Why It May Be Best to Keep a Distance between an Organization and Its Members
Businesses increasingly attempt to motivate their employees not just with financial incentives, pressure, or clever management techniques, but by asking employees to identify more with ‘their’ business and with ‘their’ products. So-called leading businesses in particular declare that ‘money alone does not motivate’ and that motivation also requires a good climate and the identification of employees with their work.
The tasks and responsibilities of staff are broadened to such an extent that everyone is able to identify with the purposes of the organization, the idea being that, when staff are free to organize work for themselves, they will come to see how much fun it is to produce high-quality kitchen scales or baking mixes.
More and more businesses are convinced that their employees’ identification with their work will increase the company’s capacity for innovation and change. There is a firm belief that employees who identify with markets, products, and economic processes will develop their own interest in ensuring that their work is as efficient and innovative as possible. If the employees identify strongly enough with the organization, it will almost automatically, it is hoped, become more innovative and efficient. With the zeal of converts, managers pass on the story of a stone mason who, when asked what he does, does not answer ‘I am chiselling away at stones’ or ‘I am earning my money’, but ‘we are building a cathedral’.
The idea of non-monetary ways of motivating employees is actually an old one. Shortly before the Second World War, Chester I. Barnard, the American pioneer of management studies, had already pointed out that financial payments, career opportunities, and status symbols such as company cars and especially luxurious carpeting will not suffice to bind someone to a company. According to Barnard, one needs to influence the needs and purposes of the employees in such a way that, even when leaving aside the remuneration they receive, they also feel that their interests and those of the company coincide.
The strategies for achieving this do not need to be as ruthless as those Barnard had in mind. In order to make employees identify with their goals, businesses do not necessarily need to inculcate the interests of the company in everyone down to the temporary errand boy, nor do they need only to recruit people with a suitable motivational structure – and they certainly do not need to motivate staff by firing employees who lack motivation.
Modern management rather attempts to change the work environment in a way that allows employees to identify with their work. They are offered more contact with the market so that they can see the effects of their actions. They are given holistic tasks so that they can feel responsible for a product or process. They are afforded autonomy so that they can learn from mistakes and independently adjust their ways of working.
This transformation of the work environment is supplemented by measures that inform employees about the purpose of actions and changes. Businesses spend a lot of money explaining to their employees how meaningful their products and processes are. Company newsletters eulogize new products, celebrate successes, and present revolutionary new production methods. Catchy names like TOP or SUPER are used to try to drum up the employees’ enthusiasm for new changes being introduced. The management presents its new strategies in videos in the hope that this openness will have a motivating effect on the employees. But what actually lies behind the idea that employees should identify with products, processes, and the company as a whole?
The assumption is that a business will do a better job if the operating process is ‘reinforced’ and ‘stabilized’ by the employees’ interest in what they are doing. There is a belief that processes of change work better if identification with them is not just bought with high salaries and bonuses, company cars with teak interiors, or glitzy prizes, but when the changes are actually seen by the employees as being in their personal interest. The assumption is that human beings are more likely to be motivated by something when they are interested in it and that this will lead them to identify with the values and norms of the business.
The attempt to make employees identify with processes and products is a way of broadening, at least to some extent, the limited and narrow involvement of employees in their organizations. As a rule, a worker does not join an organization as a whole person, as it were; rather, workers offer their labour for a specific purpose. Strengthening employees’ sense of identification with processes and products is an attempt to expand this merely partial commitment. Employees’ attachment to the company is strengthened in the interests of themselves and the company.
At first glance, this does indeed seem to imply some advantages for the business. If employees are motivated solely by money, superiors need to oversee every action. Superiors profit from a situation in which shared norms, values, and fundamental attitudes complement remuneration and career opportunities because these norms and values provide a more stable foundation for cooperation than the pure exchange principle of labour for wages.
But there is a serious downside to the identification of employees with processes and products. The business – and this may initially come as a surprise – loses a substantial part of its capacity for change. The organization loses elasticity, because for the employees it becomes difficult to understand why they should accept changes that do not conform to their ideas of the processes and products with which they identify.
Managers face a dilemma: they cannot motivate employees solely with money and pressure because they are dependent on employees’ active participation, but at the same time the identification of employees with particular products and processes limits the company’s capacity for change. Those things with which employees identify strongly will be particularly resistant to change and will only be able to be altered at the price of a significant demotivation of the employees affected. It is the strength and at the same time tragic component of identification that those things one identifies with can only be changed if one is prepared to accept a significant loss. That the motivation of employees through their identification with processes and products frequently limits a company’s capacity for change is a tragedy for management, and one that cannot easily be resolved.
