For most employees, goal-focused behavior on the part of the leader is helpful. Goal-focused leaders provide specific goals and task structure to match those goals, make suggestions on how to achieve goals, and follow-up to ensure goals are achieved.
New research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology provides more support for the idea that leaders need to know their employees, because one style of leader behavior does not fit all. This study of 1252 customer service employees in a call center and 392 manual laborers suggests that this goal-focused style of leadership works best with employees that are high in conscientiousness and emotional stability, but can burnout (emotional exhaustion) employees that are low in conscientiousness. Employees that were low in conscientiousness but high in emotional stability were less likely to experience burnout from this style of leadership.
If you have employees that you suspect are low in conscientiousness (e.g. easily distracted, disorganized, careless, apathetic), you should think twice about assigning them to goal-focused managers. While you might be tempted to think that the manager might be able to “turn them around,’ you should remember that you can’t change someone’s personality. If you want to avoid burning out your employees and frustrating your managers, you would be better off assigning your less conscientious employees to your less intense managers.
The challenge which most managers fail is the ability to observe employee behavior and correctly conclude if the behavior is primarily being driven by employee personality, attitudes, or systemic variables (e.g. training, staffing, procedures, and materials) outside of the employee’s control. If you assume that all undesirable employee behavior is a result of personality traits (e.g. low conscientiousness, narcissism), you are most likely committing the fundamental attribution error.
Personality does matter, but if you think about it, selecting employees low in conscientiousness and placing them with goal driven managers is a systemic problem. Obviously, you should also examine why you have some managers that are highly goal driven and others that are not.
If your managers are making random instead of evidence-based personnel decisions, you should not be surprised if they blame their people when things go wrong.
Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.
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