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Employees' views about success change with the economic outlook, unnecessarily tearing the social fabric of organisations during difficult times.
How do you view success? Is it a finite resource, meaning that your success requires someone else to fail, or is there enough to go around? Your answer may determine whether you view your co-workers as potentially beneficial or detrimental to your own success. When the opportunity arises to help a colleague, it may therefore dictate how you respond.
This is more than a private, idiosyncratic issue. Previous studies have shown that employee helpfulness is key to organisational effectiveness. The extent to which people are willing to help at work, however, changes in response to prevailing macroeconomic conditions, as my recent paper in Academy of Management Journal (co-written by Marko Pitesa of Singapore Management University) finds. As the economic outlook darkens, so do employees' attitudes toward one another. The uphill slog of doing business during a downturn is thus made even steeper.
A panic response
Of course, a certain amount of selfishness can be a rational response to a downturn. The threat of layoffs, for example, will naturally turn employees' concerns towards their own job prospects. Our studies, however, modelled situations where participants could help others at no apparent cost to themselves. That they withheld help anyway indicates a phenomenon more closely resembling the illogic of panic selling or bank runs than rational self-interest.
First, we verified our core premise - that an unfriendly economy contributes to what we termed a "zero-sum construal of success"- by analysing nearly 60,000 responses to the World Values Survey alongside information about the respondents' macroeconomic context. We discovered a relationship between bad economic indicators and the belief that success is a "zero-sum good".
Next, we tested our hypothesis that news of a downturn could negatively affect workplace helping. In two separate experiments, we found that professionals who had just read an article describing the U.S. economy as declining were less likely to offer to point a colleague in the right direction (even though it cost them nothing to do so) than peers who read an optimistic news article.
Finally, we launched a field study in which the participants did not even know they were a part of the research until the very end. Posing as the marketing department of a business school, we recruited 101 freelance marketing and sales professionals hailing from 47 different countries, ostensibly to evaluate the work of an intern who had devised a new slogan to promote university-branded merchandise. Participants were told that the school's policy required all freelancers to complete paperwork including questions on how they perceived the state of the economy in their home country.
Note, freelancers in the final study could not reasonably have felt threatened by the "intern" we invented, seeing as how they had neither met the intern, nor were eligible to compete for the same job. Nonetheless, when given the option to append helpful advice to their evaluation, freelancers who felt negatively about the state of their home economy were more likely to decline or to write less than their more optimistic counterparts. Across studies, we found that the unhelpful behaviour in response to difficult economic times was due to an increased tendency to view success as a zero-sum good.
Community and cooperation
Our findings imply that workforce cohesion is often at its lowest when managers need it most, i.e. during tough economic times. It should be possible to weaken the zero-sum effect by emphasising community and cooperation. Managers should stress joint goals in order to refute the notion that success can be doled out only on an individual basis. Needless to say, it helps if you have a more collective-minded corporate culture from the start. That way, you can simply emphasise existing values, rather than having to establish new ones and make them credible.
In advance of an economic downturn, managers should identify junctures in the employee network where it's especially important for employees to help each other. For example, new hires are highly dependent on colleagues to show them the ropes; otherwise their learning curve lengthens and the company ultimately loses out. In certain cases, organisations may need to make formal changes to heighten employees' awareness of interdependence, e.g. by instituting joint financial incentives within a department.
Managers should also cast a watchful eye inward to ensure that they themselves don't succumb to the insular mentality downturns often inspire. When times are tough, listening to employees with sensitivity and care combats pessimism and persuades them that you are all indeed in this together.
Nina Sirola is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at INSEAD.
It has been said that the purpose of organisation is to eliminate uncertainty. Is this stifling the ability to innovate?
I recently spoke with the innovation leaders at a major biopharmaceutical firm. They were lamenting the challenges of designing an innovation program that seemed overwhelming. No matter what they did, the organisation just kept focusing on execution and narrow thinking rather than innovation and big thinking. I reminded them that big companies are like slowly sinking ships (sinking under the weight of their own execution orientation); efforts to innovate will never be ideal, rather it’s a matter of pumping water out of the hull to keep the ship afloat.
The analogy resonates because it reminds us that our efforts to innovate will never be, and can never be, perfect. Nor can they be optimal. This is due to a fundamental principle which underpins all innovation — the uncertainty principle. This idiom doesn’t refer to the quantum behaviour of particles (although I do find it ironic that the one discipline that deals the most with physical reality is the only discipline to have an uncertainty principle), rather the simple fact that all innovation involves fundamental uncertainty, the kind we often cannot foresee or predict. It is the type of uncertainty that drives people and organisations crazy and, thus, leads us to try and stamp it out. In fact, Herb Simon, an organisation theorist who won the Nobel Prize in economics, once observed that the purpose of organisation is to eliminate uncertainty.
Managing uncertainty
If you look around you, most organisations, including those that educated us and those in which we work, try very hard to eliminate uncertainty because it is inefficient and unpredictable. Indeed, all our lives we have been told to plan for the unplannable and, in our organisations, to foresee the unforeseeable.
Which leads me to the aforementioned uncertainty principle; where there's no uncertainty, there's no innovation. Uncertainty is the soil out of which innovation grows; it is the spark that can lead us to a future better than the one we imagine for ourselves. For this reason, we need to embrace as well as respect it. When I say embrace, I mean find the ways to allow uncertainty into our lives and organisations. By respect, I mean look at how we manage the uncertainty so it doesn't overwhelm us or derail us.
No free rides
Obviously there is much more to managing uncertainty than this simple principle, which is one of my quests: to understand the personal, professional and organisational tools that allow us to turn uncertainty into something beautiful, something that solves real problems. Although I cannot share it all here, let me share one observation. As soon as you engage uncertainty, you start to feel anxiety. But anxiety does not mean you are failing. If you are pursuing a new idea, new career, new business, new approach, whatever it may be, you will experience this anxiety. Don't let it derail you. I'm not speaking about data — if the data says something different, then take it into account and perhaps change course (see my work in The Innovator's Method for this). I'm talking about how it feels. And when it comes to how it feels, remember, uncertainty feels crummy while you are in it and beautiful when you cross to the other side, even if that other side is different to what you expected. And it almost certainly will be!
In closing, I'm reminded of Ursula Le Guin who wrote, "Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction – you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart."
A version of this blog first appeared on Inc.com
Nathan Furr is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD.