A small MIT study tentatively destroys the idea — that leaders are transformationally important to employees

© 2016 Peter Free

04 June 2016

 

Contrary to decades of hype

Leadership may only matter when it makes workers’ lives painful:

 

Bosses play no role in fostering a sense of meaningfulness at work – but they do have the capacity to destroy it and should stay out of the way, new research shows.

The study by researchers at the University of Sussex and the University of Greenwich shows that quality of leadership receives virtually no mention when people describe meaningful moments at work, but poor management is the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

© 2016 James Hakner, Meaningful work not created – only destroyed – by bosses, study finds, University of Sussex (03 June 2016)

 

Not good for the Business BS publishing industry

From the MIT Sloan Management Review:

 

We interviewed 135 people working in 10 very different occupations and asked them to tell us stories about incidents or times when they found their work to be meaningful and, conversely, times when they asked themselves, “What’s the point of doing this job?”

[W]e found that . . . meaningfulness tended to be intensely personal and individual; it was often revealed to employees as they reflected on their work and its wider contribution to society in ways that mattered to them as individuals.

People tended to speak of their work as meaningful in relation to thoughts or memories of significant family members such as parents or children, bridging the gap between work and the personal realm.

[O]ur interviewees talked of unplanned or unexpected moments during which they found their work deeply meaningful.

We were anticipating that our data would show that the meaningfulness experienced by employees in relation to their work was clearly associated with actions taken by managers, such that . . . transformational leaders would have followers who found their work meaningful, whereas transactional leaders would not.

Instead, our research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

© 2016 Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden, What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless, MIT Sloan Management Review (01 June 2016) (extracts)

 

These results, assessed from an anonymous leader’s perspective

Leading is essentially an unglamorous task focused on seeing that the mission is carried out (via supervision), without simultaneously turning capable team members’ stomachs. Providing a good example (in the basics of mission accomplishment) usually goes further than posturing an ideal in front of the troops.

Organizational ineffectiveness, in my experience, usually is the result of being unwilling to discipline or get rid of people unsuited to accomplishing the organization’s mission. Pruning is not glamorous. Most people do not like the confrontation necessary to getting it done.

Yet, if we think about it, subordinates’ unexpected moments of job satisfaction generally have to do with the mission’s occasional fit with aspects of their personal value systems. Therefore, booting someone from a place unsuited to them is not a necessarily an unfriendly thing to do.

 

The moral? —Done interpersonally effectively, good leadership is not especially noticeable

Leaders are, for the most part, replaceable cogs in the teamwork machine.  Perhaps we should aspire to become cogs without missing or slipping teeth. (Pun and contradictory inferences intended.)

History mostly remembers opportunistically favored narcissists. However, remembrance does not necessarily equate with having led well, when assessed in light of the presumed mission and the values that ostensibly mandated it. The above cited study implies as much.