Academic Radar

Every time there comes a new wave to stimulate the creativity of employees, and, almost always, the results are inconsistent. Offering cool and challenging tasks, freedom to come and go and an office with charming furniture and with snooker and table tennis tables not necessarily make people more inventive and productive. Even less prizes and bonus, which, if misplaced, may lead to a work environment overly competitive and corrupt.

In the paper “The Necessity of others is the mother of invention: intrinsic and prosocial motivations, perspective taking, and creativity”, published at Academy of Management Journal, Adam M. Grant, from University of Pennsylvania, and James W. Berry, from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, say that nothing has really worked so far because the motivations for creativity do not come from within the individual, but from the outside. Only when we stop being selfish and become emphatic with other’s necessities is that we can visualize innovative solutions.

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In 1748, American Benjamin Franklin wrote, in an essay titled “Advice to a Young Tradesman”, that “time is money”. Today commonplace, the statement by Franklin was a novelty in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. When each performed an occupation for own account, the day journey was not necessarily governed by the pressure of productivity. The hours spent out of work were not perceived as lost time.

But Franklin came with a new concept, known among economists as “cost of opportunity”. He said: if a worker can earn ten shillings a day, but decides to spend half of the day abroad, he not only will spend the sixpence used in his diversion, but he will also throw away five shillings, or half of what he would have earned if, instead of “idleness”, he had chosen to work the whole day.

Since then, the notion that time is valuable and scarce, in the economic sense of the term, intensified. Management practices routinely relate time and money, either by a direct form of payment by hour of work or by indirect means such as requiring and measuring results in certain periods.

In the paper “The economic evaluation of time: Organizational causes and individual consequences”, published at Research in Organizational Behavior, Jeffrey Pfeffer, renowned professor at Standford University, and Sanford E. DeVoe, specialized in the relations between money and time at University of Toronto, show how the concept of productive time contaminated our life – and not only at work.
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Autonomy, responsibility and meaning make workers happier and more productive. Truth? To some extent, say Jason R. Pierce and Herman Aguinis, from Indiana University, in a paper that was published in the February edition of Journal of Management. In excess, the effect is the opposite: people feel exhausted by the effort and skills required to do the job without a strict supervision.

Pierce and Aguinis point out that, in organizations, variables accepted as leading to positive results actually may lead to negative outcomes. The explanation is that it does not exist a linear relation between cause and effect, but a curvilinear one, in shape of an inverted U. There is an inflection point from which what was good turns into bad. It is impressive the quantity of examples that the researchers were able to collect, based on many studies, to testify the aphorism “too much can be worse than too little”. Here are some of them:

- Not always responsible, organized, persevering and goal oriented people will produce more, and better. Take yourself seriously can be paralyzing, as well;
- Assertive leaders may press too much their subordinates and cause damage to their performance;
- Entrepreneurs who plan a lot often do not reach success, either because they become overconfident or because they are inflexible;
- Companies that have a rapid growth fail, because they risk dangerously or because they get out of control;
- Companies that diversify by activities or by regions my reduce risks and increase efficiency, up to a point when this strategy is counterproductive.

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Studies show how humor improves work journeys and help people produce more and better. But, let’s face it, there are many types of humor: good humor, black humor, self-deprecating humor, and, if you do a search on the Internet, you will find many others. In the professional environment, humor can either motivate employees to work with pleasure as become a weapon in the hands of chiefs to depreciate their subordinates – who will not have the opportunity to retaliate in the same level.

The study “Am I the only one this Supervisor is Laughing at?”, from Yuanyuan Huo e Ziguang Chen, from University of Hong Kong, and from Wing Lam, from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,  published at Personnel Psychology, has the merit of showing this negative side of humor. The researchers interviewed 243 employees at four manufacturing companies from a Chinese IT corporate. Firstly, the employees themselves answered the questions. To check if a different point of view would lead to a different result, six months later the same questionnaire was applied to employees’ spouses.

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