to report any injustice. Manipulation of rules and disciplinary actions restrict the opportunities for equality at workplace. Biased behavior results in violating the principles of flexibility and freedom of voice representation by employees. Formalizing the rules and written policy procedure strengthen the discipline at workplace that supports the organizational justice framework. Grievance procedural steps must be defined in policy structure to reduce ambiguity and providing employees opportunity to exercise their rights in situation when the confront discrimination at workplace; manager must provide support in assessing the factors viability and prospective role to minimize the arousal of such grievance factor again.