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Why Employee Empowerment is Important in the Workplace

Posted on 2012/11/26 by Jason Hensel

I’ve always said I’m at my most productive and innovative at work when I’m given autonomy. That feeling of empowerment and trust from management motivates me to help the company succeed because it’s all on my shoulders.

Now there is some research from the University of Illinois that shows autonomy plays a major role in increasing “employee commitment to continuous improvement initiatives.”

“Continuous improvement initiatives are typically bundled with employee empowerment techniques,” said Gopesh Anand, a business professor at Illinois. “We always hear, ‘If you empower employees, they will take care of the improvements.’ But what happens repeatedly is that this employee empowerment is management-driven, and it does not work.”

“It’s a paradox–employee empowerment being forced upon employees by management,” said Dilip Chhajed, a business professor at Illinois and director of the technology management program in the College of Business. “What usually ends up happening is that employees feel they are being forced into doing something that they may not even see as being very useful.”

The research offers three points on how to enhance employee commitment to improvement at work.

The day-to-day work environment needs to be perceived by employees as autonomous.
As continuous improvement involves making changes to the very practices that frontline employees use in their day-to-day work, trust in leadership is critical.
A higher degree of trust in leadership further leads to proactive behaviors by frontline employees, encouraging them to use the autonomy in their day-to-day jobs to seek out and make systematic improvements to work practices.

“Many times, employees end up working on continuous improvement projects simply because the CEO is telling them to participate in the initiative,” Anand said. “But they aren’t really sold on this idea of making an effort to improve their workplace and work practices.”

“Workers need to have a sense of control over their work environment,” said Luis Delfin, a graduate student who co-wrote the research. “They need to be able to decide how and what to do in their day-to-day work. And that’s actually what motivates them to improve. Their buy-in becomes even stronger when leadership provides them the support to do this.”

However, employees shouldn’t think of improvements as extra work.

“Employees can’t think of it as, ‘This is something being brought down upon us by upper management,’ ” Anand said. “If they do, it becomes extra work that they’re not compensated for.”

“The big one for employees is, ‘What’s in it for me?’ ” Chhajed said. “Management is trying to make things more efficient, so what does that mean for my job, my work hours? That’s why employees need to trust that management is looking out for their best interests. If they don’t have that trust, then even autonomy is not going to help as much. Trust is huge, because you don’t want the perception that management is coercing employees to do this.”

Also, management shouldn’t be the main instigator of change.

“There should be some top-down direction in terms of where the initiative should go and what are we in business for,” Anand said. “But there needs to be balance between the top-down goals and the bottom-up improvements.

“It’s like building a bridge from both sides,” Delfin said. “Upper management usually has the vision, but at the same time they’re not the experts on how things get done on the ground. So you need to have frontline employees who have some freedom because you are trying to get all of this to meet in the middle. That means that the leaders in management need to act more like coaches, and less like dictators. You need a cooperative environment where leaders are guiding and coaching, and employees are participating.”

Are you given a lot of autonomy at your job? Or does management dictate your every move and decision?

(Story materials from the University of Illinois. Image via Flickr: Ryan / Creative Commons.)

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Micro-Management is My Kryptonite

Posted on 2012/11/202012/11/19 by Jason Hensel

Inc.com recently ran a story titled “10 Leadership Practices to Stop Today,” by Paul Spiegelman. It’s a great piece, and I agree with all 10 recommendations, especially No. 1: “Out: Micro-management, or the need to control every aspect of your company. In: Empowerment, the ability to give your people some rope–even rope to make mistakes without blame.”

Perhaps it’s because I’m a writer, someone who makes his scratch in the creative arts, but micro-management is the Kryptonite to my creativity and productivity. Whenever I’m being micro-managed, I feel less empowered, less trusted, and more like a slave.

In fact, researchers from Harvard Business School and Rice University did a study last year and found that “workers perform just fine when managers don’t keep close tabs on them, and that workers are more likely to be fearful of experimenting when their managers micromanage; as a result, the employees learn less and performance suffers,” as reported by Kimberly Weisul for CBS News.

The struggle for me is knowing how to handle micro-management. Sure, I play along and let managers know everything I’m doing down to the last detail. But I can only allow myself to do that for so long before I become either depressed or angry. Neither of those are good for my health or career.

What does one do? How have you handled micro-managing in your career? How can a lower-level employee convince leadership that a lack of autonomy is stifling creativity, productivity, and a healthy mental state?

(Image via Flickr: ZaCky / Creative Commons)

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Why Ask Why?

Posted on 2012/11/052012/11/06 by Jason Hensel

I once had a boss that said we should always ask why three times. I never took up the recommendation to her face, but the advice has stuck with me for many years.

When you ask why questions, as opposed to how questions, you open people up to a more abstract way of thinking.

“‘Why’ questions make people think more in terms of the big picture, more in terms of intentions and goals, whereas more concrete ‘how’ questions are focused on something very specific, something right in front of you, basically,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Jesse Preston.

Preston, along with two other researchers, recently conducted a study to test abstract thinking’s influence on political beliefs. They used the Islamic community center and mosque in New York because it’s a strong polarizing issue.

The first study showed that after viewing a plane fly into the World Trade Center, conservatives and liberals held opposing views of the mosque at ground zero.

The second study, however, had participants answer three why questions or three how questions in a row on an unrelated subject before offering their views about the mosque.

Preston says the why questions (not the how questions) brought liberals and conservatives closer together.

“We observed that liberals and conservatives became more moderate in their attitudes,” Preston said. “After this very brief task that just put them in this abstract mindset, they were more willing to consider the point of view of the opposition.

“We tend to think that liberals and conservatives are on opposite sides of the spectrum from each other and there’s no way we can get them to compromise, but this suggests that we can find ways of compromising,” Preston continued. “It doesn’t mean people are going to completely change their attitudes, because these are based on pervasive beliefs and world views. But it does mean that you can get people to come together on issues where it’s really important or perhaps where compromise is necessary.”

Asking why questions isn’t limited to politics. It can be used in the workplace, too, granted that you have a supervisor who is open to other viewpoints. The best ones are open and will have good answers for all three of your why questions.

And if they don’t, continue asking why.

BONUS: Here’s a clip from Lucky Louie showing that by asking why one can really get to the true reason behind something.

(Story quotes from the University of Illinois. Image via Flickr: Brendio / Creative Commons.)

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How Men and Women Evaluate Glass Cliff Positions

Posted on 2012/10/282012/10/30 by Jason Hensel

Yahoo! hired Marissa Mayer as president and CEO this past summer. Before accepting the position, she was an executive at Google, a very successful company. Yahoo!, though, is experiencing some business pains. Did Mayer take the job because it would be challenging, or did Yahoo! seek her out because feminine leadership traits–such as tact and understanding–are preferred when a company is facing a crisis?

Psychological Science published a new study that answers that question and shows that it’s not the crisis positions that attract women leaders, it’s the social resources attached to the job positions.

The Association for Psychological Science has the rest of the story:

Psychological scientists Floor Rink and Janka Stoker (University of Groningen) and Michelle Ryan (University of Groningen and the University of Exeter) investigated how men and women evaluate these “glass-cliff” positions. The researchers speculated that, all else being equal, women wouldn’t be more attracted to a precarious position, but they would be more sensitive to certain aspects of the position.

Rink and her colleagues hypothesized that, following gender norms, women would be more attentive to communal aspects of precarious leadership roles, focusing on social resources, while men would attend to aspects related to authority and hierarchy, focusing on financial resources.

In the first study, Rink and colleagues asked Dutch business students to imagine working for a large company in financial crisis. They were offered a top leadership position at the hypothetical company, where they would be in charge of resolving the crisis. All of the students read a passage containing information about the social and financial resources that came with the position. One group read that they had employee support (social resources) and financial investment from management (financial resources), a second group read that they had financial investment but no employee support, and a third group read that they had employee support but no financial investment.

Comparing across genders, women generally seemed less likely than men to evaluate any of the positions positively. Yet comparing across the three scenarios, women were particularly less likely to accept the position that lacked social resources, while men were less inclined to accept the position that lacked financial resources, confirming the researchers’ hypotheses.

A second study suggests these findings may have been driven by internalized gender stereotypes about leadership. The researchers found that women viewed employee acceptance as a factor that would lead to influence, while men viewed influence as an attribute that would lead to employee acceptance.

“Since the discovery of the glass cliff, researchers and practitioners have questioned whether women are simply more likely than men to accept precarious leadership positions, thereby–albeit unintentionally–putting themselves at a disadvantage in their careers,” the researchers note. “Our findings make it clear that the glass cliff cannot be attributed to women’s failure to recognize the precariousness of glass-cliff positions.”

Taken together, the findings from the two studies suggest that societal expectations about gender and leadership play a key role in driving women’s and men’s evaluations of glass cliff positions.

The researchers argue that these findings may be useful for organizations searching for new leaders to guide them through crises.

“In order to get the right person for the right job, it is probably important for organizations to recognize which aspects of a crisis they want their future leader to solve and to give him or her the appropriate means with which to do so,” says Rink.

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How to Ensure Your Baby is CEO Material

Posted on 2012/10/272012/10/29 by Jason Hensel

If I was to have a baby, I’d want the child to grow up to be a musician or a writer or anything in the arts. Sports would be cool, too. But some of you may want your child to grow up to be a CEO. If so, then make sure the baby is born in the spring.

In a study from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, babies born in the summer are less likely to be CEOs.

“Our findings indicate that summer babies underperform in the ranks of CEOs as a result of the ‘birth-date effect,’ a phenomenon resulting from the way children are grouped by age in school,” said Sauder Finance Professor Maurice Levi, co-author of the study to appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters.

Using hockey as an example, Malcolm Gladwell addressed this same phenomenon in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, summarizing that the reason players are successful is due to the month in which they were born.

For the U.S., school admissions are open between September and January. The study’s researchers discovered that of the 375 CEOs sampled from S&P 500 companies, the ones born between June and July were the youngest in their class. Those born in March and April were the oldest.

“Older children within the same grade tend to do better than the youngest, who are less intellectually developed,” Levi said. “Early success is often rewarded with leadership roles and enriched learning opportunities, leading to future advantages that are magnified throughout life.

“Our study adds to the growing evidence that the way our education system groups students by age impacts their lifelong success,” Levi continued. “We could be excluding some of the business world’s best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early.”

(Story quotes from the University of British Columbia. Image via Flickr: opensourceway / Creative Commons)

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The Positive Impact of a Handshake

Posted on 2012/10/23 by Jason Hensel

Personally, I’m a hugger. However, most of those hugs precede handshakes. One can’t move too fast on the whole getting to know you scale. Plus, shaking hands first eases a stranger’s feelings about you. Don’t believe me? Science says so.

Beckman Institute researcher Florin Dolcos and University of Illinois postdoctoral research associate Sanda Dolcos found that “a handshake preceding social interaction enhanced the positive impact of approach and diminished the negative impact of avoidance behavior on the evaluation of social interaction.”

That makes sense. Their study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, gives scientific proof for the first time about why a handshake is important.

The study showed “increased sensitivity to approach than to avoidance behavior in amygdala and superior temporal sulcus, which were linked to a positive evaluation of approach behavior and a positive impact of handshake.” Also, the “nucleus accumbens, which is a reward processing region, showed greater activity for Handshake than for No-handshake conditions” — proving a link to “the positive effect of handshake on social evaluation.”

“Overall, our study not only replicated previous reports that identify activity in regions of the social cognition network, but also provided insight into the contribution of these regions into evaluating approach and avoidance social interactions, and grant neuroscientific support for the power of a handshake,” Sanda Dolcos said.

Florin Dolcos says that a firm, confident, and friendly handshake leads to positive feelings.

“In a business setting this is what people are expecting, and those who know these things use them,” he said. “Not a very long time ago you could get a loan based on a handshake. So it conveys something very important, very basic. Yet the science underlying this is so far behind. We knew these things intuitively but now we also have the scientific support.”

There you have it. But beware: I’m still giving you a hug when I see you next.

(Story materials and image via the Beckman Institute.)

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Flirtatious Women Score More

Posted on 2012/10/222012/10/23 by Jason Hensel

Jessie States wrote the following for another blog. I’m posting it on here, because I find that it’s a really interesting study. It’s one of those topics that is known to be true, but quietly ignored in the hopes that it will go away. It won’t go away, though, if it’s not discussed.

Flirtation is an effective way for women to gain negotiating mileage, according to a new study by Haas School of Business Professor Laura Kray. And the whole idea that it works kind of makes my stomach turn. But I get it.

“Women are uniquely confronted with a tradeoff in terms of being perceived as strong versus warm. Using feminine charm in negotiation is a technique that combines both,” said Kray, who holds the Warren E. and Carol Spieker Chair in Leadership at the Haas School.

The study, “Feminine Charm: An Experimental Analysis of its Costs and Benefits in Negotiations,” was published in October in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and co-authored by Haas Ph.D. alumna Connson C. Locke of the London School of Economics and Haas Ph.D. candidate Alex B. Van Zant.

Flirtation that generates positive results, Kray says, is not overt sexual advances but authentic, engaging behavior without serious intent. In fact, the study found female flirtation signals attractive qualities such as confidence, which is considered essential to successful negotiators.

To determine whether women who flirt are more effective in negotiating than men who flirt, the researchers asked 100 participants to evaluate to what extent they use social charm in negotiation on a one-to-seven scale. Earlier that week, the participants evaluated their partners’ negotiating effectiveness. Women who said they used more social charm were rated more effective by their partners. However, men who said they used more social charm were not regarded as more effective.

In the second experiment, the researchers asked subjects to imagine they were selling a car worth US$1,200 and asked for how much would they sell the car. Next, the subjects read one of two scenarios about a potential buyer named Sue.

The first group meets Sue, who shakes hands when she meets the seller, smiles, and says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” and then “What’s your best price?” in a serious tone. The second group reads an alternate scenario in which Sue greets the seller by smiling warmly, looking the seller up and down, touching the seller’s arm, and saying, “You’re even more charming than over email,” followed by a playful wink and asking, “What’s your best price?”

The result? Male sellers were willing to give the “playful Sue” more than $100 off the selling price whereas they weren’t as willing to negotiate with the “serious Sue.” Playful Sue’s behavior did not affect female car sellers. Kray says many of her students who are senior women executives admit they love to flirt and describe themselves as “big flirts.” Kray maintains flirting is not unprofessional if it remains playful and friendly.

“The key is to flirt with your own natural personality in mind. Be authentic. Have fun,” Kray said. “That will translate into confidence, which is a strong predictor of negotiation performance.”

Read the full paper here.

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Employees Are Your Best Customers

Posted on 2012/04/132012/04/13 by Jason Hensel

At every job I’ve had, I’ve heard phrases such as “the customer is always right,” or “think of the value to the customer.” While those sentiments are good, I never hear anything about a product or decision being valuable to an employee. It’s as if business leaders are too focused on keeping customers happy that they forget about employees. And that’s crazy, because employees are your best customers.

The main reason a business treats its customers well is because they will be happy and spread the word to their friends and family about how great the business is. Couldn’t the same be said for your employees? Treat them well, contribute to their happiness, and they’ll extend that feeling in dealing with customers.

It makes so much sense that I’m confused as to why it’s not addressed more. If you’re leader, please do everyone a favor and the next time you want to ask something like “What is the customer value?” please pause and actually ask “What is the value for the customer and the employee?” Running a successful business is a two-way street, and more often than not most leaders have a one-track mind.

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Good Credit Scores and Rudeness

Posted on 2011/11/08 by Jason Hensel

One of the most ridiculous parts of the job hiring process is letting a company conduct a credit check to determine if you are financially responsible. Yes, I can see how this might be a good process for a job at a bank, for example. But just because you have a good or bad credit score shouldn’t qualify or disqualify you for most jobs.

Now, there’s some research to back up my belief. In fact, people who have good credit scores are more likely rude.

In a study to be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers from Louisiana State University, Texas Tech University and Northern Illinois University focused on links between credit ratings and personalities.

“With regards to personality and credit–it makes sense that conscientiousness is related to good credit, but what was really interesting was that agreeableness was negatively related to your credit score,” said Jeremy Bernerth, assistant professor in LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business Rucks Department of Management. “That suggests easy-going individuals actually have worse credit scores than disagreeable and rude individuals. This suggests that agreeable individuals might get themselves in trouble by co-signing loans for friends or family or taking out additional credit cards at the suggestion of store clerks.”

The researchers also found that there’s no correlation between poor scores and bad behavior on the job.

“It was telling that poor credit scores were not correlated to theft and other deviant types of work behaviors,” said Bernerth. “Most companies attempt to justify the use of credit scores because they think such employees will end up stealing, but our research suggests that might not be the case.”

I shared this study with an HR professional. She suggested that those who score poorly could also be more naive, which is something you don’t want in the workplace.

Interesting. Would you rather have a nice and naive or disagreeable and rude employee working for or with you?

(Photo via Flickr: Richard Lemarchand / Creative Commons)

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