Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

> “Rule breaking appears to signal a team member’s commitment—a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done,” wrote Wakeman, Yang, and Moore, all of whom are hockey fans.

Beyond "taking one for the team", in business, I didn't see the article make some key distinctions:

* What is the origin of the rules? (Originated in the interests of the organization, or came from outside, such as regulatory requirements.)

* How much does the organization care about the rules? (Some rules they just need to make a paper trail show of effort, and worst impact is a transactional cost-of-business fine, or an unflattering news cycle. Other rule violations could dethrone a CEO, or even send them to prison.)

* Would the organization actually love to get away with violating that rule, when the right individual comes along to execute it without getting caught? (Say, some very lucrative financial scheme that's disallowed by regulations.)

* How aligned is the manager with the organization wrt the rules in question? (Say, the company actually really doesn't want people to violate this one rule, but a manager gets bonuses and promotions when their reports have the advantage of breaking the rule.)

Depending on those answers, a manager's claim of "Doing what it takes to get the job done!" can sound very different.

Anecdotally I’ve heard from professional athletes that steroid use is actually liked by coaches because it gives them better control over the locker room. If someone becomes an issue in the locker room, guess who is getting randomly selected for testing without a heads up warning.

You cant break rules yourself. But you sure can "scold" a rule breaker and then claim credit when they never break rules again.

90% of my best bosses just tanked the bad news when things went wrong but otherwise loved it when you do your best to work around the system.

> “We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games. Rule breaking hurts teams, despite the fact that people in positions of power, or coaches, might look at the rule breakers as people who are facilitating a better team,” Wakeman said. “The big caveat is that this is correlational, not causational.”

This is a really surprising piece of commentary considering the finding in the immediately prior paragraph:

> Different situations had different effects on coaches’ assessments of penalized players. Their generally favorable views [were] absent during winning streaks.

So the thought process here is, first we observe that coaches like fouls when the team is losing, and don't like them when the team is winning. And then we say that the coaches must be misguided (unless there's some kind of bias in the sample, but come on, look at the data) because teams committing a lot of fouls are doing worse than teams that aren't.

at a former startup the vp of eng liked to say "there are rules then there's enforcement of the rules"