And a couple reposts, the first from 2010:One of the biggest ways companies motivate people is the threat of losing their jobs. Some do it explicitly through forced ranking and threats of layoffs. Others create insecurity when managers give infrequent feedback or incomplete information.+But actively encouraging workers to fear for their job doesn’t make them more competitive and productive; it makes them panicked and incautious. Job insecurity hurts health, makes people burn out, and reduces job satisfaction and performance, according to a piece rounding up recent research at the New York Times (paywall).Studies find that workers who fear being laid off are less safety-conscious, more likely to get injured, and less likely to report injuries. A forthcoming study from researchers at Texas A&M University found that even at a company with relatively few layoffs and a supportive work culture, insecure employees were less likely to seek out support or ask for flex-time or time off....MORE+
Okay, Enough With Politics: Attention Managers, You Can Improve Corporate Efficiency by Randomly Promoting Employees
It sounds like a Dilbert strip but it's true.And another from January 2014:
From the abstract at Physics arXiv:
The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study
...Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.Here is the paper presented at Econophysics Colloquium 2009 (55 page PDF)...MORE
Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
Correctly Assuming Guilt, Deutsche Bank to Randomly Suspend Traders During Various Probes
Arbitrary and capricious.
That's the ticket.
