Women are also:
It’s not just me making such bold claims. Check out these pages from a booklet (circa 1940) that was intended to assist male bosses in supervising their new female employees at RCA plants. The images come from the collection of the U.S. National Archives Southeast Region.
One piece of advice: Avoid horseplay or “kidding”; she may resent it.
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
“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)
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
A couple of articles in the International Journal of Productivity and Performance offer signposts for managers wanting to get more out of performance management systems (PMS) such as the balanced scorecard. And there are likely plenty of you out there. By some estimates, the failure rate of PMS implementation is around 70 percent.
In their project, Andre A. de Waal and Harold Counet (Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands) asked, What problems can organizations expect to encounter when implementing PMS? To answer that, they conducted a literature review and tested the validity and relevance of what they learned with a panel of 31 performance management experts from eight countries.
De Waal and Counet discovered that while practitioners and experts/academics may differ somewhat on why a typical PMS runs into trouble, both groups point to the lack of management commitment as a crucial reason for failure.
Top Five Problems Implementing PMS According to Practitioners:
Top Five Problems Implementing PMS According to Academics:
De Waal and Counet conclude: “The results indicate the crucial role commitment – on all levels of the organization – plays in achieving a successful PMS, and the importance of management being a role model in consequently, consistently and visibly to the organization using performance management. In short, the research results in reinforcing that important adage: forewarned is forearmed!”
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Between 2002 and 2004, de Waal did great work identifying 20 behavioural factors that determine whether or not performance management systems were being used successfully. Elzinga (Shell Int. Exploration and Production), Albronda, and Kluijtmans (Open U of The Netherlands) took de Waal’s work one step further by determining which of the behavioural factors are more important than others.
The three researchers replicated de Waal’s study of four Dutch organizations in the private and public sectors. Their pattern matching anaylsis identified the following seven behavioural factors as most important:
And these are the behavioural factors that are the least important in successfully implementing and sustaining a PMS:
“Lessons learned from performance management systems implementations,” by
Andre A. de Waal and Harold Counet; International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management (Vol. 58 No. 4, 2009, pp. 367-390)
“Behavioral factors influencing performance management systems’ use,” by Taco Elzinga, Be Albronda, and Frits Kluijtmans; International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management (Vol. 58 No. 6, 2009, pp. 508-522)
photo credit: Jinho.Jung
I just realized that I have quite a few papers in the queue relating to corporate social responsibility (CSR). If there are no objections, I’ll offer super-abbreviated overviews of these articles in this one post. That means you’ll be spared CSR posts for at least another two months. Deal?
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“Is the socially responsible corporation a myth? The good, the bad, and the ugly of corporate social responsibility,” by Timothy M. Devinney; Academy of Management Perspectives; (May 2009; pp. 44-56)
Devinney (Australian School of Business) argues that a socially responsible corporation is a “fundamental impossibility.” He writes that we must be willing to accept the good and bad character of the corporation. “We want the corporation to engage in good social activity, but to be nice and not use it for competitive advantage that forestalls competition. We want managers to act benevolently when making choices about the social investments of corporations, but to do so in ways that align with our conceptions of what is socially right. But all of this is impossible. We must accept that as a social organism the firm will be a complex mixture of virtues and vices that cannot be separated.” Devinney also offers several challenges that will bedevil researchers trying to measure CSR activities.
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“Making the most of corporate social responsibility,” by Tracey Keys, Thomas W. Malnight, and Kees van der Graaf; McKinsey Quarterly (December 2009)
In the ill-defined world of CSR, “smart partnering” is emerging as an effective way to create value for both businesses and society. In these partnerships, business are not seeking to avoid risk or burnish their reputations but instead to improve their “core value creation ability by addressing major strategic issues.” The authors, from the Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development, offer two examples of creative partnerships involving Unilever in India and Kenya. They figure there are three principles guiding smart CSR partnerships: concentrate your CSR, build a deep understanding of the benefits, and find the right partners.
Download this article (registration required)
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Valuing social responsibility programs,” by Sheila Bonini, Timothy M. Koller, and Philip H. Mirvis; McKinsey on Finance (No. 32, Summer 2009)
Companies with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs have difficulty linking operational metrics (say, tons of carbon emitted) to real financial impacts, often claiming that such programs are too deeply embedded in the core business to be measured meaningfully. The McKinsey consultants counter that some companies are developing hard data to measure even long-term or indirect value of ESG programs. Some examples:
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“What matters to managers?: The whats, whys, and hows of corporate social responsibility in a multinational corporation,” by Esben Rahbek Pedersen and Peter Neergaard; Management Decision (2009, Vol. 47 Issue: 8, 1261 – 1280)
To explore the different managerial perceptions of CSR, the researchers conducted a survey of 159 managers plus interviewed 10 top-level managers in one multinational manufacturer. Most of the managers surveyed consider CSR “the right thing to do,” though a large number also see their company’s CSR initiatives as relating to image and brand. While managers generally feel CSR is well integrated in their company, CSR is of second-tier concern because it is not tied to managers’ bonuses. The authors discuss how the alignment and misalignment of managerial perceptions are likely to affect corporate social performance. One possible benefit of “misaligned managerial perceptions: it can be a source of development and innovation.
photo credit: edmittance
Fun is in the eye of the beholder. So it is with workplace fun and the growing efforts by organizations to engage employees with games-playing and other officially-sanctioned hijinks.
Researchers are now turning their attention to measuring when workplace fun initiatives have a positive influence and when they are counterproductive. Eric Lamm and Michael D. Meeks (San Francisco State U), for example, conducted a study to find out whether or not there are generational differences in how workplace fun is viewed, and if there are different outcomes depending on generation.
In the journal Employee Relations, the authors write that, based on generational theory, we would expect to see these attitudes:
Baby boomers (born between 1941 ad 1960): “Boomers’ win-at-all-cost perspective and reliance on success as a measure of self worth likely results in a perception that workplace fun is counterproductive to their competitive edge.”
Gen Xers (born between 1961 and 1980): “Since Xers have a preference for fun and embrace balance in their lives, planned organisational fun activities may engage these sometimes disengaged workers and more fulsomely direct their energy toward the organisation instead of individual, non-work pursuits.”
Millennials (born between 1981 and 2000): “Unlike Boomers, who may oppose workplace fun, and Xers, who may be indifferent to workplace fun, Millennials are likely to regard fun in the workplace not as a benefit, but a requirement.”
Armed with this background, Lamm and Meeks surveyed 701 individuals from all three generational groups. They found that indeed there are measurable generational differences in how workplace fun is regarded.
Millennials, for example, showed stronger links between workplace fun and organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction, task performance, and “organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB).”
Surprisingly, though, the authors found that baby boomers were not as negative about workplace fun as originally thought. “This has large implications because Boomers, with a reputation of ‘achievers at any cost’ and thus regarded as likely impediments to the successful implementation of planned workplace fun, may in fact not only benefit from workplace fun, but may be supportive, whether as a participant employee or facilitating manager.”
“Workplace fun: the moderating effects of generational differences,” by Eric Lamm and Michael D. Meeks, Employee Relations (Vol. 31 No. 6, 2009, pp. 613-631)
If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com
Tomorrow at 10 a.m., report to the staff meeting room for one hour of fun.
Sounds preposterous, no? Actually, this is not far from what is happening in many organizations desperate to boost employee engagement. There are ‘wacky Fridays’, karaoke competitions, laughter workshops, and countless variations on the theme. Here is the equation: organized and packaged fun means happy employees means more satisfied, creative, motivated employees means increased corporate performance. But can you actually connect the paint dots from increased fun to increased productivity?
Writing in a special “fun” issue of the journal Employee Relations, Sharon C. Bolton (Strathclyde U Business School, Glasgow) and Maeve Houlihan (University College Dublin) take a critical view. They say that for a great many employees, enforced fun is like enforced pain and that there is very little proof that such initiatives actually make for more engaged staff.
In the past, sociologists identified laughter and game playing in the workplace as either a way to tame the “beast of boredom” or to subversively make fun of management. In turn managers have been portrayed as seeing such hijinks as a disruptive influence that needed to be discouraged.
How far we’ve come. Now it’s the manager instigating the games and the employee who is cluck-clucking. “The informal rules of workplace fun appear to have been repackaged on management’s terms with the express purpose of furthering organisational goals,” Bolton and Houlihan write. “Put simply, ‘fun is not frivolous anymore.’”
The authors have identified “shades of engagement” as people enjoy, endure, or escape organizational-sponsored game playing.
According to Bolton and Houlihan, “Official fun has some striking features in the way it presumes that fun will be on managerial terms and that there will be benefits for all; in the way it excludes those who are unable (or choose not) to party all weekend; in the way it imposes formal reward mechanisms, and it demands macho work-hard, play-hard rules; and, in the process, it often reinforces unreconstructed stereotypes around what is considered fun and who may be made fun of; and it confuses as the boundaries around what is and is not sanctioned continually shift.”
The authors argue for more research in the area. I say, bring on the bongos.
“Are we having fun yet? A consideration of workplace fun and engagement,” by Sharon C. Bolton and Maeve Houlihan; Employee Relations (Vol. 31 No. 6, 2009; pp. 556-568)
If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com
photo credit: Troy McClure SF
