Finding employees who want to become supervisors

All organizations need personnel to hold supervisory management positions within their hierarchy, even when facing downsizing, rightsizing or reengineering. Government statistics reveal that management positions have increased from 10 percent to 18 percent of all jobs since 1950. Many employees join an organization for the advancement opportunities it offers. They perceive advancement as the key to increasing their pay, responsibilities, status, power, prestige, feelings of accomplishment and/or job satisfaction. It is generally assumed that management positions at one level tend to be stepping-stones to management positions at the next, higher level.

The field of research that normally investigates the advancement of employees within organizations is related to career choice, advancement and development, or simply managerial career pathing. A career is defined as a sequence of work-related positions occupied by a person over the course of a lifetime. The opportunity to pursue a managerial career in telemarketing organizations is somewhat limited because these organizations offer a relatively flat managerial hierarchy. Employees in TSR positions find advancement opportunities by moving into positions such as training supervisor, program supervisor, shift supervisor or call center manager. As with all organizations, there are more managerial positions at the supervisory level than at the top management level. Telemarketing organizations need to find responsible and committed people who will occupy firstlevel supervisory management positions. What the telemarketing industry sees are employees making one or two job changes - not career choices.

Given the flat managerial structure, the great availability of more supervisory management positions and the high turnover rate of employees within the telemarketing industry, using the managerial career choice literature as the underlying theoretical support for this study may not be appropriate. The job change literature rather than career choice literature is more applicable to the situation in telemarketing. The purpose of this study, then, is to investigate the reasons employees might be interested in making a singular job change from their current TSR job into firstlevel supervisory management.

In telemarketing organizations there is an approximate 80/20 split of part-time/full-time employees. Thus, management has two distinct labor pools inside the organization from which to draw potential supervisory management personnel. With a majority of organizations promoting from within, both pools become important sources of future supervisor personnel.

Many managers may not view part-time employees as viable supervisory personnel for a variety of reasons. If the parttime employee is a student, then management may assume that the student's employment is a stop-gap measure until graduation. Management may assume that if employees are involuntary part-time employees, they will leave if they find a full-time position that provides better wages and benefits elsewhere. Finally, management may assume that most part-time TSRs who are parents with small children want to have the flexibility to be at home when the children come home from school. There are, however, part-time employees who prefer to work full-time and who are motivated to become supervisors.

The research on part-time/fulltime employees is missing comparisons of attitudes and behaviors that motivate their desire to change status from their current nonsupervisory jobs into first-level supervisory management jobs. The job change literature traditionally assumes that people change jobs primarily because they are experiencing significant job dissatisfaction in their present job and believe they will experience greater job and reward satisfaction in an alternative job. Consequently, employees can either decide to (1) make changes within their present job, (2) change jobs or (3) make no job changes at all.

There are various organizational, environmental and personal factors that influence employee job satisfaction/dissatisfaction and, ultimately, what they do about their current job situation. A study was undertaken to investigate which of 11 factors personal, employment and contextual - would predict differences between employees interested in changing into supervisory managerial jobs from their current nonsupervisory jobs (hereafter called management seekers) compared to those who were not interested in making the job change (hereafter called management avoiders). This study occurred for both part-time and fulltime employees in a nationwide telemarketing firm.

The three personal factors included gender, age and tenure with the organization. The two contextual factors included organizational and environmental conditions, circumstances and influences that surround and affect employees and their labor market situation. Distributive justice represents the degree to which rewards and punishments are related to an employee's performance. Alternative job opportunities center on whether employees perceive there are comparable job opportunities in other organizations.

The remaining six factors were employment-related factors. Job involvement reflects the interest in and satisfaction from one's job. Role conflict and role overload reflect the degree to which one's work roles stand up under uncertainty and overload situations, respectively. Routinization reflects the degree to which jobs are repetitive and offer little job challenge. Job satisfaction reflects the degree to which employees like or dislike their jobs. Finally, intent to leave represents the extent to which employees desire to leave their organizations voluntary.

One additional relationship was tested in the study. Some employees experience an interaction effect between their attitudes of job satisfaction and alternative job opportunities. It is possible that some employees could be satisfied with their current jobs, but believe their job satisfaction would be greater as a supervisor, especially if they perceived they have few alternative job opportunities in other organizations. Employees who perceive few alternative job opportunities are predicted to become interested in becoming supervisors as a means of escaping their current, unsatisfactory nonsupervisory job. Additional predictions, as guided by past findings from the job change literature, are that management seekers will have:

* Less tenure,

* Lower distributive justice (feel the rewards are unfair),

* Higher role conflict,

* Higher role overload,

* Higher routinization,

* Lower job involvement,

* Lower job satisfaction,

* Less intent to leave their organization,

* Fewer alternative job opportunities, and

* Will be younger and female when compared to management avoiders.

The study included 322 part-time telemarketing sales agents and 96 full-time sales agents from eight different U.S. locations of the same national company. A survey containing measures of the 11 factors was administered to sales agents over their lunch hour. Their responses were then mailed back to the research team. The average age of the part-time sample was 27 years, with an average length of tenure in the organization of 3 months. The average age of the full-time sample was 29 years and an average tenure of 6 months.

Logistic regression analysis was applied to the 11 factors, the interaction effect, and the dependent variable measuring the employee's interest in supervisory management to identify which factors distinguished management seekers from management avoiders across partand full-time employees. The dependent variable was measured by a single question asking employees if they had an interest in moving into supervisory management. The question contained three answering foils - yes, no or possibly. The yes and possibly foils were combined, thus producing a binary response code of no and yes/possibly. It was this binary response code that necessitated the use of logistic regression analysis.

Part-Time Employee Results

The strength of using logistic regression analysis is in assessing the overall significance of the research model against a perfect model in which all the cases in each sample would be correctly classified. This rarely happens, but the predictive accuracy of the research model is important because it should give the user of the model some confidence in whether the major factors affecting the dependent variable really have some predictive capability.

The results of the part-time sample indicated that the model was more accurate at predicting management seekers than management avoiders. The model correctly predicted 52 percent of avoiders and 86 percent of seekers for an overall accuracy of 75 percent. Thus, the model is approximately 25 percent more reliable at classifying seekers and avoiders than random guessing, which would be expected to produce SO percent accuracy.

Part-time employees' interest in becoming a supervisor, even while they currently worked in their nonsupervisory job, was predicted by seven factors. Part-time employees who are management position seekers, compared to part-time employees not interested in management, were younger, had less tenure, were more involved in their current nonsupervisory job, felt less equitably rewarded for their current nonsupervisory job performance, felt less role overload in their current nonsupervisory job, had less intent to leave the telemarketing organization and felt positive about their opportunity to gain outside employment with another telemarketing organization even when they were satisfied with their current job.

Full-Time Employee Results

The full-time model was also more accurate in predicting management seekers compared to management avoiders. The model correctly predicted 45 percent of the avoiders and 95 percent of the seekers for an overall accuracy rate of 84 percent. Thus, the model was approximately 34 percent more reliable at classifying seekers and avoiders than random guessing.

A full-time employee's interest in becoming a supervisor was predicted by four factors. Full-time management seekers, when compared to full-time management avoiders, were more involved in their current nonsupervisory job, felt less equitably rewarded for their current nonsupervisory job performance, had less intent to leave the organization, and felt negatively about their opportunity to gain outside employment with another telemarketing organization even when they were satisfied with their current job.

Summary Of Analyses

All of the significant factors influencing an interest in supervisory management for both part- and fulltime employees are presented in Table 1. There are four factors common to both employee samples. Both part- and full-time employees who had strong interest in shifting to a supervisory management position from their current nonsupervisory job had high interest in and were highly involved in their nonsupervisory job, yet felt the rewards and punishment they received in performing that job were not equitably handled (distributive justice), and they had relatively low intentions of wanting to leave their telemarketing organization. Although the interaction of alternative job opportunities with job satisfaction was significant across both samples, there was a difference in the direction of the interaction between the samples.

Alternative job opportunities centers on whether employees perceive there are comparable telemarketing jobs in other telemarketing organizations. Job satisfaction represents the degree to which employees like or dislike their current jobs. Our prediction was that if employees had low job satisfaction performing their current nonsupervisory job and had few job opportunities in other organizations, then these employees would be motivated to become supervisors as a means of escaping their current nonsupervisory job circumstances or advancing themselves professionally and monetarily within their present organization.

Part-time management seekers feel confident there are alternative job opportunities like their current nonsupervisory jobs in other telemarketing organizations, even though they are satisfied with their current nonsupervisory job. Alternatively, full-time management seekers feel less confident about their outside job opportunities, even though they are currently job satisfied. Different labor market characteristics may support the differences in these interaction results. The telemarketing industry is generally composed of 80 percent part-time employees and 20 percent full-time employees. The high-performing part-time TSRs know there is a demand for their services and are aware of the dependency on them in this industry. Consequently, labor mobility is not a concern for them, even though they might be highly job satisfied in their present organization. Full-time TSRs face different labor market opportunities, wherein, their labor mobility is much more restricted because fewer jobs are made available to them. Even though they may be job satisfied with their current nonsupervisory job, they recognize their limited ability to move to other organizations and, therefore, conclude that trying to advance within their present organization represents the best alternative.

The part-time TSR sample identified three additional factors influencing interest in becoming a supervisor - age, tenure, and role overload. Part-time employees who were young and less tenured were favorably inclined to be interested in supervisory management. It is speculated that young, less tenured employees either do not know about the long hours, intense competition, stress, accountability, or fast-changing environment that accompanies being a supervisor, or that they perceive the supervisor's job as offering more responsibility, challenge, authority or freedom to make decisions. The final factor was role overload. While it was expected that employees experiencing high role overload would be motivated to seek other jobs, the opposite result occurred for part-time management seekers. Part-time employees are not usually required to perform additional work duties that may be required of full-time employees and, consequently, they might not experience as much work overload as fulltime employees.

Conclusions And Implications

When upper management examines the pool of sales agents for possible supervisory management candidates, what conclusions and implications do the results of this study suggest? The first conclusion is that the classification of employees as part- or full-time makes little difference. As far as expressing an interest in wanting to become a supervisory management candidate, both types of employees express that interest. Thus, it may be erroneous for management to consider only their full-time sales agents as the pool of supervisory management aspirants.

A second conclusion is the absence of job satisfaction as a singular, significant predictor of job change. All basic models of job change suggest that being highly dissatisfied with one's current job would predict job change. In our samples, however, the management seekers were more satisfied with their current nonsupervisory jobs than management avoiders. More important, it was not job satisfaction as a single factor that predicted job change; it was the interaction of employee perceptions of job satisfaction with alternative job opportunities.

In addition to the specific conclusions of this research regarding the factors predicting part- and full-time telemarketing employee interests in becoming supervisory management, this research has potential implications for establishing better retention and organizational commitment among telemarketing employees. In particular, the relationship between the two factors of intent to leave the organization and interest in supervisory management offers some intriguing possibilities. The inverse relationship indicates that if employees do not perceive there is a chance to move into a supervisory management position, then there is a greater desire to leave the organization. Because of its relatively flat managerial structure, the organization has perhaps created the perception in its employees that the entry-level, TSR job is the only position within the organization and thus, employment with this organization represents a dead end.

In the past, management has used the "carrot" of increasing the wage rate to attract and retain employees. However, excessive turnover still dominates this industry. Some employees want more than dead-end jobs that produce small, incremental wage increases.

To retain and increase the organizational commitment of its employees, management might consider professional development and career development programs. Organizations offering these types of programs may be able to retain their employees longer and subsequently, may be able to get away from constantly having to recruit new employees by continuously having to raise their entry-level wage rate. Creating a vision with an employee of "this is where you can expect to be in your future with us and here is what we will do to help you get there" can be more of a commitment builder than continuous, but small wage increases.

The overall conclusion derived from this research is that employees most interested in supervisory management positions are the ones most involved with their current work and with their current organization. The overall implication is that management has to continue to nurture this involvement by making sure employees have advancement/ improvement potentials - either through professional skill-building opportunities and/or managerial promotions.

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BY THOMAS N. MARTIN AND JOHN C. HAFER, DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA

Thomas N. Martin and John C. Hofer are both professors with the College of Business Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation Aug 1997
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