When job insecurity leads to sabotage
Being insecure about whether you’ll keep your job isn’t a great feeling, and new research by Professor of Management Ned Wellman has found that it could be bad for your company, too.
Being insecure about whether you’ll keep your job isn’t a great feeling, and new research by Professor of Management Ned Wellman has found that it could be bad for your company, too.
Research on goal setting and pay for performance can inspire not only higher performance, but higher malfeasance. And thinking “outside of the box” can cause trouble when misapplied. Even the smallest moral transgressions can evolve into problems of significant size.
Recently a senior executive at a large financial services firm struggled to answer whether the client’s interests come first, reported Dean Robert Mittelstaedt of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University in his remarks at the convocation on May 13, 2010. What has happened to respect for customers, commitment to organizational purpose and advancement, making the right decision even if it does not maximize short term profit, he asked. The global trend away from a focus on excellence and organizational success to a focus on personal success is "dangerous and destructive," he said. He challenged the graduates to measure success by the progress made in society and their organizations. Make that your ultimate goal and personal success will follow, he said. "Your leadership will differentiate you, your ethics will save you, and continuous learning will make you successful."
The story sounds just like a John Grisham novel: The CEO of a West Virginia energy company spent more than $3 million to help a relative unknown unseat the incumbent and become a judge on the state’s Supreme Court. Later, that same judge, after refusing to recuse himself, cast the deciding vote on two decisions overruling verdicts against the energy company — verdicts now worth $82 million. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor isn’t shy about her opinion on the matter — states should do away with judicial elections in order to restore independence to their courts, she said recently at an Economic Club of Phoenix luncheon, co-sponsored by the W. P. Carey School of Business and the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU.
Each of us, as we go about our daily lives, has opportunity after opportunity to make the right choice, John Johnson told audience at the Spark 2008 IT Invitational conference this fall. Living with integrity encompasses deliberate decision-making in all aspects of one’s life, he stressed, including relationships and business. Johnson is chief information officer for the popular P.F. Chang’s China Bistro chain of restaurants.
"A leading company should be a company of leaders," says Dov Seidman, a consultant whose career focuses on how companies and their people can operate in both a principled and profitable way. Seidman’s new book, "HOW: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life)" is a thoughtful and incisive look at why "how" matters more than "what" in business, and how "should" matters more than "can." The bottom line, he says, is that in a fast-changing, hyperconnected and hypertransparent world, success is redefined as a quest for significance.