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When employees feel slighted, they work less

penntoday.upenn.edu

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Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#101

Post by andsoitis »

pinnochio wrote: post #21

There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition. When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't a…

> late birthday recognition.

if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.

What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.

Now, as a people manager, if you're not steering those kinds of things, you are not a great manager and you should be replaced with someone who does those things.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#102

Post by dmurray »

jampekka wrote: post #82
dmurray wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects. [Reads abstract] They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the org…

Per abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions. PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p... > Certainly they took the t…

They could start by observing the rate at which birthday cards are delivered on time, and not vary too much from that.

I suppose the impact on productivity isn't known in advance, and it might be that failing to receive a birthday card from a normally diligent manager costs the company more in productivity than it gains from a sloppy manager unexpectedly giving one on time.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#103

Post by 4er_transform »

tarkin2 wrote: post #35
mejutoco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker a…

Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.

People are animals like any other. That’s not a slight. Managers respond to incentives much like dogs do too, and so do execs, and board members, and every human.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#104

Post by dbshapco »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #68
kranner wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it were Surprisingly Obvious. IME there are a large number of emotionally stunted middle and upper managers that could use a pedigreed reminder that being a jerk at work is not good for anything in the end.

Would the people who need such a reminder actually accept the research, and change their behavior? Are they even aware of the effects of their behavior?

When I was in university I took a lot of courses in management science, which is basically a lot of applied psychology, and learned a lot of stuff like this.

Then I went out into industry and watched as all these principles about managing employees effectively were ignored, or at best received lip service.

It led me to the conclusion that actually effectively managing employees to motivate better performance wasn't a priority. Not in the top ten anyway.

Most corporations and therefore managers operate using resource extraction principles. How do I extract maximum labour from this resource at lowest cost?

The 'R' in HR always bothered me, and others judging by the companies that used nomenclature like 'talent' or 'people'.

However that was whitewash. Underneath the nomenclature resource extraction continued unimpeded.

The irony being that treating people like resources is counterproductive and hurts performance.

Companies extracted the illusion of more resources, more hours, while productivity largely plateaued or decreased.

Somehow corporations expected to hire smart people, smart enough to do an intellectually challenging and technical job, and not have them do the math that the additional pay for performance generally amortized lower than the hourly rate, and that by doing more employees were actually lowering their effective hourly rate -- i.e. discounting labour for the employer.

The wag in me would observe the reason companies were so eager to portray everyone as family is that's the only model where this is marginally acceptable. Family taking advantage of family, like a family farm. Working more hours to get paid less certainly doesn't work as a business model for the employees. They'd be better off with a second salaried job -- and there were apocryphal stories about employees doing actually that, hanging up a coat on the door hook, throwing a newspaper on their desk, then leaving to go to their other job.

This is all observational and anecdotal however, but over a three decade career with a dozen plus companies, some of them Fortune N (where 20 <= N <= 500) in both contractor, IC, senior leadership and C-level roles.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#105

Post by aarmenaa »

hypeatei wrote: post #64

Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance. Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of al…

Yeah, I am always going to interpret that sort of thing as performative. There seems to be whole corporate mythology that is absolutely sure there are a bunch of cheap, low-effort things managers can do to raise morale and get more productivity out of employees, like office birthday parties. I propose a name for adherents to this philosophy: the Pizza Party Cult.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#106

Post by ghaff »

kps wrote: post #65
WillAdams wrote: post #17

The big concept which needs to be included in this discussion is "payslope" --- for an excellent article on this, and an example of a company which handles this well, see: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h... I have never regretted a purchase from Lee Valley, and highly recommend all of their products.

Lee died about a decade ago; I don't know whether they still have this policy. (One immediate change was that their stores started being open on Sunday.) In ‘our’ field, HP, under founders Hewlett and Packard, ran into some trouble in 1970 and instituted a “9 day fortnight”: rather than lay anyone off, everyone took a 10% cut in pay and hours.

I worked for a small company through the dot-com crash (when I was lucky to get a new position as a previous employer cratered). 20% pay cut. Things eventually recovered with a much later employer.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#107

Post by t-3 »

nsgi wrote: post #25

As a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal

As an American, I would be totally creeped out if a manager even knew my birthday, let alone gave me a card.

When I've seen people feel slighted in the workplace, it's usually due to uneven praise or criticism, or discriminatory stuff like passing over all the black workers with years of experience to promote the one white guy who's been there for 6 months.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#108

Post by gorgabal »

grayhatter wrote: post #84
tarkin2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.

> Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? American culture is unfortunately permeated with examples, and habits, and expectations around punishing the behaviors you'd want to see. I see subtle things like that all the time. So while I doubt anyone who stopped to actually think about the concrete implications of their behavior, more specifically…

> You can train a human using the exact same skills you use to train a dog.

Depending on the context, this can traumatize a human though. This idea has been the basis for both gay conversion therapy and applied behavior analysis. The latter I have had the misfortune to directly experience myself.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#109

Post by yunwal »

tarkin2 wrote: post #35
mejutoco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker a…

Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.

The top-level comment was being ironic. To explain the joke, the employees are withholding the reward of hard work from the employer because the employer behaved badly (by slighting them in some way).
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