I/O in the Works

What an octopus can teach you about management

modernpolymath — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:39:37 -0400

All of Earth’s successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one,”writes Rafe Sagarin in HBR, free of “planning exercises,” “predictive frameworks,” or other buzzy human constructions. “Instead,” he says, “they’ve adapted.”

Decentralize like a mollusk

Consider the octopus: Fleet of tentacle and prismatic of color, the cephalopod is a paragon of flat, startup-style organizational structure:

An octopus … doesn’t order each arm to change a certain color when it needs to hide quickly. Rather, individual skin cells across its body sense and respond to change and give the octopus a collective camouflage.

If we take managers to be the brains of the octopus—a frightening proposition—employees, especially those with a customer touch point, are the spectacular, tentacular, color-shifting cells—a credo of the connected company. When you move with your feelers (or suckers, as is the case with eight-arms over there), you can move much quicker than your centralized competitors: Wikipedia over Brittanica, Google Flu Trends over the CDC.

Get more management tips from nature here.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3006732/executive-coach-vs-octopus-embracing-business-lessons-biology

Working Girl Revelation #11: Promotions that come as a result of a coworker leaving don’t...

modernpolymath — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:40:00 -0500

Working Girl Revelation #11: Promotions that come as a result of a coworker leaving don’t motivate, satisfy or enhance organizational commitment.

Authority Figures Don't Listen to Subordinates

modernpolymath — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 09:05:00 -0400

Authority Figures Don't Listen to Subordinates:

In a surprisingly relevant study from Stern (NYU’s Business School, aka the NYU I/O rivals), we find out that our bosses really don’t listen to us:

Kelly See, an assistant professor of management and organization at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, was curious about these sorts of scenarios, so she put together an in-depth study of the extent to which people in power take advice from knowledgeable colleagues. Together with NYU Stern’s Elizabeth Morrison, Naomi B. Rothman of Lehigh University and Jack B. Soll of Duke, See ran a research project over two-and-half-years that examined advice-taking in some 1,500 study participants. The conclusion: The more power managers have, the less likely they are to take advice. “Once you’re in a position of power, it tends to make you more confident in your decisions,” explains See.

[…]

To test her hypothesis about the detrimental effects of power on advice-taking, See and her colleagues conducted four different pieces of research. In one study, they did online surveys of 208 incoming business graduate students who had been working as junior to mid-level managers at a range of companies, including health care, finance, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. They asked these managers about their level of responsibility over resources and staff. Then they asked each of them to name 2-5 colleagues who worked closely with them and could rate their behaviors. Next they gave those co-workers an online survey about the extent to which the managers took advice. The results supported See’s hypotheses about power and advice-taking: The more power the managers perceived they had, the more confidence they had in their own decision-making prowess, and the less likely they were to take colleagues’ advice.

I’m going to read through the whole journal article before I pass judgement, but it looks like Stern might have actually done something, well, experimentally real, for once.

http://web-docs.stern.nyu.edu/pa/ksee_power_advice_taking.pdf

Your Rude Coworker is Ruining Your Life

modernpolymath — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:09:00 -0400

Your Rude Coworker is Ruining Your Life:

Research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that people who are regularly stressed out by the office jerk are more likely to take that stress home with them — and pass it on to whoever is unfortunate enough to be cohabiting with them.

“Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress, negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences, which then affects more than their family life – it also creates problems for the partner’s life at work,” Dr. Merideth J. Ferguson, the study’s author, said in a press release.

The study surveyed 190 full-time employees, as well as their working partners, and basically found that stress, much a like an out of control virus, spreads around endlessly infecting people.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/08/18/study-your-rude-coworker-is-ruining-your-life-not-to-mention-everyone-elses/

Nice Women Finish Last At Work

modernpolymath — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:12:00 -0400

Nice Women Finish Last At Work:

Results indicated that disagreeable people — men in particular — earn substantially more in the workforce than their agreeable colleagues.

But the study affirmed another long-held belief as well: in case you were in doubt, gender double standards still exist in the workplace.

While data collected in the 2008 Census showed that American women earned approximately 77 cents to a man’s dollar — with a gap that was larger for Latina and African American women — the agreeability study compared how personality was linked to gendered wage inequality.

[…]

Although disagreeable men earned 18.31 percent ($9,772) more than agreeable men, disagreeable women only earned 5.47 percent (or $1,828) more than agreeable women. Furthermore, regardless of whether they were agreeable or disagreeable, women still earned less than even the disadvantaged “nice guys.” The gap between women, generally, and agreeable men was almost as large as the agreeable-disagreeable gap among the men.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/16/nice-women-finish-last-work_n_928207.html

Four Stories You Need To Lead Deep Organizational Change

modernpolymath — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:09:00 -0400

Four Stories You Need To Lead Deep Organizational Change:

How do we unlearn the things that we still believe in our heart of hearts are true?

Facts and statistics don’t get the job done. Charts left listeners bemused. Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow.

By contrast, leadership stories can get inside people’s minds and affect how they think, worry, wonder, agonize and dream about themselves and in the process create – and recreate – their organization. Storytelling enables the individuals in an organization to see themselves and the organization in a different light, and accordingly take decisions and change their behavior in accordance with these new perceptions, insights and identities.

Four leadership stories are key

The story of the future

Springboard stories of the future

The story of the past

The story that explains why the story of the past is no longer viable

Communicating is the most important part of initiating organizational change, and OD will tell you that. There are various ways to get the message out, but if your org is one that is receptive to storytelling this is a great way to do it.

http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/07/25/the-four-stories-you-need-to-lead-deep-organizational-change/

How to Train Leaders to Make Money

modernpolymath — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:40:00 -0400

How to Train Leaders to Make Money:

When senior managers are looking for leadership training programs for their staff, they should insist that “soft skills” and the like make up no more than 25% of the overall content. The rest should focus on more concrete themes that will help managers gain a better understanding of how to create and capture value, i.e. how to lead with the intent of boosting the firm’s performance. Specialists who conduct such training sessions should come not just from the fields of organizational behavior and psychology but also of strategy and financial management.

When looking to train leaders, senior managers must insist the following are included:

Managing Resources

Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Strategic Thinking

Financial Management

Leadership training programs that don’t take a balanced approach to what it means to lead aren’t training leaders successfully. In today’s business environment, leaders without the sets of skills mentioned above are simply outdated and cannot be trusted to drive bottom line results. Leaders without a honed ability to drive organizational excellence are like parents without the ability to discipline or guide their children – both can lead to disastrous consequences.

Interesting take, and debate, on whether leaders can be trained or not. Depends on which side of the innate-developed perspective you stand on, but I completely agree that the above skills need to be include in any leadership development program.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/07/27/chief-mentor-how-to-train-leaders-to-make-money/

5 Low-Cost Ways to Make Employees Happy

modernpolymath — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:30:00 -0400

5 Low-Cost Ways to Make Employees Happy:

Offer something special

Share control

Share the load

Offer no-interest loans

Show your appreciation

Basically, increase autonomy, give meaningful tasks and recognize good work to intrinsically motivate. Companies should be doing these things anyway.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/smb/5-low-cost-ways-to-make-employees-happy/5037

Working Girl Revelation #10: Days off are never really days with out work. They are merely days you...

modernpolymath — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:58:57 -0400

Working Girl Revelation #10: Days off are never really days with out work. They are merely days you do work from bed, the grocery store, or the movie theater.

Necessary

modernpolymath — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:15:20 -0400

There is a fine line between indispensable and in the room.

VIDEO: An Employee's Heart and Mind

modernpolymath — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:55:00 -0400

VIDEO: An Employee's Heart and Mind :

Mike: It’s not a want to, it’s a have to. So there’s natural resistance even if they see that there’s a benefit to it. If someone sees something being done to them or they’re being forced to do something, it’s just human nature to push back.

Dennis: Right.

Mike: And if you’re married you know how that goes. But what’s truly unique about our work is that it allows individuals to connect to what we’re trying to do within an organization both through the head and the heart.

Dennis: Yes.

Mike: By connecting to the heart unleashing human potential, the human spirit, innovation and we do that in a variety of ways as you know. One is by gaining clarity around the big opportunity naturally and making sure that it’s communicated in a manner so that individuals at every level of the organization can see how what they do on a daily basis helps us get to that big opportunity.

And when people can be connected to their work and see that it’s having impact they bring more of themselves to the workplace and they’ll contribute more.

Dennis: I think this idea of the heart in the workplace is a difficult concept many times for—especially people that are in engineering firms and think that we’ve got to have all the metrics and they’ve got to be measurable, but my experience is that we’re still working with people and they do have a heart. And when you can touch that—and by the way we can touch it in a negative way, if we only do processing I don’t think you care about me or I don’t care about you or it, then I’m just going and doing something in which I don’t involve my heart, we don’t get a change in the behavior towards what we want to have happen and we don’t get ownership and we don’t get that “go” as I like to say. We get more of the stop and have to and when the pushing stops I’m going to stop.

And once you involve the heart, even John wrote a book on it, The Heart of Change. When you go in and read that you realize it’s both, it’s me understanding what the behavior change needs and then how do I emotionally move into it so I can see the success of it.Would you agree to that?

Mike: Well you bring up a good point there as well that if we’re not connecting to the heart, if we have to constantly enforce compliance around policies and procedures and tell people what to do, when you’re not there doing that people revert back to their driving beliefs. And if their belief is I don’t want to do this when you’re not there telling them to do it, they won’t do it.

This may be a bit existential for this blog, but Kotter’s the man so here it is.

http://blogs.forbes.com/johnkotter/2011/06/21/excite-employees-by-tapping-their-minds-and-hearts/

Accurate, if not the whole story.

modernpolymath — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:53:37 -0400

Accurate, if not the whole story.

A Quiz: Morality and Employee Enagagement

modernpolymath — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:51:16 -0400

A Quiz: Morality and Employee Enagagement:

One of the areas of Psychology that has long been concerned with the prediction of immoral behaviors is Industrial/Organizational Psychology (or Work Psychology). Indeed, this has been a very fashionable research area in this branch of Psychology particularly for the past 10-15 years. The main variable these studies have attempted to predict is “counter-productive work behaviors” (CWB), defined loosely as employee behaviors that are detrimental to the organization (including colleagues, managers, and organizational profits). The simplest example is damaging or stealing the company’s property (e.g., wasting paper, electricity, stealing staplers or stationary, or even retail products), but at the other extreme we have severe cases of harrassment, bullying, etc. The interesting issue here appears to be that an employee’s capacity for displaying productive work behaviors is largely independent of his or her capacity for CWB (or destructive work behaviors). Think Bernard Maddoff or Dominic Strauss-Kahn here: people who are no doubt talented at their jobs, but they cannot control their dark side.

The conclusion of these studies is that individual differences in integrity (a personality disposition that captures Freud’s notions of a super-ego, that is, your inner moral compass) predict CWB - that is, moral conscience is seen as a personality characteristic or a major dimension of character.

In our latest study, we take a look at the relationship between a new measure of morality and employee engagement. Our question is really quite simple: are CWB more dependent on a person’s personality profile or the degree to which they enjoy or dislike their job? Imagine two people with the same personality profile but one is badly treated by colleagues and bosses, and given really boring tedious or difficult task - surely that person will be more likely to “behave badly” than someone with the same profile who is really loving the job?

To find out how your score on our test, just take out 10-min survey and get instant feedback!

I scored low on all five variables: 1) Abuse against others; 2) productive deviance; 3) sabotage; 4) theft; and 5) withdrawal. I’m apparently hired.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201106/morality-work-can-personality-explain-immoral-office-behaviors

Comparing Behavior: Career Poison?

modernpolymath — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:11:22 -0400

Comparing Behavior: Career Poison?:

I assured him that many students were his intellectual equal, but he persisted in asking me to rank his strategic sense against one student or his analytical acumen against another. Not once did this budding business leader talk about his interests and aspirations and how his abilities might serve those interests; it was all about his strengths relative to others.

…

What is going on here? Social relativism is the sociologist’s answer; comparing behavior is the psychologist’s response. To a certain extent, ambitious professionals have always engaged in what I refer to as reverse Schadenfreude — being pained by other people’s success.

This is less about explaining the behavior however, and discerning a person’s self-motivating style. Some people are high in need for achievement, meaning that above being affluent and having influence on others, they want to be the best they can.

The individuals described in this piece are also mostly likely performance-oriented: they compare their success to others as a way of establishing where they are themselves in reaching their goals. Goal-setting theory, in action.

More so than ever before, though, business executives, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, doctors and other professionals are obsessed with comparing their own achievements against those of others. Over the last five years, I have interviewed hundreds of HNAPs (high-need-for-achievement-professionals) about this phenomenon and discovered that comparing has reached almost epidemic proportions. This is bad for individuals and bad for companies — when you define success based on external rather than internal criteria, you diminish your satisfaction and commitment.

I want proof of this, first of all. But evidence aside, and how I find it hard to believe that you can measure this in a objectively, you’re blatantly contradicting the entire concept of capitalism. If you compare only internally, you don’t know how well you’re doing in the world, and your company will fail due to groupthink and a disregard for how successful the consumers see you.

Assessing one’s own success as compared to others is realistic and beneficial. Without it you get the awkward home-schooled child who thinks he’s awesome, and then goes to high school only to realize he’s a social outcast and not as smart as he though.

I could tear the rest of this article apart, but I have to go compare my assumptions with that of my colleagues to see if I’m crazy or successfully justified.

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/20/why-chronic-comparing-spells-career-poison/

Women Still Aren't Climbing

modernpolymath — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 09:50:44 -0400

Women Still Aren't Climbing:

The lack of women leaders in corporate America is a problem that has only become worse during the economic downturn. Attempts to make things better have done little to poke even a small hole in the glass ceiling. If a company is OK with its lack of gender diversity there are no laws to force the issue.

Of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 100 index, which tracks some of the nation’s largest and most established publicly traded companies, women make up about 18 percent of the director positions and only 8.4 percent of the highest-paid positions, according to Calvert. And women executives were three times more likely to lose their jobs than their male counterparts during the Great Recession, a survey by research firm Catalyst found.

…

There are a few U.S. companies that actually get it.

There are only 45 companies in the Fortune 500 — a list that ranks the top 500 U.S. companies by gross revenue — whose boards are more than 40 percent women, according to a list Catalyst has compiled. And only 18 corporations had 40 percent or more female executive officers.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/43426525/ns/business-personal_finance/

Biz Schools Wising Up?

modernpolymath — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 09:46:00 -0400

Biz Schools Wising Up?:

A fresh roundup of interesting and practical research from top business schools has one thing in common: It is all about getting companies to run more smoothly. From determining how pay is doled out to chief executive officers in different geographical areas to recognizing the natural checks and balances of an office, the research is meant to help managers better understand how to operate in times of financial strain, as well as in more promising periods.

Doth my eyes deceiveth me? Or have business schools finally started to consider that it’s not all about the money? People matter, too.

She hopes managers take away from this research how much influence people have on one another.

“The presence of others can affect a person’s performance on tasks, even individual tasks,” says Amanatullah, whose research was published online in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Processes last summer. “The layout of the office—who is sitting next to whom—can make a difference.”

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2011/bs20110616_441431.htm

Is Flat the Future?

modernpolymath — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:00:10 -0400

Is Flat the Future?:

Tearing down our vertical structure was easy. Building a new self-governing mindset is where the real work begins. The right balance needs to be struck between governance, leadership and culture, one that provides enough of each to guide crucial decisions such as who gets to spend money (how much) and who gets rewarded (how).

As we studied other flat journeys, we saw a need to strike a “Freedom From/Freedom To” balance. Eliminating old structures gives organizations freedom from micromanaging, lengthy approval processes and other obstacles — it creates space. But maximizing the value of this space means giving people the freedom to collaborate, to make quick decisions, to innovate and much more.

This freedom to self-govern requires behaviors, derived from shared values, that align to achieve a shared mission.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dov-seidman/going-flat-creating-the-f_b_869852.html

Vicarious Goal Situations

modernpolymath — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:34:00 -0400

Vicarious Goal Situations:

Schadenfreude in the workplace? I think so.

In a psychological phenomenon they are calling “vicarious goal satiation,” the researchers found that individuals feel a sense of accomplishment from watching others achieve their goals, and this in turn actually makes them less motivated to achieve the same goal themselves.

In the experiment, one group of people saw puzzles being completed on a video screen. The other groups either did not see the puzzle being solved or they saw no puzzles at all. Then these groups of people were asked to do the puzzles themselves. Those who watched the puzzles being completed ended up being the least successful with their own puzzles.

http://www.isu.edu/psych/Articles/McCulloch/Vicarious%20Goal%20Satiation.pdf

via: http://exceptionmag.com/vocations/making-it-america/0002137/watching-others-succeed-can-lower-motivation

Power Begets Powerful Mistakes

modernpolymath — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:31:06 -0400

Power Begets Powerful Mistakes:

I’m not sure I agree with the first sentence, or really any of this article, but it’s an interesting read to see the view from the other side. (And by that I mean, you know, those MBA people. Shudder.)

The specific psychological mechanisms that produce the effect aren’t that important. What is important is that power becomes self-perpetuating. Not only do those in power have the capacity to use their resources to purchase better help in their struggles, those in power get treated differently by most all of those with whom they come in contact. So the former head of Bear, Stearns gets invited to prestigious conferences, and France has a minister of culture who has admitted he paid for sex with boys in Thailand.

The lesson: attaining power matters because once in power that power becomes self-reinforcing and protective. That’s why I have written, “seek power as if your life depends on it.” Our only chance of having the powerful be good is to have more of the good become powerful.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/when_the_powerful_behave_badly.html

Sharing, Sharing is No Fun

modernpolymath — Wed, 18 May 2011 07:01:00 -0400

Sharing, Sharing is No Fun:

Welcome to world of “knowledge hiding,” where workers become evasive, play dumb or call a report confidential - even if it isn’t - whenever they are asked for information from a colleague. The findings will be published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

“Anyone who reads this is not going to think, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of this before.’ This goes on. It’s just that no one has really identified the way in which it occurs and why it’s occurring,” Zweig said.

People hoard information from co-workers for two reasons: either they distrust what their coworker will do with the information; or the company they work for has done a poor job of promoting inter-office sharing.

http://www.timescolonist.com/Knowledge+hiding+increases+report/4795586/story.html