Excerpts from
Organizational Behavior Real Research for Real Managers
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From Chapter 2, How to Hire:
Identifying the Best Person for Your JobWe all want to hire the best person for the job; the difficulty is in identifying the best at what.
True or False? |
| Hire the best. |
This boxed opinion is fine in the abstract, but it is useless as practical advice. Some successful companies, such as Microsoft Corporation, state that they try to hire the smartest people they can find, whereas a leading American airline, Southwestern Airlines, proclaims that it seeks employees who share its values and attitudes. Others advocate matching job requirements to skills (e.g., self-confident people in sales). There are as many theories about what makes the best employee as there are company leaders who have been asked the secret of their success. Systematic organizational behavior research can help us sort out these conflicts.
From Chapter 4, Understanding Feelings at Work:
True or False? |
| Happy workers are more productive. |
Understanding Job Performance
Simple productivity or task performance does not capture all of the job performance that organizations need from employees. Contextual performance is the contribution people make in support of direct task performance. It includes any voluntary act that facilitates organizational goal attainment. Examples include efforts such as working hard to meet a deadline, helping coworkers, taking the initiative to solve unexpected problems, making constructive suggestions, developing oneself and spreading good will. Contextual performance is important to most jobs, and it is critical to professional and managerial job performance. Organizational performance requires more than a narrow focus on doing as instructed; it requires employees who pitch in, help others, and use their best judgment to solve whatever problems they confront.
Using narrow measures of task performance or productivity that exclude contextual performance, literally hundreds of studies have established a very weak relationship between this part of job performance and all the different ways of looking at employee happiness. There is no evidence at all that making employees happy will lead them to become more productive on their tasks. So there is no ambiguity here: none of the many ways we know to make employees happy — by paying them more, treating them with consideration, creating a just workplace — will lead individuals to produce more, no matter what we all want to believe. Employee happiness does matter to organizational performance in other ways, but it does not — and this is probably the strongest, best established empirical fact in the field of organizational behavior — lead to greater worker task productivity. Most organizations have worked hard to encourage task productivity through training, having the necessary supplies available, and performance measurement and incentives. When all of those systems function as they should, employees’ feelings matter little to narrow task performance. However, their happiness is important to employees’ contextual performance.
From Chapter 6, Managing Incentives:
True or False? |
Employees should be paid for
performance. |
Money and Motivation
Perhaps people should be paid for their performance, but we rarely find that that this is true in organizations. This box is a hope for something that cannot exist for most jobs in most organizations. For many, when they think of employee incentives, they first think of money. But Edward Deming argued against piece rates and other forms of paying people for what they produce, and many, many studies over the decades find that, in practice, neither corporate executives’ pay, nor many others’ pay is actually tied to their performance.
If money is such a good incentive, why is it so rarely tied to individual job performance? To diagnose this conundrum, we need to see what systematic research can tell us about three questions: Does money motivate? Can money be tied to performance? Can managers identify the performance they will pay for? This popular opinion needs to be rephrased: it is not whether or not employees should be paid for their performance; it is whether or not they actually can be paid for the performance organizations want.
From Chapter 9, Mastering Power
Manipulation
True or False? |
To get what you want from others, you need to be Machiavellian. |
Many confuse politicking with manipulation. Manipulation is influencing others by deceiving them. The effective exercise of power does not depend on manipulation or lying. Everyone can know exactly what you are doing and why, and they will still do what they otherwise would not have done. For example, most would accept that their managers have the formal authority to make a new project the priority. A change in priorities is not manipulation.
Seeking to exercise power through manipulation is not a good idea. One reason is because deception and lying are unethical. So, manipulation should not be done for that reason alone. However, even for those willing to behave badly, manipulation is a very risky tactic. This is because it depends on complete secrecy for its effects, and complete secrecy is very hard to maintain in organizations. This is the reason why popular power advice so often fails: Eventually employees see the pattern and resent being manipulated. Certainly, people can become very angry if they feel that have been manipulated or tricked. As we saw in Chapter 6, those who feel they have been treated unfairly will retaliate when they can, leave if possible, and sullenly withhold cooperation if that is their only option.
Power through deception and manipulation is often called being Machiavellian. However, those who have read Niccolò Machiavelli’s entire book would find this warning: “If you are going to attack a prince you better be sure to kill him, because a wounded prince is dangerous.” In today’s bureaucratic organizations many people are princes, that is, they have the ability to retaliate. Those who are attacked will act to protect themselves, and when possible, take revenge on their attackers. Even the least intelligent employees, with sufficient time and motivation, can find ways to punish their attackers.
They have the time, can wait, and are very motivated. Do you want to build an army of motivated enemies lying in wait for you to stumble? Those who hold the inset boxed management opinion are risk takers indeed.