Psychology 2: Choice…Increasing Productivity through Choice and Collaboration
So, as we concluded in Part 4a of this series, is work or the “boss” or your fellow employees in your quality world? Chances are that there are “select people” at work that you include in your quality world. With these folks, you can “be yourself” and you look forward to having lunch with them or working with them on some project. Here you find support, acceptance, synergy and likely accept their input and even disagreement without feeling judged. Perhaps, there are others with whom you interact as little as conceivable because they do not help you “feel as good as possible as often as possible.” These folks are why we call work…work. This being said and with the
acknowledgement that we could now address relationships at work including peers, subordinates and bosses applying “Choice”… let’s focus on Boss Management which is how we will refer to the boss who uses control as their management style.
Boss Management
Typically, the boss sets the standards for an organization. Depending on their Thinking and Behavioral Attributes, they push forward an agenda reflective of “who they are”, what is important to them and who is holding them accountable to what. Blatant bossiness is somewhat on the decline in today’s managerial climate though certainly it is nowhere near absent. Control approaches to performance are as prevalent as ever.
Some of this “control presence”, however, is not always the bosses doing. Why? Because control is still such a feature in our world, in the worker’s mindset that even when collaborative synergizing steps are taken they are interpreted as controlling. Creating this change in a workforce does not happen overnight but over time. Part of that explanation is that the longer lower level managers operate in a control environment themselves the more they use that pattern of interaction. They are “use to it” and can even defend it as their modus operandi.