Posted by In a previous blog post, I posted a list of manager tools that you can test on the TransistorsHead.com platform. If you’d like to get your login information, email me. And today I’ll show you sample results of the research I’ve been doing for several years using these online managerial tools. The article, which you can read in full and which you’ll find at the bottom of this post, was published in 2018 in the International Journal of Contemporary Management.
The survey I conducted at the time to record the work of a manager and his team had the following characteristics. Forty-one management students from the University of Economics in Katowice participated in the study. They were divided into teams of 5-6 people as part of the Human Resource Management course. Each team had a team leader who led the team during the observation. The study was conducted using non-participant observation. The research tools were online managerial tools embedded in TransistorsHead.com.
Due to the fact that the teams that participated in the study worked at different intensities, I presented in the article the team that completed the most tasks in the allotted time. The team consisted of 6 people, including the team leader and 5 team members. The total observation time of the team was 1,075,293 seconds, which is equal to the observation time of the team leader of the team leader. This means that he logged in first and logged out last on TransistorsHead.com. However, it should be noted that such a long observation time (more than 298 hours) does not mean that the participants worked continuously on the project. Some of their team activities were not recorded at all by the existing 10 online tools. Other activities, such as sleeping, studying, working in other areas, etc., were also not recorded.
Still, the picture of their work was similar to looking at the world through the hole of a pasta strainer – not everything can be seen, but nevertheless the world on the other side of the strainer can be recognized.
The number of activities of a given type, the names of which I have already given in a previous post:
you can read from Figure 1.
Figure 1. Number of activities undertaken by the manager and members of his team
Such recording of managerial activities is made possible by the Organizational Size System. For simplicity, each managerial activity is recorded by a single online managerial tool, so it is easy to know which managerial activities are undertaken by employees, including the manager, how long they last, their characteristics and content, and finally – their order. Recording the sequence of managerial activities makes it possible to take a step toward pattern recognition in management in three areas:
- comparing the managerial activities of a single manager in real time,
- comparing the managerial actions of several managers one to one after their work,
- finding regularities in the work of managers in specific situations.
For how each tool works, read the posts in a few weeks. And now see what else you can record with online managerial tools: