How - Dov Seidman [62]
Business in the internetworked world moves faster each year, and the conditions of the marketplace reward organizations and teams most able to adapt to changing circumstances. Companies who subject their employees to mixed messages, repetitive policy changes, or in-congruent practices may actually be causing the workforce they so desperately want to be nimble and adaptive to instead become hooked on resistance to adaptation and change. When things get really out of hand, you end up in the Kafkaesque reality of the bakery that won’t cut. Other studies of cognitive dissonance have shown that when learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are less likely to concede that what they believe is useless, pointless, or valueless because to do so would be to admit that they had been duped.13 Thus the counterperson at the bakery can, with a sweet and genuine smile, tell you that it is against policy to cut a roll, no matter how long or vociferously you attempt to convince her otherwise. For her to see your logic and admit to the folly of the policy would be to admit to being a fool, which, obviously, she will naturally resist.
Though companies desperately want employees to keep their heads in the game, it turns out that generally they do a terrible job at creating the conditions necessary for employees to do so. A three-year survey of about 1.2 million employees at Fortune 1000 companies conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence concluded that, although the vast majority of employees are filled with enthusiasm when they begin a new job, in about 85 percent of companies morale declines dramatically after six months and continues to do so for years afterward.14 The Sirota research lays the fault squarely at the feet of management and its inability to create policies and procedures that satisfy the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work:
1. Equity: to be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
2. Achievement: to be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
3. Camaraderie: to have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.
These statistics illuminate the ultimate cost of dissonance: cynicism. When a company breaks trust and fails to live up to the representations it makes and the values it professes, the enthusiasm new hires bring to the company gets eaten away until nothing is left but the dry bones of cynics. Cynics believe that people are motivated by pure self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons. They create a space of suspicion between themselves and the actions of others—a permanent and unfillable Certainty Gap—and habitually question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile. While it is not necessarily corrosive to question things—skepticism can be a healthy response in the right circumstances—to do so reflexively, out of unconscious habit of mind instead of honest consideration, places you at a distance from the events around you.
Cynicism hampers more than just the intangibles of the way people interrelate; it directly affects the bottom line. Studies indicate that highly cynical employees are more likely to file grievances against the company, show lower levels of commitment, and be less likely to believe management would reward good work.15 (This last fact is particularly relevant to cultures that govern primarily through carrot-and-stick motivational models. When the power of the carrot becomes moot, the stick becomes the only means management has to achieve progress.) Cynicism consumes energy like a sport utility vehicle consumes hydrocarbons. You can’t make a Wave in a stadium full of