"When people are treated unfairly, for example, when they are not allowed to have input into decisions that will affect them, or when they are not given good explanations of why certain decisions were made, the symbolic message may be that the organization does not think highly enough of them (to provide input or to be given good explanations)."
A concerned manager pointed me to a potential unilateral decision on incident management software about to happen and I am trying to strategize how to intervene on behalf of <<< waves to team not being included on this decision >>>
"Using relevant personal experiences, employees collect information regarding trade-offs between safety and productivity issues, attending mostly to situations presenting a conflict between the two. Practically speaking, if productivity is favored across a variety of situations, implying a higher priority, it will promote a poor safety climate, leading employees to align their behaviors accordingly."
@mlevison yeah if you pop it into google scholar or similar there is an open pdf on research gate. I typically don't link to ancillary docs because I want to link to the specific publication and then folks can use that to browse for open copies/plus people are super mean on here if you share a link they consider weird or maybe it's a platform they don't like idk. Not worth the bizarre blowback.
The overall literature on how employees contextualize and interpret trade-offs between potentially conflicting goals seems like...a big one for software to start to understand better. Safety/productivity trade-offs and conflicts are well studied in other areas, and there are even tested interventions -- e.g., improving the communication between management and direct reports in manufacturing! I suppose software considers itself above such areas of psychology
"Messages from managers are impactful not only during the hiring process, but also throughout employees’ tenure. Managerial trickle-down effects have been found in several literatures in organizational behavior (e.g., Wo, Ambrose, & Schminke, 2015), which show that managers at lower levels tend to treat their direct reports similarly to how they have been treated by their own bosses." - Brockner & Sherman, 2019, again
"one way to fulfill the promise of onboarding employees in a self-affirming way is for organizations to allow for job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), which refers to employee-initiated changes in how they do their work."
Brockner & Sherman
I've been noodling on this for a long while, since thinking about the role Agency plays in Developer Thriving (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10491133 ) -- it would be cool to measure how much job crafting folks feel like they have or don't have on software teams
There are however two sides to this -- much research on organizational fairness concentrates entirely on the "top-down and static approach" (Brockner & Sherman, 2019) of how managers impact their direct reports, but not how direct reports influence their managers. Particularly in knowledge work where technical credibility testing is high, I believe those bidirectional relationships are very impactful. Vicious or virtuous cycles make all the difference
This is good for individuals, not just organizations: for example when individuals are able to exercise compassionate interpretations of their managers ("perhaps my boss never had the training to deal with this situation and he doesn't have the information I have") they are more likely to intervene, self-advocate, and also suffer fewer harms to themselves because being able to go through reappraisal can de-escalate the stress and burden of a situation (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-45081-001)
Organizational fairness exists upwards and downwards, but critically: LATERALLY. Peers can be a source of protection and repair after negative mistreatment from authorities, but conversely, mistreatment from peers can also undo the good done by fair leadership (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.2441). We are all in it together, no one is separate from this
"to foster positive work attitudes and behaviors in their direct reports managers have a dual fairness challenge: (1) to treat their direct reports fairly, and (2) to create conditions in which their direct reports treat one another fairly.
Indeed, the findings of Bendersky and Brockner suggest that the failure of managers to do the latter may counteract the success they achieved by doing the former." (Brockner & Sherman, 2019)
All right, it's time to get away from papers and into sunday relaxation, this has been another random "read with Cat" thread as I refreshed my way through some papers on organizational fairness! 🥰
If you are curious for my deeper take on how organizational psychology can be used to help software teams, I build on these theories and many other papers in my review paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qz43x
Do they mean peers you're likely to interact repeatedly with, like to interact exactly once with (because of organisational distance), or both? (I expect this to at least sometimes differ significantly between the two groups, because in exactly one case trust between two individuals can exist.)
@grimalkina I'm been thinking about a related thing a lot, which is how in the industry-wide push to reframe every role as a software development one, I think orgs often end up doing a disservice to people whose jobs operate very differently from "software developer who writes features for external customers".
@grimalkina not gonna lie, it hurts to talk about this stuff. Software has been so totally committed to its own exceptionality for so long that the whole notion of psychological self-awareness and its systemic impacts is an identity threat to the field, even though the inside of our heads is where the raw material of our work comes from. It’s so terrible and we’re so far behind as a field.
@mhoye it DOES hurt, I feel that too and appreciate you voicing it. I can see how much of our world functions only because many self-sacrificing individuals are taking on far more than they should have to (similar in my mind to teachers). But there can be surprising strengths and opportunities in moments of transition, and I really think we're in a moment of transition. More people than I thought in software are more committed to community than that conventional exceptional loneliness
@grimalkina this can be applied to manyany orgs but seems relevant to MS right now as they did realign around safety over a decade ago but restructuring and turnover since then has lost the safety culture they tried to build, after so much success improving Windows security now they have shit tier Azure security and loss of focus on core quality.
@grimalkina what are your thoughts on motivation model from Daniel Pinks Drive? it lists autonomy as one of the three pillars of intrisict motivation. mastery and purpose being the other two. autonomy is defined as ability to have input what on and how you work
@sumek Daniel Pink is a popular author, which means his books float on top of scientists' work on motivation and he mostly operates by summarizing a lot of it. Mutatis mutandis keeping in mind the ways that a popsci book oversimplifies or needs to explain concepts, I think Drive is a decent enough summary of modern motivation science (but kind of suffers from an individualistic mental model, which a lot of motivation is moving away from these days -- this is what sells better in airports)
@sumek so yeah, autonomy mastery and purpose are all fairly well established as important psychological needs, I do believe in it. I tend to prefer "agency" over "autonomy" (again, individualist/US culture -- there are a lot of steep penalties to too much autonomy like structural loneliness) but that's psychological nuance for scientists like me so like OVERALL? A decent enough breakdown I think. Mastery is a long-standing concept in achievement psychology
@sumek Ah what I mean by this is there's an increasing amount of evidence for the role of the environment and motivation as a situation-by-situation strategy and the "psychological affordances" that let us exercise it! Individual plays a strong role but shapes and is shaped by the affordances of the environment. So yeah, groups being motivated as a whole is one way to put it!
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