Here be monsters

When you log into Slack or tap your security card on the office turn style, do you do it with a spring in your step and a smile on your face? Do you wave a cheery hello, be it emoji or with real fingers, to everyone you pass? Or do you enter work mode with fear in your heart and a bone weary dread, keeping your eyes firmly fixed on the floor to avoid eye contact? If it’s the latter, you’re not alone, and chances are you’re suffering from a common condition that afflicts many people around the world. You don’t know what kind of mood your boss is going to be in today. It’s not you, it’s them.

There are good managers, who behave ethically most of the time, and there are bad managers, who don’t. And then there are the unpredictable “Jekyll and Hyde” managers, who are sometimes worthy of respect and other times abusive. In a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a group of researchers working around the world described Jekyll and Hyde managers as being demoralising and likely to affect productivity as out-and-out abusers.

Sound familiar?

The study evaluated managers based on employee feedback, using a scale of abusive to ethical based on two factors: what kind of leader a boss is and what kind of supervisor they are. Ethical leaders who manage teams in a Draconian manner, or poor leaders who are employees’ best friend, don’t offset the problems in one area by excelling in another. And erratic behaviour is just as unsettling.

“If you’re constantly guessing which boss will turn up – the good cop or the bad cop – then you wind up emotionally exhausted, demoralised, and unable to work to your full potential,” the lead author, Haoying Xu, said in the journal.

Fear, uncertainty, doubt

Unfortunately, it looks like bad behaviour outweighs good, with employees taking more cues from a manager’s negative actions than they do from positive ones. And it’s not just employees either; Xu reckons unpredictability also rubs off on other managers within a firm.

Not only is this true in the workplace; it’s easy to think of South African politicians who have been outwardly charming and taken an ethical stance on some issues, but displayed enough poor judgement and unethical behaviours to destroy entire institutions.

You don’t need to go far into the research to know that heightened anxiety and fear of the unknown is draining; it burns energy resources to keep our danger-sensing instincts alive, leaving little for the day-to-day of life. Before HR got all touchy-feely and adopted the lingo of “employee engagement” as a catch-all term for monitoring workplace morale, it was common in dry, academic tomes to speak of the “psychological contract” between workplace and drone.

There are two types of contract parties enter into when someone joins the firm: the written, legal contract, and the unspoken psychological contract that – at its best – more or less boils down to, “we’re all on the same side”, or “the boss will have your back”. Not all psychological contracts are positive. We might accept a bad one and, say, work for Elon Musk, if the rewards in the written terms are good enough.

Speaking of “engagement” recognises that in these less-paternalistic times, the psychological contract is a two-way thing, albeit one in which the power lies mostly on one side. Engaged people give something back into the contract, mostly in return for the opportunities to better themselves in other ways, like learning new skills or getting to exercise their creative juices every now and then.

The purpose of growth

The impact of breaking the psychological contract is, self-evidently, psychological. A strong psychological contract is, many argue, essential to things like low staff turnover.

All over the world, political leaders are breaking psychological contracts with citizens in order to increase the levels of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) in order to present themselves as the only ones that guarantee stability and success. Techies will be familiar with FUD as the go-to tactic once commonly deployed by vendors to convince hapless CFOs that they need millions of rands of infrastructure which, while not particularly useful in any obvious way, they had to have because their competitors were buying it.

If you’re constantly guessing which boss will turn up – the good cop or the bad cop – then you wind up emotionally exhausted.

- Haoying Xu

FUD has, mercifully, become less common for server sales in the age of highly competitive cloud services, and vendors are now keener to present themselves as partners journeying through this muddled world together, rather than Great Saviours who simply know best. But Silicon Valley’s bro-rocracy, also now known as the Government of the United States, has simply moved up a rung. Instead of making you worry that your server is going to be obsolete in a few years, they now want to make you worry that your entire life is going to be obsolete thanks to machine learning algorithms.

It was good, then, to see Discovery Bank chair Reuel Khoza quoted by Currency News as questioning the FUD at an AI conference. “What is the purpose of growth, and growth that does not provide employment and livelihoods to ever increasing populations?” he is reported as saying. “AI does help a great deal – it is at the cutting edge of growth and technology – but it raises human and humane questions that continue to be vexing.”

Humane questions, not psychological torture? Just perhaps, that’s the secret to long-term growth a company needs.?