Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [9]
One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that good performance—job accomplishments—is sufficient to acquire power and avoid organizational difficulties. Consequently, people leave too much to chance and fail to effectively manage their careers. If you are going to create a path to power, you need to lose the idea that performance by itself is enough. And once you understand why this is the case, you can even profit from the insight.
THE WEAK LINK BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND JOB OUTCOMES
There is a lot of systematic evidence on the connections between job performance and career outcomes. You need to know the facts if you are going to intelligently plot a strategy to acquire power. The data shows that performance doesn’t matter that much for what happens to most people in most organizations. That includes the effect of your accomplishments on those ubiquitous performance evaluations and even on your job tenure and promotion prospects.
More than 20 years ago social psychologist David Schoorman studied the performance appraisal ratings obtained by 354 clerical employees working in a public sector organization.5 Employees were categorized by their supervisors’ involvement in their hiring. In some cases, managers “inherited” employees—they were there when the manager took on the supervisory role. In other cases, the boss participated in the hiring decision and favored the job candidate now being evaluated. In still other instances, the supervisor participated in the hiring or promotion decision but he or she was overruled by others involved in the final choice. In this latter case, managers found themselves supervising an employee they had not favored hiring. The simple but important question Schoorman asked was: how does a supervisor’s mere involvement in the hiring process affect the performance evaluations subsequently given to subordinates?
As you might guess, supervisors who were actively involved in hiring people whom they favored rated those subordinates more highly on performance appraisals than they did those employees they inherited or the ones they did not initially support. In fact, whether or not the supervisor had been actively engaged in the selection process had an effect on people’s performance evaluations even when objective measures of job performance were statistically controlled. Supervisors evaluated people hired over their opposition more negatively either than those whom they had favored in the hiring or those they had inherited. David Schoorman’s study shows the effects of behavioral commitment—once someone has made a positive or negative judgment about a potential job candidate, that judgment colors subsequent performance appraisals. What this research means is that job performance matters less for your evaluation than your supervisor’s commitment to and relationship with you.
Extensive research on promotions in organizations, with advancement measured either by changes in position, increases in salary, or both, also reveals the modest contribution of job performance in accounting for the variation in what happens to people. In 1980, economists James Medoff and Katherine Abraham observed that salaries in companies were more strongly related to age and organizational tenure than they were to job performance.6 Ensuing research has confirmed and extended their findings, both in the United States and elsewhere. For instance, a study using data from Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker reported that white-collar