Work Matters

Randy Hodson’s Dignity at Work

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One of the main ideas that
runs through The No Asshole Rule, and
in fact, much of the work that we do at Stanford’s Center for
Work, Technology and Organization, is the importance maintaining dignity in
the workplace. If you think about the kinds of people who are labeled as assholes,
they often earn the label by demeaning people in ways that strip them of their
dignity.  I was reminded of this just the
other day in an email that a management consultant sent me about a nasty
client: “I spent the day with a person who routinely
puts me down, But he’s great at smooching butts of people higher than him. Really frustrating. Yesterday he bumped into me three times,
poked my chest twice with his finger, and made five jokes about me. What an
asshole.” 

If
you take a look at my list of things that assholes do, which is on Guy Kawasaki’s
blog posting, you will see that many of these put down moves are covered. And
you will also see ways that people can battle back against assholes who take away their dignity. Like the radio producer I talk
about in The No Asshole Rule who had
a boss that kept stealing her food: she exacted revenge by making some “treats”
out of Ex-Lax and leaving them out in her desk. As usual, her boss promptly ate without asking her permission. He was not pleased when
she told him the ingredients!

If you want to read the
most comprehensive academic treatment of dignity that I know of, check out Randy Hodson’s 2001
book Dignity
at Work. He reviewed over 300 in-depth ethnographies – these are
academic ethnographies, usually entailing a year or more of intense observation
–and ultimately selected 108 cases from 86 published ethnographies for
intense quantitative and qualitative analysis. His compact definition is
fantastic, “Dignity is the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and
self-respect and to appreciate the respect of others.” 

Hodson presents insightful analysis of major
challenges to dignity at work and “the strategies through which dignity is
attained and defended.” He digs into causes
including mismanagement and abuse, overwork, challenges to autonomy (e.g., undermining
freedom and control at work), and “contradictions of employee involvement,”
where employees are blamed for organizational performance problems, are asked
to work harder and get more involved, but they don’t actually have any control.
Or when employees are asked to work harder to avoid layoffs, be when they do
work harder, layoffs happen because the organization has become more efficient.

Dignity at Work is written for academics, not managers, but it is
far more accessible than most academic books and still impressively rigorous in terms
of theory and evidence. If you are serious about digging into the struggle for workplace
dignity, want to understand why you as manager might be making if difficult for
your people to sustain their self-worth and self-respect, what others are doing
to you to take your dignity away, and why and how people can fight back, this splendid
and well-crafted book is well-worth reading.

 P.S. If you are
interested in other examples of in-depth organizational ethnography, especially
from our Center from Work, Technology and Organization, check out Steve Barley
and Gideon Kunda’s masterpiece Gurus,
Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy,
the most complete and thoughtful book ever written on skilled contract labor. It
also includes lovely examples and analyses of the ways that “permanent”
employees undermine the status of these temporary employees and how contract workers fight
back to gain self-respect and control.

Comments

4 responses to “Randy Hodson’s Dignity at Work”

  1. dblwyo Avatar
    dblwyo

    You’ve got several themes running thru your blog but two that strike me are the problems with a healthy workplace and dignity (the No-A problem). And the Otis Redding problem with bad operating systems. Both of which are strongly inter-related in my mind.
    Now tolerance for Aholes and dis-respect for the individual are cultural characteristics and cultures persist over long periods of time. For example at IBM 65% of the people have been there less than five years yet decision-making, style, are still pretty much the same as when I left in ’99; or similar talking to older IBMers from decades ago. Changing them is difficult (Heskett argued impossible) and requires strong, persistent leadership. It’s more likely to result from building new behaviors on old, workable values if there, than being created. The questions then become how and why ?
    Bad behavior is much more important than it’s given credit for because it lowers, potentially to the point of destruction, the efficiency and efficacy of the organization. As a ‘model’ consider the typical employee who, realistically, might work at about 80% effort. That’s a reasonable and sustainable level so let’s take it as a figure of merit. In a hostile environment suppose that time and energy goes to warding off Aholes and takes 20% off that and it cascades thru the organization. Let’s also further suppose that the Aholes in leadership positions make it clear they’re in pursuit of their own benefit rather than the organizations. Then the typical employee will rationally reduce effort for the organization and divert it to watching their backs, staying networked and exploring other jobs. Suppose that results in another 20-40% reduction in effort – which reflects my experience and observations. Then one has .8 X (1-.2) x (1-.4) = .8 X .8 X .6 = .29 or approx 30% dedicated effort after very few iterations.
    Bad cultures and bad leadership behavior are very bad business, can be destructive, depreciate the accumulated soft assets of an organization and, effectively, violate the fiduciary responsibilities of the executives to act in the broader interest. That’s not an argument that seems to be floating around though one that’s really implicit in much of our joint knowledge (jokes, Dilbert cartoons, etc.). Turning it around though it argues that the problems you’re addressing are more important than just individual comfort – they speak to the fundamental performance of any organization and are critical to it’s survival.
    Dave Livingston

    Reply
  2. dblwyo Avatar
    dblwyo

    The Dirty Little Secret of corporate management is that politics is inescapable because there are competing uses for scarce resources and no clear mechanism for choosing between them. All too often resource decisions, budgets, etc. are made to placate the largest stakeholders, e.g. the old division with the aging product, because they have the politcal clout. This doesn’t seem to be well documented in the business literature but anybody who’s worked in a large organization takes it as a given. I’ve worked with the largest and most prestigious enterprises in the world and some of the smallest and found it to be true in all cases, to some extent or another.
    The challenge is to find a balance between good and bad politics.
    The Otis problem, in my arguement anyway, is the result of cognitive dissonance brought about by non-existent management systems. Dissonance in the sense, and several of the comments and blog entries tend to confirm this, e.g. the Citibank example, that what’s really expected and rewarded bears no resemblence to the myriad programs, initiatives and directives floating around. They all fail the tests of reality – what incentives do we provide people and do we really give them clear, concise and workable guidance ?
    My experience is that most organizations fail these ‘simple’ tests and, further, that one can examine the front pages of the WSJ for evidence of how destructive it is from Sony to Dell to Ford/GM to Airbus. Having been keeping track of the evidence over the last few years the numbers and consequences are kinda amazing. Yet the underlying realities are so accepted that we build it into our standard repetoire of jokes about work.
    There is no magic answer for the dignity problem but there may be, my key and perhaps critical point, for the Otis problem. Which loops back on the cultural change issues one way or another.
    Dave Livingston

    Reply
  3. dblwyo Avatar
    dblwyo

    Let me define a Management System as the set of objectives, outcomes (including steps), resource decisions and allocations and incentives that define acceptable operational behavior in an organization. A good and effective system would start with the core corporate strategic objectives break them down in a structured hiearchy at each level of the organization appropriately, measure the gaps between capabilities and requirements, establish realistic steps and timeframes, measure the gaps and allocate resources and both explain and compensate people for adhering to these goals.
    My experience is that almost no enterprise or organization I’m familiar with has such a system in place, nor really recognizes or acknowledges it’s advantages or necessity. The closest – and worth your looking into – might be Fedex. BtW – such a system need not be onerous but rather could be as simple as a basic tracking system where each level of management was responsible for building out it’s own and reconciling them upward and downward.
    A critical element is judgement. One simple fix could also go a long way, over time and with persistence, to auto-correctin political dysfunctions. Simply start each planning cycle with an open meeting where the top-level objectives, resources and commitments are laid out and inter-dependent commitments are made by the sr. executives. This might be what I call a “magic’ answer because no matter how political the initial decisions are they are a) in public and b) have to be committed and reconciled.

    Reply
  4. mean boss Avatar
    mean boss

    How do you leave work at the office?

    Reply

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