This weeks readings made me want to re-watch the 1999 Mike
Judge cult-classic movie “Office Space.”
The movies’ main character, Peter Gibbons, is what Wren and Bedian (Wren
& Bedian, 2009, p. 123) would describe as a soldier. This is evident when Gibbons says, “It’s not
that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.”
(To watch the clip click
here.) But why doesn’t he care?
In the movie, Gibbons is bored in his job working in what
Paul referred to last week as a “cube farm” environment. The management of Gibbons’ “cube farm” would
benefit from reading any of our readings this week, but starting with Morgan’s
“Images of Organization” in which Morgan discusses Abraham Maslow’s Theory of
Motivation that states that people (employees) want “full
growth and development” (Morgan, 1998, p. 38).
A piece from Teresa’s Amabile's “The Progress Principle” published
at www.washingtonpost.com addressed four factors that can cause Gibbons, and
employees like him, to have such an attitude.
Amabile takes the backhanded approach and lists four steps in
how to make employees miserable: “Never allow pride of accomplishment. Miss no
opportunity to block progress on employees’ projects. Give yourself [as the
supervisor] some credit. Kill the messengers” (Amabile).
Amabile’s four steps of ineffective management grind against
the three goals of management that Lorsch describes as influencing staff,
creating an environment of “collaborative effort,” and “creating an
organization that is cost effective” (Lorsch, 1987, pp. 1-2). If the employee succeeds, it would seem the
organization succeeds.
And that success could stem from understanding the
“Organismic Metaphor” (Morgan, 1998, p. 63) that states everything needs to
work together to work well to achieve the “full growth and development” the Theory
of Motivation (Morgan, 1998, p. 38).
However, with each theory and idea, I wonder how much of it
is practical once human nature and other uncontrollable X-factors are part of
the equation? At the end of “Office
Space” (sorry, spoiler alert) it turns out Gibbons was just in the wrong
occupation.
References:
1. Amabile, T. &
Kramer, S. (2012, March 6). How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com
2. Judge, M.
(Director). (1999). Office space.
Motion picture. United States: Twentieth Century
Fox.
3. Lorsch, J.W.
(1987, January 30). Note on organization design [Case no. 9-476-094]. Boston: Harvard Business School
Publishing.
4. Morgan, G. (1998).
Images of organization. San Franciso,
California: Berrett-Koehler. Thousand
Oaks: Sage.
5. Wren, D.A. & Bedeian, A.G.
(2009). The evolution of management
thought. Danvers, MA: John Wiley
& Sons.
I have a sad story: I showed a bit of Office Space to my undergraduate class a couple semesters ago and only ~50% had even heard of the movie.
ReplyDeleteIn your last paragraph you mention that you are unsure how theories can hold in real-life situations. When you wrote that statement, which theory were you trying to apply? I think we need to divorce the idea of organizational design and employee satisfaction for a moment. Do you think an organization is only perfectly fit to its environment when every employee has extremely high job satisfaction? Or can an organization be designed well despite some employee turnover? Are employees who naturally fit an organization automatically happy there? I think those are interesting question.
Hi Dr. Pade,
ReplyDeleteThat is a sad story. It just made me a bit sad.
My previous company, as I've learned in the last two weeks was a total disaster (I think the first chain newspaper to declare bankruptcy) and the joke at my current employer is that it's stuck in the 60s, so I don't have a great background to put these theories in perspective and that's where that paragraph came from.
However, after reading Audrey's post about Calvin Klein and Andrew's post about the development of hockey players, it makes more sense to me now, practically speaking. I understood the theories and their usefulness, it just didn't exist to me.
But your questions built off of mine are what I find the most interesting about the theories -- putting them into everyday use and the employee response.
I am pretty happy that I am not the only one who thought of office space during this week's reading!
ReplyDeleteJustin (and Dr. Pade) do you think that the focus should solely be on the organization and its success? I feel a lot of these questions of job satisfaction, turnover, and fit can be traced back to economic questions like how can we maximize profit. If the first order question is always a matter of profitability within an organization I am inclined to say a good portion of people wont experience satisfaction or good fit which will result in high turnover. If an organization is designed to be people centered and profitability secondary much of this can be mitigated, or at least that intuitively seems the case. What do you think?
Hi Nik,
ReplyDeleteIt has to be hand-in-hand right Nik? When you look at some of the best companies to work for, they're often some of the most successful companies. I'm interested to see what week 3 brings.
I too thought of Office Space while reading this week's assignment. I remember a job I had where management was trying to gently nudge a gentleman out of the company and kept moving his office closer and closer to the front door. We even called him "Milton." It was a strategic decision by management to make him uncomfortable and to send him and the organization a message. Likely that company will never be listed in a "best to work for list."
ReplyDeleteI can't count the number of red Swingline staplers that dot the landscape in my workplace. And when a certain network printer inevitably jams, it's not uncommon to find a hand-written "PC LOAD LETTER" sign taped to the machine. Hopefully, our comfort with these references stems from an appreciation of the ways our company differs from the fictional Initech.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated your post and the connections you made between a great piece of pop culture and the week's readings. Your entry also inspired some fascinating conversation. Dr. Pade challenged us to consider whether the ideas of good organizational design and employee satisfaction need necessarily go hand-in-hand. Though what I'm about to say flies in the face of everything I look for in selecting an employer, I think the answer is "no."
Earlier this week, I facilitated several focus groups with employees of a global manufacturing firm. As the focus group participants introduced themselves, my co-facilitator frequently broke from script to utter exclamations like "29 years with the company? That's so unusual these days!"
And she is right. Particularly among my own generation, I rarely encounter "career loyalists" in the making. I have heard smart, skilled young people ask, "why on earth would I want to stay with one company more than a few years?" Sometimes I wonder if these people can really be satisfied by any reasonable effort of organizational design.
I wanted to share with you all an excerpt from Ocean Palmer's interesting article on World of Why that calmly suggests many reasons good companies may experience low job satisfaction and high turnover:
"Not all companies that deal with high turnover are unethical or undesirable. Some are quite the opposite; some are great brands. For them, a revolving door of new hires and quick exits has nothing to do with the company, leadership team, product or service, environment, or compensation plan. Even when all of those are top-shelf, good people still leave quickly because of something much more difficult to manage through: the basic demands of the job. Those collateral realities, unfortunately, are often unavoidable.
For example, the job may be maddeningly pressure-packed or super service-oriented; or maybe the work requires a string of high-pressured nights or stressful weekends. Seasonal demands can force long, unhappy stretches of all-nighters or sunrise-to-sunset days. Everyone caught in the vortex wonders if there is, in fact, a better way to earn a living. Complex integrated teams that force long hours and tense, interdependent working relationships build mounting stress, too." You can read the full article here: http://oceanpalmer.com/blog/?p=945.