Time to Review Workplace Reviews?

By
TARA PARKER-POPE

After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies — they have identified some surprising ones.

The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.

A number of studies have documented the health toll of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours.

Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!”

Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me.

Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”

Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job.

“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.”

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker.

“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”

Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ”

Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss.

“If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.”

And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.

Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor.

The association notes that one of the hazards of such a relationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions.

But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress.

“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com

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The importance of leading responsibly

Jack Denfeld Wood
is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD (www.imd.ch)
and the director of its Building on Talent program.

Ask people to name great leaders and chances are that they will choose a person who “fought to improve the state of the world” in one way or another; Gandhi, perhaps, or Winston Churchill. They will also name – more provocatively but just as accurately – someone such as Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden.

This means that any serious examination of what it means to be a leader must include the recognition that one can be responsible for causing great harm as well as great good.

The responsible exercise of leadership is not the result of putting someone in a particular job, investing him or her with formal authority, and giving them a book of ethical rules to follow. It doesn’t work that way—witness the origins of the current world financial disarray.

Neither is selecting those for leadership positions the result of an assessment of a range of specific traits, competences, or presumed abilities, no matter how much some recruiters would like to believe this. Nor do those installed in leadership positions rationally assess the situation that they are facing and then choose a particular leadership style and course of action, as many theorists suggest.

The heart of leadership is not rational — it is deeply psychological and emotional. In fact, I do not believe that it is possible to “teach” leadership in the way that other subjects are taught—through lecture, videos, and written examinations.

You are just as likely to improve your capacity to exercise leadership from reading books and watching podcasts by management gurus as you are to likely to improve your physical condition by watching fitness videos and Olympic competitions.

But if leadership can not be taught, it can be learnt. Given the right conditions, virtually anyone can develop their capacity to lead more effectively. But leadership takes work. Anyone who wants to run a marathon in under three hours has to spend months practicing. Just so — executives who wants to develop their capacity to lead must get their hands dirty and actually “do” leadership.

Leadership has never been about simply following orders, however, and whether those who are developing their capacity to exercise leadership do so in a responsible way depends on how they understand and integrate their responsibilities as a leader.

Leadership is neither inherently good nor evil, but is a process that can be used in the pursuit of either. Indeed, the positive traits that make great leaders also contain elements with a far darker, shadow side.

The implications are clear: Leadership must be exercised responsibly if it is to be beneficial; and leadership development must include the development of a finer moral and ethical compass and increased self-awareness.

This is a central reason why IMD revamped its flagship high potential Building on Talent program (BOT) — to give young up-and-coming managers practice in three fundamental elements of effective management — hands-on leadership development through a deeper grasp of business fundamentals, an integrative personal project, and the opportunity to understand the broader moral context in which they live and work.

The Responsible Leadership Elective (RLE) of the BOT program requires young executives — IMD BOT Fellows — to collaborate with a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the developing world and to use their technical strategic and business knowledge and skills to “make a difference”. The Elective gets them out of the business class lounge, away from the boardroom at corporate HQ, and into situations where issues other than quarterly returns and shareholder value have to be dealt with — often life and death issues. BOT participants can choose, for example, to help Cambodian parents learn business and technical skills that will allow them to earn enough money to send their children to school, work with Vietnamese children to develop their “hospitality” skills to land jobs with hotels and restaurants, to develop a reward system that will help a Tanzanian rehabilitation facility retain its medical personnel, or to work with the legal systems in the Middle East to ensure fair treatment of prisoners.

It is important that individuals exercising leadership in the future see and work with organizations with this broader sort of aim because otherwise they risk being captured by the short-term goals that dominate many profit-driven businesses. Such lack of awareness inevitably affects thousands, or even millions, of people.

Without this external awareness managers can, in effect, become hostage to the limited organizational vision. With the RLE, new factors are brought into the decision-making calculus leading to better, longer-term, more responsible and sustainable choices.

Profit at any price is not good enough. Companies that profit responsibly will last — and so will the societies on which that profit rests. Organizations — private or public sector — that do not behave responsibly will fail in due course. Every group or organization needs the exercise of leadership; but only those with a long-term vision of responsible leadership will exercise it wisely. Ultimately, executives must strive to do both.

Leadership is neither inherently good nor evil, but is a process that can be used in the pursuit of either.

Source: The Jakarta Post

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What if a Recovery Is All in Your Head?

By ROBERT J. SHILLER
is professor of economics and finance at Yale and co-founder and chief economist of MacroMarkets LLC.

Published: November 21, 2009
www.nytimes.com

Beyond fiscal stimulus and government bailouts, the economic recovery that appears under way may be based on little more than self-fulfilling prophecy.

Consider this possibility: after all these months, people start to think it’s time for the recession to end. The very thought begins to renew confidence, and some people start spending again — in turn, generating visible signs of recovery. This may seem absurd, and is rarely mentioned as an explanation for mass behavior late in a recession, but economic theorists have long been fascinated by such a possibility.

The notion isn’t as farfetched as it may appear. As we all know, recessions generally last no more than a couple of years. The current recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, so it is almost two years old. According to the standard schedule, we’re due for recovery. Given this knowledge, the mere passage of time may spur our confidence, though no formal statistical analysis can prove it.

Certainly, people did not always believe that there is a regular “business cycle” that starts and stops in a definite pattern. The idea began to spread in the popular consciousness in the 1920s and reached full bloom in the ’30s — with one major complication, the Great Depression, which received its name in midcourse, from a 1934 book with that title by Lionel Robbins.

“There have been many depressions in modern economic history, but it is safe to say that there has never been anything to compare with this,” Mr. Robbins wrote. In his narrative, the Great Depression was an extreme event, compared with ordinary “depressions.”

“Recession,” a kinder, gentler term, began to be used around the time of the 1937-38 contraction to refer to a normal downturn in the business cycle. In January 1938, The Chicago Daily Tribune offered a wry definition of a recession, calling it “a new word for depression, coined by those who don’t like to admit that we’re still in one.”

People joked so much about the euphemism that in 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “It makes no difference to me whether you call it a recession or a depression.”

The proliferation of the idea of a more-or-less predictable business cycle intersected with a rapidly growing public interest in psychology. Choice of words can matter greatly for the psychologically aware, and the new word “recession” had a much softer sound than its predecessor. Recessions, as the term came to be used, implied timetables that mark their expected end. Uttering the word does not risk damaging confidence, at least not fundamentally. A diagnosis of a recession can be shrugged off as something from which you will recover, as though your doctor had just diagnosed an illness as a common cold. A depression came to be another matter entirely.

Back in 1931, for example, The New York Times attributed the emerging economic cataclysm to a “mood of pessimism which had been carried to grotesque extremes.” In 1932, it compared reckless talk about “depression” to shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

President Roosevelt is widely remembered for saying, in 1933, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But he was only repeating an oft-told message.

It wasn’t until 1948 that the Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote an article in The Antioch Review titled “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” using the Great Depression as his first example. He is often credited with having invented the “self-fulfilling prophesy” phrase, but by the 1930s the idea was already as commonplace as the breakfast toast made with modern electric toasters. (Interestingly, the same Robert Merton documented the tendency for important ideas to be falsely attributed to celebrities.)

In fact, in 1937, “Think and Grow Rich,” a book by Napoleon Hill, urged readers to adopt a positive mental attitude and to channel the power of the subconscious mind so that real wealth would follow. It became a runaway best seller. Faddish interest had already emerged not only in Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind, but also in the theories of the psychologist Émile Coué, who urged people to recite that “every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” He said this “autosuggestion” would bolster the unconscious self.

In important ways, we are still using that 1930s pattern of thinking. We are instinctively fearful of reckless talk about depressions, and we try to support one another’s confidence. We like the idea that modern scientific economics seems to show that all recessions end in due course.

For now, our common efforts at building confidence appear to be working somewhat. But the economy has still not recovered, by any means.

COUÉISM has been discredited generally, as has much of the old business-cycle theory, but they live on in our popular notions about recessions. We may hope that our resorting to euphemism and belief in timetables of business-cycle recoveries work better to restore confidence than they did in the ’30s.

The problem might be put this way: There is still a nagging doubt afloat that the current event is really just another example in that long sequence of recessions. In which mental category does the current contraction belong: recession or depression? We may still be at a tipping point. To the extent that the theory of the self-fulfilling prophecy is correct, there is a case for continued vigilance, to ensure that adverse events don’t encourage widespread talk of the second category.

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