Work Matters

Category: Evidence-based Management

  • How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews? Take Sam Culbert’s Test

    One of the most lively discussions we've had on this blog was around a post I wrote a couple years ago called Performance Evaluations: Do They Do More Harm Than Good.  The reason, I argued, is that that they are done  badly in most places that the best performance evaluation might be no performance evaluation at all. In too many places, they are done by badly trained people, the forms and procedure  often have little relevance to the people being evaluated or to organizational goals, they take a huge hunk of time (a bad 360 degree evaluation can waste weeks), and often leave both the evaluator and the person being evaluated feeling less rather than more motivated. As I said in my earlier post,the famous quality guru W. Edwards Deming was vehemently opposed
    to using them at all.  As Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote on page 193 of     The Knowing-Doing Gap:

    Deming emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed
    internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and
    breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing
    good work. He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as
    poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high
    quality. Deming maintained that when people get unfair negative evaluations, it
    can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent,
    dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after
    receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior.    "      

    To Deming's point, there is one organization I work with — a high tech firm with about 250 employees — that eliminated formal reviews except when people are being considered for a promotion or when they are having serious performance problems and need to "on plan" (i.e., shape up or be fired). They have about ten different levels in the organization, and everyone at the same level gets the same pay and same sized bonus.  And they have been emphasizing frequent and lower stakes feedback instead.  So I know of at least one place that is having some success breaking from this often hollow and destructive ritual.

    Dustcoverv2-web  If you want to read the most compelling and complete case against the traditional performance evaluation, however,I suggest that you pre-order UCLA Professor Sam Culbert's new book Get Rid of the Performance Review. He first made this argument in the Wall Street Journal, but the book digs into this argument in far more detail and offers solutions for managers and companies who want to replace the traditional review — or at least reduce the damage that they do.  To help spread the word about the book, and to find out if as many people despise the performance review as Sam (and I) believe, he has — a bit like the ARSE — designed a ten-item test called How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews?  I just took it and scored a 36, which means I really hate them.  

    Take the test and let me know what you think, and after you complete
    it, you can read the first chapter of the book.  I predict that this
    book is going to spark a lot of controversy and, I hope, inspire
    leaders and organizations to use performance evaluations less, and to
    do a better of using them.  At least I hope so.

    Here is the first question to give you a taste:

    1- My favorite performance review was:

    a. when my boss correctly identified weaknesses that I was eager to work on.

    b.when I was reviewed, anonymously, by many insightful colleagues I interact with, including some who want my job.
        c. when my boss asked me to first review myself, allowing the boss to correct my silly self impressions.

    d. when my boss forgot to give me one

  • You Know It Is Snake Oil When They Say That It Explains 75% of Success in Life

    I
    clearly have strong beliefs about what drives human behavior, and think there is
    pretty strong evidence to support many of them. At the same time, I believe
    equally strongly that there are no magical cures for organizational and
    individual problems, or any one theory that explains all human behavior.
    Behavioral scientists battle over these issues — and they should, it leads to
    better evidence — over things like nature versus nurture, extrinsic versus
    intrinsic rewards, cognition versus emotion, and on and on, and each of us —
    me too — is probably unduly biased in favor of our pet theories.  There
    is a lot of evidence out there to fuel different arguments and I often am
    bewildered about what causes human behavior (remember this research about how
    the sawmill stopped theft….if you read this in combination with Salt Passage
    Research    , you can get completely confused). But, in reading so much of this
    stuff over the years –while it is clear that some behavioral theories and
    interventions work better than others — the thing I am most sure of is that
    there no one golden theory that is by far the most powerful and effective, and
    that provides the golden path to success.

    The
    corollary to this conclusion (which is evidence-based) is that when anyone
    claims they are hocking a theory that explains 75% of success in life, it is
    safe to assume they are selling you snake oil. To quote James March once again,
    as I suggested in my post on Good to Great, “Most claims of originality are
    testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimonial to hubris.”

    I
    was reminded of this problem once again when I received an invitation for a
    workshop on emotional intelligence (called "EQ" sometimes) that an
    obviously well-meaning consultant was putting on at one of my kid's schools. 
    The advertisement for this event claimed that "EQ" was far more
    powerful for explaining success in life than "IQ," in fact, the
    advertisement claimed it explained 75% of success in life.  I am a big fan
    of the general idea behind emotional intelligence, and believe that more successful
    human-beings — especially bosses –enjoy higher emotional intelligence, which
    researchers (the one's who apparently coined the concept and published the
    first studies) John Mayer and his colleagues define as "The ability to
    engage in sophisticated information processing about one's own and others'
    emotions, and the ability to use that information as a guide to thinking and
    behavior."  As I wrote to this consultant, I definitely think that the
    schools in my area would be better-off if everyone — students, teachers, and
    administrators– had higher EQ, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that
    (despite debate about exactly what it is and how it works), that more EQ leads people to more success — and to have more civilized human exchanges
    too.  

    Yet, much as the main popularizer of EQ apparently did, this
    consultant undermines her legitimate message by making excessive claims — in
    March's lingo, claims that she wielding magic.  The case of EQ is interesting
    because, while Goelman and his colleagues were selling it as nearly a cure all
    (I went to one of his speeches, and he was making outrageous claims about the
    amount of variance in organizational performance that were explained by
    a leader's EQ), more careful research and more measured claims were emerging from
    Mayer and other researchers.  To this point, please read what Mayer and his
    colleagues wrote in an article published in the American Psychologist in
    2008 called "Emotional Intelligence: Now Ability or Eclectic
    Traits."  On page 504, they argue:

    A journalistic rendering
    of EI created and also complicated the popular understanding of it. Goleman’s
    (1995) bestselling book Emotional Intelligence began with the early version of
    our EI model but mixed in many other personality traits including persistence,
    zeal, self-control, character as a whole, and other positive attributes. The
    book received extensive coverage in the press, including a cover story in Time
    magazine (Gibbs, 1995). Because the book included, in part, the theory we
    developed, some investigators wrongly believed that we endorsed this complex
    and, at times, haphazard composite of attributes as an interpretation of EI.

    The journalistic version
    became the public face of EI and attracted further attention, in part, perhaps,
    owing to its extraordinary claims. Goleman (1995, p. 34) wrote of EI’s
    importance that “what data exist, suggest it can be as powerful, and at times
    more powerful, than IQ.” A few years later, Goleman (1998a, p. 94) remarked
    that “nearly 90% of the difference” between star performers at work and average
    ones was due to EI. …. Our own work never made such claims, and we actively
    critiqued them (Mayer, 1999; Mayer & Cobb,2000; Mayer & Salovey, 1997;
    Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso,2000). More recently, Goleman (2005, p. xiii)
    wrote that others who believed that EI predicts huge proportions of success had
    misunderstood his 1995 book.


    I suspect the consultant's claims
    about the magical powers of EQ simply were repeating these widely accepted beliefs
    — apparently first perpetuated (but now denied) by Goleman.  In addition to
    sending this consultant the Mayer paper, I also sent her an article (summarized
    here) that analyzed
    85 years worth of research and showed that, for better or worse, the strongest
    evidence we have is that IQ is mighty powerful predictor of success.  I
    hope I didn't come across as     arrogant or overbearing when I suggested to her:
    "I am not an IQ freak at all, and in fact, I believe that it has a large
    social and economic component – and although my ideology and values press to me
    believe in EQ and related indicators of the ability to read and respond to
    others, I try to be careful to stick to the data and avoid excessive
    claims.  I think what you are doing is wonderful, but please be careful
    not to fall into the trap of making excessive claims to attract attention."

    For me, all this raises an interesting
    question, or I suppose challenge, that I wrestle with constantly.   I
    believe in evidence-based management and also have strong opinions that are grounded in evidence but are also shaped by my values (e.g., no matter how
    much money you make, in my book you are still a loser if you are an asshole)
    and by the quirks of my experience in this life.   The challenge is
    to walk the line between selling ideas that I firmly believe can make
    organizations better places, without overselling them — it is hard to do both
    because of the temptations (money and attention, for starters) and because, in
    many cases, people yearn for simple, powerful, and complete solutions to their
    problems (and keep asking for them even when you are careful to say that you
    don't have them and neither does anyone else    ). 

  • “Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.”

    The above quote is from James March, an emeritus professor at Stanford.  I would argue that Jim is the most prestigious living organizational theorist. If I believe the rumors I hear from "well-placed sources," he came pretty close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics last time and has a decent chance do so in the future.  I thought of Jim's quote (which is from an email he sent me about five years ago and is quoted in our book Hard Facts) when I received an invitation to a leadership conference at a prestigious university proclaiming that — given defective but widely accepted leadership models that fueled the financial crisis — it is time for some really smart academics and business leaders to get together and "imagine" a radically different  and better kind of leadership. 

    Frankly, I felt physically ill as I read the hype around this conference because, once again, I see people arguing that reinvention and radically new ideas are needed to save the day.  Yet, in fact, there is plenty of old evidence (not to mention common sense) kicking around that shows the best leaders are competent and benevolent and that they put the interests of their followers and customers ahead of their own greedy desires. Is that a shocking new idea to you?

    Yes, there are nuances and tweaks that emerge from new research and innovative leaders all the time, but just as in the rest of life, progress occurs one tiny and often painful lesson at a time — not through some magical process where ultra-smart people (many of whom brought us the defective models that got us in this mess) imagine a brand new kind of leadership.

    I bet that Kurt Vonnegut never read any management theory.  But he got it right in his  "Joe Heller"  poem that I love so much — where he suggested that emotionality  healthy human-beings are content with having enough to live well, with the knowledge that they have enough, and they don't constantly yearn for, demand, and take more more more status, money, and power for me me me.  I don't think this mindset requires any radical new inventions or leadership models — I bet you knew that before you ever read this post.  And I contend that anyone who claims that it does — or worse yet, claims they have invented such a radical new model — suffers from arrogance, ignorance, or both (to paraphrase Jim March's wise words.) 
     

  • Salt Passage Research: The State of the Art

    I am preparing for my class tomorrow where my students and I discuss the what
    motivates human behavior — a pretty hot topic these days given all the focus
    on whether it really is necessary to  pay top talent gobs of money to
    motivate them and keep them from running out the door (as we saw in the strong
    emotional responses to this recent post).  As I was digging through old
    articles, I ran into an old parody published in Change in     1978 by
    Michael Pacanowsky called "Salt Passage: The State of the Art," which
    does a remarkably adept job of showing that — when you review major behavioral
    science theories — ranging from work on  cognitive dissonance, to
    communication, to rewards, to the effects of threats — that researchers have
    not yet generated clear evidence to explain why the request "Please pass
    the salt" is efficacious in causing salt to move from one end of a table
    to the source of the utterances.”

    The
    research in the article is fake, but the theories are remarkably
    well-explained, and, alas, some 32 years later, I would assert that behavioral
    scientists are — if anything — even more at odds then ever about what fuels
    human action.  It is an easy way to learn a lot of social psychological
    theory in a short space, and if it was revised for modern times, another dozen
    reasons would need to be added to explain why people pass the salt when
    asked.  Here is the pdf:     Download Saltpassage-2  It holds up pretty
    well.  And it makes me squirm because I realize I don't really know why
    people pass the salt when asked.    .    .

  • The Floon Beetle Expedition: Don Martin’s Lesson For Researchers

    The notion that the process of studying something can change it is an old and useful theme in the behavioral sciences and other disciplines.  Perhaps the most famous illustration is the Hawthorne effect, which was uncovered (as the myth goes) when Harvard Business School researchers who were studying the effects of illumination and other physical changes on employee performance at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant in the 1920s.  Many reports suggest that employee productivity at Hawthorne went up mostly because the researchers and their managers were just paying more attention to the employees. As I learned it in graduate school, Harvard's Elton Mayo and his colleagues reported a pattern that looked something like this list at ACCEL when they experimented with different working arrangements with a group of six "girls" (this was the 1920s, remember):

    Conditions and results
    Under normal conditions with a forty eight hour week, including Saturdays,
    and no rest pauses. The girls produced 2,400 relays a week each.
    They were then put on piece-work for eight weeks.

    • Output went up

    Two five minute rest pauses, morning and afternoon, were introduced
    for a period of five weeks.

    • Output went up once more

    The rest pauses were lengthened to ten minutes each.

    • Output went up sharply.

    Six five minute pauses were introduced, and the girls complained that
    their work rhythm was broken by the frequent pauses.

    • Output fell slightly

    Return to the two rest pauses, the first with a hot meal supplied by
    the Company free of charge.

    • Output went up

    The girls were dismissed at 4.30 p.m. instead of 5.00 p.m.

    • Output went up

    They were dismissed at 4.00 p.m.

    • Output remained the same

    Finally, all the improvements were taken away, and the girls went back
    to the physical conditions of the beginning of the experiment: work on
    Saturday, 48 hour week, no rest pauses, no piece work and no free meal.
    This state of affairs lasted for a period of 12 weeks.

    • Output was the highest ever recorded averaging 3000 relays a week

    You can see the Hawthorne effect myth here in more detail at the ACCEL site or the more staid and cautious explanation at the Harvard Business School site here — but regardless of what actually happened in this study (whether the simple act of paying attention to these workers increased their output — or not), the Hawthorne effect is now used to mean "the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed." 

    I started thinking about the Hawthorne effect because of the Floon Beetle Expedition, one of the many masterpieces by the late Mad Magazine columnist Don Martin.  I used the cartoon below last week to demonstrate how the act of studying things can change them… in this case, destroy them!

    MadCartoonFloonExpedition_Mar2009JPEG
     

  • Workers Who Chew Gum Report Less Stress

    I was disappointed by this study as I have a pet peeve about chewing gum. Everyone else in my family chews it now and then but I have always found it a bit gross.  And my dislike for it was amplified when my young kids would get in the carpet and other tough places to remove.  They were all delighted to hear about this study and my 13 year-old suggested that if I chewed gum I wouldn't be so uptight about other people doing it. As with many great research summaries, this one comes from the BPS Research Digest Blog. Here is a key paragraph from BPS:

    Andrew Smith
    at Cardiff University surveyed over 2,000 workers and found that the 39
    per cent of respondents who reported never chewing gum were twice as
    likely to say they were extremely stressed at work, compared with gum
    chewers, and one and a half times as likely to say they were very or
    extremely stressed with life in general.

    So, does this mean that bosses who are leading tense teams ought to pass out the Wrigley's or — worse yet — bubble gum?  I hope not, but there seems to be a hint here that this is an evidence technique.

    P.S. The reference is: Smith, A. (2009). Chewing gum, stress and health Stress and Health, 25 (5), 445-451.

  • Drive: Daniel Pink’s Definitive and Fun Guide to Motivation

    I just spent a couple hours reading Daniel Pink's new book, DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  Dan's publisher sent me an advanced copy of the book and I became very interested in it after seeing his splendid TED talk, which I blogged about some weeks back.  The book is even better than the talk, as Dan does a masterful job of boiling down the results of a huge body of behavioral science research, presenting in way that is extremely engaging, and showing how it has profound implications for managers, teachers, parents or anyone else who wants to motivate others (and themselves) to be as effective as possible. It will be for sale in about two weeks.

    He does a masterful job of showing the limits and drawbacks of widely accepted assumptions about motivation — showing the limits of carrots and sticks, and then showing the power of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In addition to his compelling use of stories and examples (you don't want to miss his "Tom Sawyer" effect and explanations of why so many lawyers dislike their jobs so much), I especially liked his toolkit at the end of the book, which offers fantastic evidence-based advice. Check out the idea for peer-to-peer bonuses, illustrated by a civil engineering firm where at any time anyone can award a $50 bonus to one of his her colleagues.  I also like the steps he offers managers for giving-up control, which is also based on piles of evidence about what really motivates people — consider his argument that the best bosses are careful to avoid not controlling language when possible.  Using words like "must" or "should" can undermine the perception of autonomy and control that is so motivating to people. And we all like his advice that employers should pay above the industry average — which is based on research showing that the motivational gain is so high that doing so REDUCES company costs. 

    Drive provides a splendid summary of the best research on motivation, but never seems like a textbook, it carries you along as Dan adds his little creative twists to show why we as parents and managers are doing so many things wrong that seem so right — and how the best solutions to motivating people are usually so simple and so inexpensive.  Millions of people take introduction to psychology courses each year and nearly as many take introduction to organizational behavior classes: If you teach one of these classes, you might consider using Dan's book in place of or as a supplement your text for part of the course — your students will love it.  And anyone who wants to motivate others — which is pretty much all of us — can learn a lot from this book.

  • The Good Cop, Bad Cop Technique

    Perhaps my last post on assholes and policing got me thinking about the word cop, but in any case, I don't think I've talked much about a stream of research that I did years ago — about 20 — with my colleague Anat Rafaeli on "the expression of emotion in organizational life."  We studied various settings in which people were expected to express certain emotions and suppress others, or used emotions strategically as part of their jobs.  We studied occupations including grocery store clerks, telephone bill collectors, and cops.  In particular, Anat and I published a paper that combined qualitative data that she collected on Israeli police interrogators (to be clear, these were Israeli cops trying to get confessions from Israeli citizens, as we wanted to avoid the entire Arab/Israeli and terrorist thing) and data that I gathered during a three-month ethnography of U.S. telephone bill collectors who collected overdue Visa and MasterCard payments for a large bank.

    Our research, building on prior work on influence (especially Robert Cialdini's masterpiece), suggested that the reason that encountering both a nice and a nasty person was more effective than just a nice person or a nasty person was because of the "psychological contrast effect." In essence, the impact is to make the "carrots" offered by the good cop seem even sweeter and the "sticks" offered by the bad cop even harsher.  Both the cops and the bill collectors used this method routinely, although as the cops worked mostly face-to-face and the bill collectors did this over the phone, there were different variations used, and of course different stakes.  But the contrast effect seemed to be evident in both settings. For example, Anat's fieldnotes of an interrogation she observed indicated:

    There were two interrogators in the room. There was an extreme difference in their style. One (the manager) was a real source of stress to the suspect, while the other was much less threatening, even friendly. The second one was also physically less threatening. He was slim, less muscular, more dressed up, and more delicate in his appearance. During the interrogation he also drifted along with the suspect, while the other used a much harsher tone.

    It also seemed to be effective.  For example, one "good cop" bill collector told me how when his friendly style isn't working, he sometimes has a "bad cop" co-worker do the call:

    Then, usually, they pay pretty quick. Especially if it is Tom who does it. He has had a couple of managers tell him to cool down, where he has just pissed this person off and this person hangs up in a huff. But the next thing you know they're on the phone to the nice collector going, "What do you want, what do you want? Don't you ever have him call, I don't ever want to talk to him again, he was so rude."

    We also identified some interesting variations of the good cop. bad cop method. Looking back, they sound to me like we could have used simpler language, but I was a young academic then, and was probably rewarded by the peer review process for doing so… and wasn't quite at the career stage where I was concerned about writing for human-beings.  The variants include:

    1. Sequential good cop, bad cop: This is the classic approach, as we saw with the above bill collector, where you start with the good cop and go back and forth between encounters with the two until your "target" complies — in this case wither paying the bill or confessing to the crime. Just like in the movies, the targets usually caved-in to the good cop, sometimes saying things like " I never want to see that guy again." 

    2. Simultaneous good cop, bad cop. That was they both work on you at once. The bill collectors didnt use this method, but the police did — and would argue openly with each other to strike fear in the heart of the suspect (Anat has notes of a bad cop saying "He looks like dirt to me" and the good cop saying "He looks like a good guy to me."

    3. One person plays both bad and good cop.  The idea here is to create contrast, as one interrogator explained "I speak in a very low, relaxed tone. So that way, when I yell, it really makes them jump."

    4. Good cop in contrast to hypothetical bad cop. The bill collectors used this a lot, they would be customer service oriented but warn that if the debtor didn't pay now, they would be turned over to a collection agency, where not only would the people be nastier, they would be taking more aggressive action to take away their house or car.  

    Please note I am not endorsing these methods, especially by the police, but the fact is that good cop, bad cop is an effective tool for compliance because using it — often in very subtle ways — does apparently enhance the impact both the carrots and the sticks. In fact, this qualitative study is bolstered by experiments on negotiation teams by researchers Susan Brodt and Marla Tuchinsky  showing that — under most situations — having both a good cop and a bad cop on a negotiation team is a winning strategy.

    BUT there was also a twist we did not address in our research, and in fact, would have been tough to do as we were studying people in "the wilds" of organizational life.  Their research shows that starting with a good cop and then using a bad cop was not effective, that the method only was effective for negotiating teams when the bad cop went first and the good cop followed.   So, this may mean it really should be called "The Bad Cop, Good Cop Technique."   In thinking about this finding, and looking at our old data, I notice that — in just about all the cases we looked at — although the cops or bill collectors started out nice at times, they would switch back and forth between good and bad cop, so there would be many times when the good cop followed a bad cop — as the example of the nice and nasty bill collector above shows.  One exception is the "hypothetical" bad cop technique, where the good cop warns that if you don't pay now, things are going to get a lot nastier — which in the case of debts, everyone knows is not a hollow threat.

    As I wrote in The No Asshole Rule, although I generally am opposed to workplace assholes, there are times when they do seem to be effective — after all, fear and intimidation do change human behavior, despite the dangerous side-effects.  The implication of this theory and research is if you are an asshole, and want to be a more effective one, you would be wise to team-up with a good cop.  This isbecause doing so will make your nastiness sting even more and because good cops also often play the role of toxic handler, cleaning up the mess that asshole bosses and other nasty people leave behind.

    I wonder, do other people use variations of good cop, bad cop? Or have you had it used on you?

    Here are the citations to the
    articles:

    Brodt, S.E. and Tuchinsky, M. (2000) Working together but in opposition: An examination of the “good cop/bad cop” negotiating team tactic. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 81, 155-177.

    Rafaeli, A., and Sutton, R., (1991). Emotional contrast strategies as means of social influence: Lessons
    from criminal interrogators and bill collectors. Academy of Management Journal, 34, 749–775.

  • Jeff Pfeffer on “Perverse Norms” About Good Management

    I was reading through an old but still spot-on book by my friend and co-author Jeff Pfeffer,  The Human Equation, which provides an evidence-based case about why companies that put people first enjoy superior financial performance over the long-run.   Jeff makes an argument that is a variation of something one of my college friends used to say, "eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong."  But he adds prestige and status as an added twist in a section he labels "Perverse Norms about What Constitutes Good Management," and how such norms often emerge even though they conflict with the evidence.   He uses the example of layoffs — which are no doubt sometimes necessary.  But executives often seem to act in ways that clash with evidence showing that companies that do layoffs last and least tend to perform best over time:

    " If the world believes that laying-off employees by the carload is good management and confers status on those that do it with the most vigor, it will be difficult for executives to resist the temptation to conform to the normative definition of "good management" and thereby achieve approval."

    As usual, Jeff is smart and blunt.

  • Mintzberg in the WSJ: Get Rid of Executive Bonuses

    Today's Wall Street Journal has a simply brilliant argument by management theorist and guru Henry Minztberg titled "Get Rid of Executive Bonuses."  I think it is brilliant because it marries the results of  diverse and compelling research from many corners of academia with a concise and logical argument.  It also is consistent with Dan Pink's argument I mentioned recently that many of the assumptions beneath the way we run organizations are based on little if any evidence — but rather are articles of faith.  As always, I also love Mintzberg's boldness.  The heart of his argument, and you must read the nuances, is that three of the assumptions about the logic for executive bonuses clash with the weight of the evidence:

    A company's health is represented by its financial measures alone—even better, by just the price of its stock.

    Performance measures, whether short or long term, represent the true strength of the company.

    The CEO, with a few other senior executives, is primarily responsible for the company's performance.

    Mintzberg then digs into a topic that Jeff Pfeffer and I talk a lot about in our chapter in Hard Facts on "Do Financial Incentives Drive Company Performance?  That is, what kind of people does your performance evaluation system attract and what kind does it drive away?   Here is what Mintzberg, note how he turns the argument that "if we don't pay these people bonuses, we won't have enough good people."  I quote:

    Actually, bonuses can serve one purpose. It has been claimed that if
    you don't pay them, you don't get the right person in the CEO chair. I
    believe that if you do pay bonuses, you get the wrong person
    in that chair. At the worst, you get a self-centered narcissist. At the
    best, you get someone who is willing to be singled out from everyone
    else by virtue of the compensation plan. Is this any way to build
    community within an enterprise, even to foster the very sense of
    enterprise that is so fundamental to economic strength?

    Accordingly, executive bonuses provide the perfect tool to screen
    candidates for the CEO job. Anyone who insists on them should be
    dismissed out of hand, because he or she has demonstrated an absence of
    the leadership attitude required for a sustainable enterprise.

    Of course, this might thin the roster of candidates. Good. Most need to
    be thinned, in order to be refilled with people who don't allow their
    own needs to take precedence over those of the community they wish to
    lead.

    I confess that some his arguments even make me squirm, and I also am concerned because he doesn't really spell out what system might replace bonuses.   But his last argument (especially the part I have put in bold letters) really appeals to me, in part, because one of the best definitions I ever heard of an asshole executive is that he or she consistently puts his or her needs and wants ahead of the company and colleagues.  Mintzberg is making a compelling argument that the current system seems largely designed to attract and create exactly that flavor of asshole!