Middle management stress: What can we learn from animals?

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Middle management stress among monkeys (Image by RedCoat)

Gibraltar Barbary Macaque (Source: WikiMedia. Photo by RedCoat).

The great Aristotle wrote 2½ millennia ago that man is a social animal. It was about 150 years ago that Charles Darwin made us realise that we have a lot in common with monkeysthat we wish to admit.

Recent research has strengthened this idea by showing that middle management stress is a natural occurrence as it also occurs among Barbary macaques.1.

Although there are many advantages to working in organisations, social conflict is often a source of stress. Subordinate members of the team receive more aggression from higher ranked individuals and experience higher stress levels as a consequence. Katie Edwards showed that monkeys at the Trentham Monkey Forest in the middle of the hierarchy were involved with conflict from both individuals below them as well as above them, whereas those in the bottom of the hierarchy distance themselves from conflict. The middle ranking macaques were more likely to challenge, and be challenged by, those higher on the social ladder, causing them stress in the process.

middle management stress can be avoided

But knowing that middle management stress is a natural phenomena and observed in primate behaviour does not mean that we should simply accept it as a fact of life. The paper also describes how different animal species developed coping mechanisms to deal with their stressful lives. In olive baboons, subordinate males that redirect aggression towards another baboon following a conflict, had lower stress levels compared to those that did not do so. Another coping mechanism is social buffering; the social support from other members of the group, which has been demonstrated in greylag geese. Direct social support reduces the impact of stress, including close grooming relationships during times of social instability, and post-conflict consolation. Although I don’t advocate physically grooming your colleges experiencing stress, make sure you look after the middle managers in your organisation and avoid high levels of stress.

Notes
  1. Edwards, K. L., Walker, S. L., Bodenham, R. F., Ritchie, H., & Shultz, S. (2013). Associations between social behaviour and adrenal activity in female Barbary macaques: Consequences of study design. General and Comparative Endocrinology, 186(1), 72–79. doi:10.1016/j.ygcen.2013.02.023. [↩]

Organisational culture and the risks of normality

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Organisational culture change“We need to change our organisational culture!” one of the board members said. Everybody around the table nodded and the secretary noted yet another action in the board minutes. The CEO would now be charged with changing the culture of the organisation.

Nobody really knew what they wanted, all they knew was that something had to change and because nobody knew what to change, blaming the culture of the organisation for whatever was going wrong seemed like a great idea. Not that anyone had any idea what culture actually is, but judging by some of the inspiring articles in Harvard Business Review it seemed the best way to go.

Soon enough a consultant was hired and the work to transform the organisation began. Meetings were held and a range of new values, based on a neat list of abstract nouns, was defined. Following the famous words by George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, you are either with us and subscribe to these values or you are an enemy of the organisation—those employees critical of the new approach become the axis of evil. The consultant even drew a Bell Curve on a whiteboard, indicating that deviance from normality was from now on scorned upon. Thus began the new world order.

forcing normality destroys excellence and innovation

What the consultant did not realise was that forcing people to normality within strict standard deviations is a repression of spontaneity and destroys sources of excellence and innovation. When organisations force their employees in the same value pattern and no longer accept any deviance, an important source of improvement and innovation is killed.

Positive organisational deviance is a necessary condition for innovation and improvement to thrive—only by nurturing those that think differently are organisations able to become remarkable.

Dance monkey, dance: On the limitations of job interviews

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Dancing monkey and job interviewsJob interviews are stressful and time consuming for both the applicant and the recruiter. The most often used mechanism for selecting new staff is often a highly ritualised affair, with little room for meaningful human interaction. The job interview is an artificial environment that has no comparison in the social world, except maybe police cross-examination.

Formal job interviews are a limited tool to get to know the person seeking a new job. The main problem with this approach is that the balance of power is presumed to be on the recruiter’s side. This forces the applicant to be like a dancing monkey, performing the tricks that he or she believes will please the recruiters. The applicant is often left to second-guessing the ‘right’ answer to the questions. And although we are often told that there are no right or wrong answers, this is of course not correct. There are answers that get you the job and the ones that don’t. The recruitment process is a case of double deception, both the recruiter and the applicant are not willing to have a genuine conversation because they are limited by the script of the traditional job interview.

Genuine Conversations

Formal job interviews are popular because they provide an illusion of rationality as it is assumed that thorough questioning will lead to the truth.

The purpose of the recruitment process is to try to predict the future behaviour of the applicant. A formalised job interview is a counter-productive human interaction with limited predictive quality when it comes to getting to know a person. The artificial nature of the job interview does, however, prevent this process from being rational.

Effective job interviews should be based on the presumption of equality between the recruiter and the applicant in order to espouse genuine conversations between the parties. It is the task of the recruiter to make the applicant feel comfortable and treat them as an equal conversation partner. Only this way will you be able to get to know the person you are interacting with.

The Importance of Cynicism: The Organisation’s Guard Dog

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Cynycism is bein the guard dog of management.Cynicism has a bad name in management, some even call it a “cancer in your organization”. In my view most people are a bit too cynical about cynicism. Cynics are often valuable assets in organisations.1.

The word Cynic is derived from the ancient Greek word for dog. The cynic might be a dog, but is certainly not a lapdog. The cynic can be the guard dog for organisations. Philosophical cynicism rejects conventional social values, such as business hierarchy. The cynic is thus able to reflect on business practices from an external perspective and positively contribute by pointing out things that might not be obvious to their superiors. Cynicism is not necessarily a focus on negativity; it allows a view of the organisation outside of office politics.

Every manager should prefer a cynic over the pseudo-expert that uses many buzzwords without substance or the critic who is quickly to find fault at anything, without themselves performing. but tend to deliver the goods. Cynics often exasperate upper management by constantly questioning everything.  More often than not, however, they do know what is going on.2. Cynicism can help people ensure that others don’t take advantage of them, and potentially help organisations benefit from resistance to potentially bad decisions3.. In one experiment, participants cynical toward the employing organization were less likely to comply with unethical requests than those who were less cynical4..

Not all cynicism is, however, of equal value. Researchers have defined three types of cynicism: affective, cognitive and behavioural. In other words, you can be cynical as an emotional reaction, such as irritation, tension and anxiety. When you are cognitively cynical you think that your organisation is run by self-interest and when you are behaviourally cynical you display that attitude in how you perform at work.5.  The most productive type of cynicism is the cognitive type—the cynic as the devil’s advocate.

My advice is to listen to cynics in your organisation. Find out what is bothering them and learn from these experiences.

Notes
  1. Dean Jr, J.W., Brandes, P. & Dharwadkar, R. (1998). Organizational cynicism. Academy of Management Review (23) 341–52. [↩]
  2. Carlini, J. (1996). A trustworthy cynic. Network World, 13(42), 70–70. [↩]
  3. Naus, F., van Iterson, A. & Roe, R. Value incongruence, job autonomy, and organization based self-esteem: A self-based perspective on organizational cynicism. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2007b, 16, 195–219. [↩]
  4. Andersson, L.M. & Bateman, T.S. (1997). Cynicism in the workplace: Some causes and effects. Journal of Organizational Behavior 18, 449–469. [↩]
  5. Kim, Tae-Yeol, Bateman, Thomas S., Gilbreath Brad and Andserson, Lynne M. (2009). Top management credibility and employee cynicism: A comprehensive model. Human Relations 62(10), 1435–1458. DOI: 10.1177/0018726709340822. [↩]

The Value of Value Based Management

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Value based management as a means to control behaviourThe past years many organisations espouse to implement value based management. There are several definitions of what value based management is, but most are not very illuminating. The consensus is that value based management is a tool to reach organisational consistency, a tool to control behaviour.

The word value itself can be considered as what philosophers refer to as an ‘essentially contested concept’, which means that there is no agreement on the definition of value, which has espoused a complex branch of philosophy called axiology.

In practice, value based management leads to a list of abstract nouns that the organisation espouses to live up to. But, which of the many hundreds of positively interpreted abstract nouns in the English language do you choose? Which value is more important to your organisation? Do you prefer creativity over punctuality? Or should we have pride in our work or is it dedication we are after? Basically, any word that has positive connotations and ends in -tion, -ism, -ity, -ment, -acy and so on will do. Defining a list of value, which usually is no longer than four, is restrictive and leads to the implicit exclusion of other positive values.

Value based management is essentially a crude implementation of virtue based ethics. This approach leads to tensions is because most organisations don’t work according to virtues but follow a consequentialist approach; valuing those behaviours that lead to positive outcomes.1.

value based management is of little value

In value based management it is assumed that following a arbitrary list of abstract nouns will lead to good business outcomes. The lists provide a cheat-sheet for employees of how to behave and a way for management or colleagues to assess the behaviour of others. The values to be chosen from the multitude of available abstract nouns are usually decided democratically, without systematic examination of al available options.2.

Most businesses are not honest in their chosen values, Enron being a great case in point. The never list greed any any of the other deadly sins as their real core values. And those so called deadly sins are not always bad. Peter Nowak argued convincingly that the seven deadly sins have propelled humanity more for the good than bad.

Value based management is of little value as it ignores the practical outcomes of behaviours. It is also flawed because it arbitrarily highlights some values of others. Surely to be ethical we should behave in accordance with all possible values and not just those printed on our coffee mugs.

Notes
  1. Consequentialism can be problematic because not all behaviour that leads to good results can be considered ethical. I have argued in an earlier paper that deontic constraints are required to maintain the goal oriented nature of business in an ethical environment. [↩]
  2. I prefer to stick to the list defined by Aristotle, more than 2000 years ago: wisdom; prudence; justice; fortitude; courage; liberality; magnificence; magnanimity; temperance. [↩]