LEADING THOUGHTS

“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

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

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

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

Communication and trust go hand in hand. Good communication builds trust within organizations and boosts employee involvement. But what qualifies as “good” trust-building communications? Well, it depends on who is on the receiving end.

Thomas (Naval Postgraduate School), Zolin (Queensland U of Technology), and Hartman (Colorado State U) set out to investigate the linkages among quality of information, quantity of information, trust, and outcomes such as employee involvement. For data, they used communication audits from 218 employees in the Texas and Oklahoma oil industry. Audits are used to identify communications patterns within an organization.

Thomas et al found that for building trust among co-workers and supervisors,  quality of information — its accuracy, timeliness, and usefulness — is most important for building trust than quantity of information. But for building trust in senior management, it is the quantity of information that is most important.

Information coming from top management is seldom specific to an individual’s job and is generally focused on the big picture, write Thomas, Zolin, and Hartman in the Journal of Business Communication. “Top management depends on supervisors to translate this abstract information into more task-related, relevant communication. While employees count on top management to set the strategy and determine criteria for organizational success, then, supervisors must be trusted to show workers the connection between employees’ jobs and the organization’s goals and to provide the more specific, high-quality information needed to perform their jobs well. Coworkers, likewise, are depended on for high-quality information needed for job execution.”

The researchers also found that, in all cases, trust was very closely tied to perceptions of organizational openness which, in turn, is linked to high employee involvement.

“The central role of communication in developing trust and its effect on employee involvement”, by Gail Fann Thomas, Roxanne Zolin, and Jackie L. Hartman; Journal of Business Communication (Vol. 46, No. 3, July 2009; pp. 287-310)

photo credit: evilpeacock

Since 1995, researchers have been studying wage differentials based on sexual orientation. Studies based on U.S. census data, for example, have shown that lesbians earn more than heterosexual women; the “lesbian wage premium” is estimated to be between 8 and 13 percent.

A team of researchers from the University of Nevada also mined census data to investigate the effect a previous heterosexual marriage exerts on the relative wages of lesbians (defined as a woman sharing a household with a female partner) and heterosexual women.

“The fact that many lesbians were once involved in a heterosexual marriage provides an opportunity to better understand the relationship between lesbian wages and wages earned by otherwise similar heterosexual women,” write Daneshvary, Waddoups, and Wimmer  in the journal Industrial Relations. Never-married lesbians, the thinking goes, are not constrained by “traditional gender roles” and are better able to invest in developing themselves for the job market.

Crunching the 2000 census numbers, Daneshvary et al found that never-married lesbians earn significantly higher wages than heterosexual women, while previously married lesbians earn roughly the same wages as their heterosexual counterparts. “We find the largest gaps between never-married lesbians and previously married lesbians (8.7 percent) and between never-married lesbians and previously married heterosexuals (8.2 percent). The estimated gap between never-married lesbians and never-married heterosexuals is substantially lower (4.1 percent).”

The findings, say the researchers, are “consistent with the notion that at least part of the lesbian premium originates from lesbians’ relative freedom from constraints associated with marriage and the gender division of labor in traditional households.”

“Previous Marriage and the Lesbian Wage Premium,” by Nasser Daneshvary, C. Jeffrey Waddoups, and Bradley S. Wimmer; Industrial Relations (Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 432-453)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz [dot] com

photo credit: incurable_hippie