Is There Real Distinction Between Men and Women in the Ways of Collaboration?

The article 'Collaborative Overload' by Cross et al. (2016) discusses the importance of collaboration among employees to increase productivity. The study reveals that women tend to follow a collaborative nature, sharing workloads and guiding junior colleagues, whereas men are more individualistic. The authors recommend increasing collaboration in organizations to overcome psychological exhaustion experienced by women. The article also draws from other studies, such as Davenport and Kirby's (2015) 'Beyond Automation' and Luca et al.'s (2016) 'Algorithms Need Managers Too', highlighting the need for managers to focus on people management and productivity, which can be achieved through technology or work redistribution.

Running head: MANAGING PEOPLE IN THE ORGANISATION
MANAGING PEOPLE IN THE ORGANISATION
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In this current setting of organizations, most of the CEOs and the human resource
management executives, found collaborative works to be the most important and common
factor for their success. In this particular method, two or more people form teams to work
together and share their ideas and knowledge for accomplishing a common goal. Teamwork
takes the job at higher level because it does not depend on the ideas of one individual but
incorporate the upgraded knowledge of technological advancements thus focus on the
purpose and accomplish it within limited time.
To Luca, Kleinberg and Mullainathan, “An algorithm can tell you which
employees are most likely to succeed without identifying which attributes
are most important for success” (2016). In this article named, ‘Algorithms
Need Mangers, Too’ the authors support the means of algorithm to make
perfect prediction. According to the researchers like Cross, Rebele and Grant,
collaboration in the workplace in the current business setting has been increasing (2016). The
business has been becoming more and more cross cultural and global. This is the reason why
the tendency of collaborative work has developed. Certainly these development has been
applauded but the over consumption of valued resources can be a barrier for such
development. In the critical point of decision making or getting a difficult job done, the
managers cannot arrange meetings where the employees can form a team, meet and share
their knowledge to accomplish the job. The critical work allows the employees little time to
access the resources. The researches have revealed that the distribution of the collaborative
works is often uneven. In most of the cases the cases, 20% to 35% of the value added
collaborations come from 3 to 5% of employees in the organizations these people become
known to have more personal resources and capable to share them with others (Cross, Rebele
and Grant 2016). Moreover, they are willing to help others. This is the reason why these
employees are being taken into the projects and incorporated into the more important

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designations. The giving mindset of these employees and desire to help others and create
collaborative workplace quickly enhances their reputation as well as performance.
Are the personal resources reliable or efficient enough to be shared?
According to the authors, there are three types of collaborative resources which
include informational, personal and social (Cross, Rebele and Grant 2016). However, all of
these resources are not equally efficient. It is important to differentiate among these three
types of collaborative resources which the individual employees capitalize in others for
creating values. The informational resources are mainly the acquired knowledge as well as
skills which can be easily recorded as well as passed on. Social resources on the other hand,
involve individual’s awareness, position and access in a network. This type of resources can
be used to assist the colleagues to learn better collaboration with one another. The personal
resources on the contrary, include the efforts of the individual’s time and energy (Gürbüz,
Şahin and Köksal 2014). All of these resources however are not effective equally. To the
authors, the social and informational resources can be shared without lessening the supply of
the collaborators. this is because, when an individual offer knowledge and network awareness
they keep some for themselves also but in the case of personal resources, it takes more time
and effort. This is because the individual’s energy and time are finite therefore each request
for participating in and approve the decisions for a specific project leave fewer available for
that individual’s own work.
Regrettably, the personal resources become one of the major source when the people
desire to collaborate (Huarng and Ribeiro-Soriano 2014). As an alternative of asking for
particular informational as well as social resources or searching the existing repositories for
example reports and knowledge libraries but people ask for help even if they can do the task
on their own (Davenport and Kirby 2015). It takes time because this exchange might have

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taken five to ten minutes turns in to half an hour calendar invite. This staring the personal
resources on both the sides of the request.
Why most desirable collaborators have the lowest participation?
This however fuels the demands placed on these top collaborators. These employees
with credible personal resources gradually become the bottleneck of the organization. No
work can progress without their intervention. Moreover, these employees are so very
overtaxed that they do not remain personally effective. The volume and diversity of work
these resourced employees perform or suggest others left unnoticed (Cross, Rebele and Grant
2016). This is because the other employees from different units or varied departments seek
help from these top collaborators. In the process of network analysis, when the leaders
identify the strongest collaborators in his organization, they find a lot of names in their lists
(Igbaekemen 2014). In their quest to gain the rewards of collaboration, the business leaders
unintentionally create open markets for this but do not recognize the costs.
According to the authors, collaborative nature has an evil that demonstrate that the
people or the chief collaborators who are in the demand always, seem to be disengaged.
These people remain at the top position having all the information to help others, have lowest
engagement as well as career satisfaction scores. These people feel stressed and overloaded
with demand, tend to leave their organizations (Jopp et al. 2014). This is because they possess
all the valuable knowledge of working in particular industry and network resources. This
leads to a feeling of indifference towards the organization as well as the colleagues which
consequences ultimately in voluntary turn-over.
What are the chief ways of increasing collaborative efficiency?
In response to such problem, the collaborative efficiency of the organization needs to
be increased. According to the authors, there are several ways through which the organization

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equally distribute resources rather keeping them accumulated in some of the employees
(Wang et al. 2016). These methods can be redistributing tasks, encouraging behavioral
changes, making informational and social resources more available, bringing structural
changes and rewarding collaboration efforts.
Redistribution for work: the efforts of increasing the organization’ collaborative efficiency
must be started with proper understanding of existing supply and demand (Li et al. 2014).
The electronic communication tracking, employee surveys and internal systems like 360
feedbacks as well as customer relationship management programs can offered valuable data
on type, origin, volume along with destination of requests can more deeply analyses networks
and tools (Cross, Rebele and Grant 2016).
Encouragement of behavioral changes: according to the authors, the most active as well as
overburdened collaborators must be shown methods of filtration and prioritization of the
requests, giving permission to say no and encourage them to introduce other to replace them.
There is team collaboration software which help the employees to build strong vineries round
their incoming information flow (Huarng and Ribeiro-Soriano 2014). The authors therefore
suggest that at the time these employees invest personal resources, this be in the value added
activities which they find stimulating rather than exhausting.
With the behaviors or attitudes of the collaborators the help seekers also need to
change their attitudes, resetting the norms associated with when and how to induct mail
requests as well as meeting invitations may free up wasted time. In this direction, the
managers can eliminate all the recurring meetings for time beings. It forced the employees for
reassessing the inevitability of those gatherings and helped the to become more vigilant about
their schedules. This ensured that each of the meetings had owner as well as agenda
(Igbaekemen 2014). The study has revealed that despite the companies increase the number

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of employees at their headquarters, this method can help to keep their meetings shorter as
well as more productive.
Making informational and social resources more available: the authors have named some
technological tools that help the individuals to assess networks and to make informed
decisions about collaborative activities. The research by Luca, Kleinberg and Mullainathan
(2016) has revealed that the detrimental effects of the team meetings as well as mails on the
expansion and maintenance of creative helping relationships. The managers need to collocate
their highly interdependent employees for facilitating impromptu and brief collaborations
resulting in the more effective altercation of resources (Konstantinides et al. 2014).
Consideration of structural changes: shift of decision right to more appropriate people in the
network is an important question. The lower level managers and support staffs seem to enjoy
authority to approve small capital spending, travel and minimum HR activities but this is not
the actual story in most of the organizations. These employees can act like buffer against the
demand for collaboration. Many of the hospitals now arrange employees who no such
functions in any unit but respond to the request when needed or utilize the automation to
respond in the emerged situation (Davenport and Kirby 2015). This method reduces the
problem of institutional bottleneck and create direct connection between the employees and
right experts. The role of these utility players is to lessen the demand of the busiest
employees in the organization. In addition to this, these employees help to rotate the role
among the team members by freeing up the personal resources. This however, reduces the
workload of the employees.
Rewarding collaboration: the researchers have found out that the overlap percentage among
the top collaborators of the companies is only 50% and these employees considered to be the
top performers in the organizations because these people have more personal, informational

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and social resources (Davenport and Kirby 2015). As the authors have discussed that many of
these employees do not perform well often underperform because they remain overwhelmed
by the diversity of work. This is the reason why the managers need to redistribute the works
among the employees according to their capabilities. On the other hand, these collaborators
must be rewarded because their help to the success of their colleagues remain unnoticed
hence roughly 20% of these organizational stars do not help others (O’Toole and Meier
2014). The reward system can help this collaboration.
Is there real distinction between men and women in the ways of collaboration?
The study has revealed the fact that women tend to follow collaborative nature while
getting a job done. As the Hofstede’s cultural dimension has denoted the women have special
feature of being caring and communal hence they help others by sharing workloads and
guiding the junior colleagues. In short the women show more emotional attachment with their
workplace culture than of men (Cross, Rebele and Grant 2016). This is the reason why they
experience greater psychological exhaustion as compared to men. The authors have
recommended the increased use of collaboration in the organization so that this problem can
be overcome.
Therefore, it can be concluded that this study by Cross, Rebele and Grant in the article
‘collaborative overload’ has discussed the method of increasing productivity through
collaboration among the employees. In this aspect the article of Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg
and Sendhil Mullainathan and article by Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby has been used.
The chief idea is to focus on managing people in the organisation and increase productivity
which can be achieved by technology or redistribution of work.

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Davenport, T. and Kirby, J. (2015). Beyond Automation. Harvard Business Review.
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