LEADING THOUGHTS

Let’s pump up employees and stoke their competitive juices by ranking them against their peers. Better yet, let’s throw cold water on them. Comparing workers to their peers is usually a lousy idea, and here’s why. Go to article

The organization is flying through the turbulence of change. What does it do? Throw gobs of money at senior execs and “star” performers to induce them to stay on board? There is a more shrewd and less costly solution. Go to article (requires registration)

The issue: When selecting a new leadership team, should CEOs use a scientific approach that is fact-based and analytical? Or should they emphasize subjective factors such as personality, loyalty, motivation, politics, and team chemistry? Let the debate begin. Go to article

C.K Prahalad gave us core competencies, the bottom of the pyramid, constrained innovation, and a few other mind-bending management theories. Until his dying days, he believed that individuals, not institutions, were central. Institutions are merely “different ways of combining skills and capabilities of the moment.” Go to article

Learning and development pros have been getting an easy ride when it comes to showing the business value of training. Lame surveys no longer cut it. Fortunately, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America can show how to tie training to key business performance metrics. Go to article (registration required)

Beefy bouncers at Manhattan nightclubs can tell us a thing or two about status cues and how rewards are doled out. I’ll let you connect the dots to organizational life. Go to article

A Conference Board of Canada study provides some welcome data on literacy and basic skills in the workplace.

Literacy in the workplace means the ability to understand instructions and read and apply printed information, among other basic skills. A workforce with a deficit in these skills will see lower productivity, higher health and safety costs, and more prevalent problems with product and service quality.

The Conference Board’s survey of employers, workers, union representatives, and providers of services to immigrants and Aboriginal groups shows that despite the importance placed on literacy skills in the workplace, training to build these skills is not often available through the workplace. Specifically,

• Forty-five percent of employer respondents and 55.6 percent of worker respondents said  training in the workplace to improve the ability to “listen to instructions” is never, or only seldom, available.
• Fifty-six percent of employer respondents and 58 percent of worker respondents indicated that training in the workplace to improve the ability to read printed information is never, or only seldom, offered.

According to the Conference Board survey, the biggest challenge resulting from workplace literacy training is the scheduling or reorganizing of work. Measuring success and determining the return on investment were other obstacles reported.

On the positive side, those organizations that offer workplace literacy programs see a boost in performance:

• More than 60 percent reported that productivity and the quality of products/services were improved.
• Fifty-eight percent of respondents said health and safety and workplace communications were improved.

The Conference Board survey also revealed a mismatch in perceptions between employers and workers. Employers in the survey, for example, reported a much higher level of confidence in workers’ understanding of health and safety policies than did any other responding group.

• Sixty-four percent of employer respondents said they felt that health and safety policies were understood fully or to a large extent, while 50 percent of responding labour representatives and 40 percent of workers agreed.

This mismatch has potentially significant consequences. “Because employers are already confident,” the report concluded, “they are unlikely to see the need to provide training to upgrade workers knowledge and understanding of the health and safety policies of the workplace.”

The Conference Board report includes the analysis of 10 Canadian workplace literacy and learning programs, particularly relating to their impacts on workplace health and safety.

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You: Literacy’s Impact on Workplace Health and Safety, by Alison Campbell; The Conference Board of Canada (July 2010)

Are people who take leadership positions motivated mainly by selfish interests or the interests of their followers? It is easy enough to cite examples proving one side or the other but researchers Gillet (U Osnabrueck), Cartwright (U Kent), and van Vugt (VU Amsterdam) wanted to add rigor to the debate.

Among evolutionary biologists and psychologists, there are two theories on the origins of leadership. The dominant idea views leadership as the outcome of status battles between group members. The winner (leader) exercises power over lower-ranked individuals.

The alternative idea sees leadership as a coordination device that helps group members plan, execute group tasks, and divvy up resources. In this view, leaders serve the interests of followers.

To test these two ideas, Gillet and colleagues conducted two social decision-making experiments. They examined the behaviors of individuals in four-player coordination games in which the individuals had the option to go first (lead) or wait (follow); their decisions were associated with certain monetary pay-offs. The researchers then linked the players’ decisions to data from personality questionnaires and their earnings in the game.

“The core question in these games is who leads and how do they fare compared to followers in terms of their earnings in the game?” the researchers report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Gillet et al found that leaders were more likely to be rated as pro-social rather than selfish. And they discovered that these “servant leaders” seemingly sacrificed some of their own gains for the benefit of the group.

“Leaders, on average, earned less money than followers and dispositionally social participants (on the basis of their social value orientation) chose to lead more often than selfish participants,” the researchers report. “Additionally there is no relationship between leadership and the kind of personality traits that are usually associated with selfish leadership, most notably personal dominance.”

As the researchers admit, the experiments were run in an anonymous setting that did not enable group members to form status and dominance hierarchies commonly seen in the brutish real world. So this line of thinking is a work in progress, albeit one that gives servant leaders a measure of redemption.

Gillet, J., Cartwright, E., & Vugt, M. (2010). Selfish or servant leadership? Evolutionary predictions on leadership personalities in coordination games Personality and Individual Differences DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.06.003

photo credit: Clinton Steeds

Change can be stressful, no doubt. But not all employees experience change in a similar way, say researchers Loretto (U Edinburgh), Platt (U Edinburgh), and Popham (U St. Andrews). Downsizing, for example, could have a positive effect on mental health, they write in the British Journal of Management, if they lead to clearer roles and responsibilities for employees and increasing worker participation.

FACTOID: Employers in the UK are under legal obligation to prevent and control factors leading to stress in their workforce.

To fill in the research gap, Loretto et al set out to devise a comprehensive measure of organizational change (based on self-report questionnaires) and then to use that tool to explore the effects of change on employee mental health (using the well-validated General Health Questionnaire). Their study focused on nearly 5,400 employees in the National Health Service in the UK.

The study did show that the prospect of changing employers and terms and conditions of employment are likely to have detrimental effects on staff health and well-being.

But the researchers’ findings also challenge the assumption that change necessarily has an adverse effect on health. “Our findings indicate areas, such as promotion and development, where a positive impact can be anticipated.” They speculate that training and promotion may reduce employees’ uncertainty by increasing their control over their future.

Loretto, W., Platt, S., & Popham, F. (2009). Workplace Change and Employee Mental Health: Results from a Longitudinal Study British Journal of Management DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00658.x

It may disappoint you to read this but anger has a productive role in negotiations. Empirical studies (such as those by Sinaceur and Tiedens in 2006) have shown that expressing anger induces larger concessions when negotiating with another party. Angry negotiators are perceived to be tougher and to have higher “reservation prices” (higher standards for the worst deal they are willing to accept) than other negotiators. But these studies are all based on North American and Western European subjects. Is expressing anger in negotiations equally effective in other cultures?

Adam (INSEAD), Shirako (U of California, Berkeley), and Maddux (INSEAD) conducted the “first investigation of how the interpersonal effects of discrete emotions in negotiations vary across cultures,” according to their paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

They hypothesized that anger would elicit larger concessions from Western negotiators but smaller concessions from East Asian negotiators. They figured that anger is at odds with the East Asian emphasis on interdependence and social harmony and would therefore be perceived by East Asian negotiators as an inappropriate display.

The research backed them up. Adam et al conducted three studies using scenarios and computer simulations (none involving face-to-face interactions) and found consistent evidence that “anger not only may be less effective in East Asian cultural contexts, but may actually backfire and lead to worse outcomes.”

Culture, they say, has a significant impact not only on how people from different cultural backgrounds perceive certain behaviour but also how they actually react to that behaviour.

Hajo Adam, Aiwa Shirako, & William W. Maddux (2010). Cultural Variance in the Interpersonal Effects of Anger in Negotiations Psychological Science, 21 (6), 882-889 : 10.1177/0956797610370755

photo credit: Frederic Poirot

Professor Robert Hooijberg (IMD, Switzerland) studied 175 state government managers in the U.S. to assess whether or not leadership effectiveness is linked to integrity, as judged by the managers themselves, their bosses, their peers, and their direct reports.

Hooijberg found that goal-oriented behaviour — getting the job done — is far and away the strongest predictor of perceived leadership effectiveness. Integrity, by contrast, holds much less importance for a leader’s boss or direct reports. “Our study lends little support to the assertion that integrity is essential for effective leadership, a sobering thought indeed,” he writes.

Of course, there is more to this research. Hooijberg found, for example, that flexibility is a crucial value for leaders. And in his article, he lays out some important distinctions between the concept of “integrity” and what it actually means in practice. Sometimes acting with undiluted honesty can damage workplace relationships that need to be sustained. Do you really need to point that your colleague’s green-and-brown argyle socks clash with his black pin-striped suit?

Read the entire article here

In the UK, for example, there’s a proposal to tie top public sector pay to a 20-times multiple of low pay, and to publish the salaries of the highest earners.

Amid all the huffing and puffing, the huge UK-based HR association, CIPD, is providing a gutsy contrarian view. In a recent report, CIPD argues in favour of variable pay and bonuses, a tough argument to make in these days of retrenchment.

“Politicians and, perhaps more importantly, more strident parts of the media need to stop seeing pay in the public sector as only a cost to be driven down,” the report says. “Instead, used well, it can be a tool to drive up standards and increase value to the taxpayer.”

So how should compensation be designed to deliver what public sector bosses and their political masters intend? CIPD suggests that, for the most part, what works for the private sector should work for the public. To wit:

Ensure reward practices match the purpose.
The key question is: “Are the ways that the benefit package is structured likely to make any day-to-day difference to the ability of the organisation to deliver its objectives, or the effort delivered by individuals to help it do so?”

Make compensation transparent.
Employees need to know what is expected of them and what they need to do to earn a pay raise or bonus, and what is expected of others. Transparency also builds credibility with taxpayers. In fact, CIPD likes the idea of publishing the names of high earners, not merely their job titles. U.S. states such as Utah, Washington, Nebraska, and California already have publicly accessible online databases containing the salaries of state employees.

Reward performance.
This won’t please the “slash the pay packet” crowd but CIPD suggests public sector managers make greater use of variable pay to reward individual or team behaviour. This is a good way to recognize high performance without continually ratcheting up comp levels and pension commitments. “Bonuses can help focus minds by communicating what’s important to the organisation and can be more cost-effective than consolidated pay awards.”

Adopt flexible compensation schemes.
CIPD recommends moving from national pay agreements, “pay spines/increments”, and service-related pay progression to flexible pay structures. More flexible pay grades and progression mechanisms should be adopted to allow individuals to progress through their grades faster.

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