LEADING THOUGHTS

Alas the “glass ceiling” is one of those sad facts of modern organizational life that knows no national boundaries.  Doesn’t matter the country: despite rising female labour participation rates, women can’t seem to crack senior management ranks.

There are the usual reasons: the lack of transparency around promotion policies; work-family conflict; the old boys’ network; and the lack of visibly successful female role models. In her study of female managers in Ireland, Christine Cross (U Limerick) found similar dynamics at play but also what she calls an under-appreciated phenomenon: that “visibility” or being known to the senior management team is a crucial “career progression strategy.”

It is a strategy for which women of a certain age are ill-equipped, Cross says. “The age during which women are most often taking time out of their career for childbirth coincides with the time they are most active in seeking promotion,” she writes in the Leadership & Organization Development Journal. “As a consequence of taking maternity leave, a woman’s absence from the organisation directly impacts her visibility in organisational life. This study highlights that where women are away from the office for these extended periods, they believe, because of their absence, they are ‘forgotten about’ by the senior management team.”

Cross’s conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with 30 female managers from across a wide range of industry sectors in Ireland. The women in the study also observed that men in their organizations overtly engaged in self-generated visibility, a strategy the female respondents did not want to employ.

Hmm. . . do you buy that?

I have seen the way some men network and it’s not a pretty sight. Everyone knows they are doing it, just to get in with the ‘in crowd’. People talk about them behind their backs about how they are always smoozing up to the most senior people, and there is this one guy who is really junior, but wants to hang out with the ‘big boys’. But it’s working for him, even though we are all saying he shouldn’t be doing it because he’s making a laughing stock of himself.
—Retail store manager quoted by Cross

“Barriers to the executive suite: evidence from Ireland”, by Christine Cross; Leadership & Organization Development Journal (Vol. 31 No. 2, 2010, pp. 104-119)

photo credit: Let Ideas Compete

Org Development, Uncategorized career path, discrimination, gender, networks

You’re flush with excitement because you’ve just hired an industry high flier. How can you make sure that your new star employee isn’t a flash in the pan?

Top-notch talents do not automatically perform at high levels, say Groysberg (Harvard Business School), Lee (RiskMetrics Group), and Abrahams (Harvard Business School). Writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, they offer advice on how to get the best out of the best.

Their main point is that “star” hires perform at their peak when surrounded by colleagues of similar talent. As proof, they point to a study they performed among equity analysts who benefited (as did their customers) by working with sharp portfolio strategists and salespeople.

Why is this so? It turns out that high-quality colleagues act as sources of information, provide insightful feedback, serve as valuable interfaces between knowledge workers and clients, and enhance the reputation of their star colleagues.

This management strategy also leads to higher retention of the top performers, the authors state. “The goal here is the so-called Matthew effect: The more stars a company has, the easier it is to develop and retain such high-caliber individuals.”

Three other pieces of advice:

:: Avoid lavishing high salaries on your new star hire; doing so risks demoralizing co-workers. In fact, the authors write, high achievers may be willing to accept a pay cut for the opportunity to work with similarly talented employees.

:: Stars may not have the instinct to play well with others, especially when managerial time and resources are scarce and the urge to compete is greatest. Managers should therefore create a culture of collaboration by encouraging face-to-face contact and building a compensation package that rewards appropriate behaviour.

:: Don’t neglect home-grown talent. By developing high potentials from within and building bench strength, you will be rewarded with greater loyalty and less disruption when a key person leaves.

“What it Takes to Make ‘Star’ Hires Pay Off”, by Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee, and Robin Abrahams; MIT Sloan Management Review (Vol. 51, No. 2, Winter 2010, pp. 57-61)

photo credit: Noel Feans

General HR career path, compensation, engagement, hr practices, incentives, recruitment, teamwork

According to social network theory, people on average are only a few connections away from the information they seek. But in large organizations, this theory falls apart: some employees clearly have longer search paths than others in locating the knowledge they require. Is this simply because they have an inferior network?

Not really, say researchers from INSEAD and Apple University. Singh, Hansen, and Podolny suggest there are two dynamics at play. One, employees who belong to the periphery of an organization — women and those with lower tenure or poor connectedness to experts — have limited awareness of who knows what in an organization and a lower ability to seek help from others best suited to guide the search. Two, when these employees do seek information, they tend to contact colleagues like themselves who are also outliers.

The researchers say employees on the periphery need to cross social boundaries to discover “who knows what,” and that their managers have a role in making this happen.

“We speculate that reliance on interpersonal networks remains crucial when a firm’s knowledge cannot be easily codified and stored in databases, when it changes
quickly (making it difficult to keep track of who knows what), and when it is distributed across people who are not official experts,” the researchers write in their working paper The World is Not Small for Everyone. “This calls for managers to recognize that formal IT systems are rarely substitutes for inter-personal networks. The implication is that managers need to help members on the periphery develop their networks.”

“The World is Not Small for Everyone: Inequity in Searching for Knowledge in Organizations”, by Jasjit Singh, Morten T. Hansen, and Joel M. Podolny; INSEAD working paper 2009/49/ST/EFE

photo credit: Sambhu Sankar

Learning Orgs communication, learning, Org Design

You can see it in the streets and smell it in the air: signs of economic recovery are beginning to emerge in Canada. But according to the latest estimates from the Conference Board of Canada, it will take up to five years for the economy to return to full capacity. For workforce planners with an agenda for change, now is the time to strike.

According to the Conference Board’s Industrial Relations Outlook 2010, “Employers now have a window of opportunity to develop effective workforce strategies before the recovery pushes us back to full employment and the challenges of a tight labour market.”

The report suggests that employers use this time to train and re-skill the workforce and more effectively integrate immigrant and Aboriginal communities.

As for the near term, the Conference Board predicts that the public sector will dominate collective bargaining in 2010, with negotiations involving 750,000 public sector workers. Faced with national deficits, federal workers will feel the need to concede gains. Municipal workers, however, may push for contract improvements.

Factoid: Union density rate in Canada is 29 percent — 71.3 percent in the public sector and 16.1 percent in the private sector

In the private sector, the Conference Board says, employers will continue to focus on controlling costs. The strength of the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar means dampened exports of manufactured goods.

According to the Conference Board, there are two big issues that employers face: one, a continued structural labour deficit; and two, a private pension fund system that requires fundamental change, particularly regarding employer finding.

For their part, unions will continue to be focused on protecting their existing rights and benefits and protecting jobs of existing members.

Given the uncertainty in the private sector and the fiscal deficits in the public sector, the Conference Board says, “universal labour peace is unlikely in the coming year.”

InfoBox: Current Negotiation Issues (Canada)

Management Issues:

1. Wages
2. Productivity
3. Health, pension, and benefits
4. Organizational change
5. Business competetiveness

Union Issues:

1. Wages
2. Employment security
3. Health, pensions, and benefits
4. Employment/pay equity
5. Outsourcing/contracting out

(Source: The Conference Board of Canada union-management survey)

Industrial Relations Outlook 2010: A recovery offering little relief, by David K. Shepherdson; Conference Board of Canada

photo credit: Aaron Magner

Labour Relations compensation, pensions, public sector, training, unions

“Workplace spirituality”: Are those two words in direct conflict, like “progressive conservative”? Maybe not: plenty of researchers make the case that it’s good for employees to bring their “whole person” to work, including their spiritual and religious expressions. It’s assumed that workplace spirituality leads to greater employee engagement through more meaningful work, enhanced ability to cope with stress, and more effective organizations. It’s a win all ‘round, right?

Marjolein Lips-Wiersma (U of Canterbury in New Zealand), Kathy Lund Dean (Idaho State U), and Charles J. Fornaciari (Florida Gulf Coast U) argue that there is a dark side to workplace spirituality (WPS). The dark side, they write in the Journal of Management Inquiry, is in how spirituality can be misused or misappropriated, particularly for managerial control.

They say most workplace spirituality research ignores two key dynamics wielded by the employer: the degree of control and “instrumentality” (in which employees are treated as means toward a goal such as profit or productivity).

“Firms by design are instrumental, goal-driven entities with a clear focus on ends, and any means adopted into the firm will have present some level of instrumentality for its employees,” Lips-Wiersma et al write. “Consequently, the very notion of attempting to formally include spirituality in modern firms will always include the potential for misuse and misappropriation.”

In their article, the researchers offer a two-by-two matrix anchored by “control” and “instrumentality” and with the following quadrants:

Seduction
Found in: Organizations with low control and low instrumentality.
Dark side: “Because organizational members are free to select in or out of WPS activities and determine the nature and form of their WPS, cultural fragmentation occurs. Certain employees’ WPS may speak for the organization as a whole, either by contagion or by publicity, or when the WPS practice amounts to discrimination.”

Evangelization
Found in: Organizations high in control and low in instrumentality.
Dark side: “The agenda of management (hidden or overt) is to convert employees to the spiritual beliefs of management and these beliefs are judged to be superior to other beliefs. In many ways, the organization will display formal and informal characteristics of religious cults—with the most successful organization members being those that buy into management’s view and expression of WPS.”

Manipulation
Found in: Organizations with low control and high instrumentality.
Dark side: “In these organizations, spirituality is primarily a tool for improving performance, but the form and nature in which WPS is incorporated into the organization is left open for determination by individual firm members. In this worldview, upper management believes that WPS is simply another potentially manipulatable variable to try and wrest more productivity from its workers, and it will immediately focus on strategies to do so.”

Subjugation
Found in: Organizations high in control and instrumentality.
Dark side: “In these organizations spirituality is not only a clear tool for improving performance, but the form and nature in which WPS is incorporated into the organization is highly specified by management. Thus, employees are asked (through some direct or indirect spiritual practice) to bring more of themselves to work, but the culture of control encourages people to behave and even ‘feel’ in prescribed ways.”

It all boils down to the tension between the “management of meaning” versus “meaningful work” as it relates to spiritual expression. Be looking for an employee backlash in the years ahead as individuals try to take back control. Their interior lives should not be for sale.

“Theorizing the Dark Side of the Workplace Spirituality Movement,” by Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, Kathy Lund Dean, and Charles J. Fornaciari; Journal of Management Inquiry (Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2009, pp. 288-300)

photo credit: estherase

General HR, Uncategorized diversity, engagement, spirituality

When you call a meeting at work, do your colleagues roll their eyes? I feel for you. Here is some advice on how to win some meeting credibility, from Desmond J. Leach (Leeds U Business School) and colleagues.

Leach and his team surveyed 958 people in the U.S., UK, and Australia, trying to determine what makes people perceive a meeting to be effective. He focused on five meeting design characteristics: using an agenda, keeping minutes, starting and ending on time, meeting in an appropriate facility, and having a chairperson.

The results of the first phase of the study: the use of an agenda, punctuality, and meeting facilities rose to the top.

Respondents were then asked to consider more specifically the effectiveness of the last meeting on the day of their survey (to get around “recall bias”). The results this time: agenda completion, facilities, and the chairperson were the most important meeting design elements.

These perceptions held true for various types of meetings, such as those dealing with routine issues, information sharing, or addressing special problems. As well, neither the size of the meeting nor its duration seemed to effect peoples’ perceptions of meeting effectiveness, except when the meeting agenda was not completed.

If you really want to score points for your meeting prowess, do a good job involving attendees. The researchers found that higher levels of involvement predict greater perceptions of effectiveness.

“Perceived Meeting Effectiveness: The Role of Design Characteristics,” by Desmond J. Leach, Steven G. Rogelberg, Peter B. Warr, and Jennifer L. Burnfield; Journal of Business Psychology (2009, 24:65-76)

photo credit: Wildstar Beaumont

Teams, Uncategorized communication, engagement, leadership, teamwork

Sweeping changes in the labour market over the past four decades have triggered “the disappearance of ‘workers’ as a political and industrial force, as a social and cultural category and as the concept that organizes our thinking about labour law and policy,” says Harry Arthurs, one of Canada’s leading labour law scholars.

In a recent speech to St. John’s College at University of Oxford, Arthurs listed a litany of tectonic forces: technological change, the shift in employment from manufacturing to the service economy, the “flexibilization” of the workforce, demographic trends, and globalization.

These developments have made employment more precarious, created conflicts or magnified differences among workers, undercut labour solidarity, and shifted the balance of power to employers.

As a result, people no longer define themselves as “workers” or as members of the “working class.” If they experience unfairness, Arthurs says, it is not as “workers” but as members of a disenfranchised group. “The common experience, the solidarity-building experience, of workers — in mines and sweatshops and dark satanic mills— is gone,” Arthurs says. “Gone too is the culture that reinforced that solidarity.”

The transformation of work has also rendered machinery of labour market regulation obsolete. Arthurs offers a number of examples.

“The shift from manufacturing to service jobs has revealed that laws premised on one sort of employment relationship do not necessarily produce the desired results when transplanted onto another.” Implication: Should labour legislation be drafted to take account of sectoral differences?

“Technology enables employers to respond to their customers around the clock, and globalization requires that they do so. But for employers to respond, employees must be available on at least a standby basis.” Implication: Should laws fixing maximum hours of work and requiring premium pay for overtime be changed to accommodate the employer’s business needs, or the employee’s needs for even greater protection against intrusion on his or her free time?

Arthurs says Western economies have three choices:

1. Adopt the perspective of human rights and the principles of freedom, dignity, and equality. “These principles ought to apply to people at work, no less than people at other moments in their lives,” he says.

2. See what can be done to bring more equity into the labour market within the limits of neo-liberal capitalism.

3. Try to resuscitate the labour movement or reinvent the labour movement.

Which one would you vote for?

If you’d like a copy of Harry Arthurs’s presentation, send me an email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz [dot] com

photo credit: Mohammad A. Hamama – A Socialist Blogger

Labour Relations, Uncategorized change, demographics, unions

Dirk Lindebaum of Manchester Business School argues that organizations should forget about trying to develop the emotional intelligence (EI) of their employees. Lindebaum doesn’t have an issue with EI itself; he just feels it is best developed as a result of individual initiative.

In the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Lindebaum identifies three barriers to workplace EI initiatives.

Industry barriers: Some industries, such as construction, are notorious for encouraging aggressive management styles and fierce competition. In such environments, EI may not be an advantage. “Owing to the dominance of males in some industries, and their influence on power relations, an inauspicious framework for introducing EI indiscriminately across various industries emerges.”

Intra-organizational barriers: EI workplace initiatives can ignore the varying personal motivations to commit to organizational objectives. Many employees, for example, may not be receptive to developing their emotional intelligence, and shouldn’t be forced to. Lindebaum: “Some individuals may be perfectly content to pursue with little organizational involvement their ‘nine-to-five jobs’ while others are keen to climb the organizational ladder.”

Intra-personal barriers: One, it is believed that EI is partly an innate ability that cannot be developed. Two, Lindebaum says that as workers become more emotionally astute, they could end up reevaluating whether they fit in their existing jobs (what’s wrong with that, I say), which isn’t necessarily in the organization’s interests. “Does the individual benefit from high EI or is it the organization? I argue that the individual is the primary beneficiary and organizations come second.” And three, more emotionally intelligent workers could be so preoccupied orchestrating favourable impressions that honest social interactions are few and far between.

Linebaum advocates individual initiative to foster EI, focusing on learning rather than performance. “Since emotions are an individual’s engagements with the world,” he writes, “the fostering of EI is a profoundly personal and private affair.”

“Rhetoric or Remedy? A Critique on Developing Emotional Intelligence”, by Dirk Lindebaum; Academy of Management Learning and Education (2009, Vol. 8, No. 2, 225–237)

photo credit: xiaming

Communications, Uncategorized Conflict Resolution, emotional intelligence, training