…level of pay had little relation to either job or pay satisfaction. This indicates that within an organization, those who make more money are little more satisfied than those who make considerably less. Moreover, relatively well paid samples of individuals are only trivially more satisfied than relatively poorly paid samples…The results of this review – the first quantitative review to appear in the literature – suggests that earnings are only weakly satisfying to individuals even when they confine their satisfaction to an evaluation of their pay.(p. 162)

Wow. For employees, these findings suggest that if you want a good job (one you are satisfied with), then pay should not be at the top of your shopping list. Other things like interesting and autonomous work and leadership that is more relational than transactional are better predictors of job satisfaction.

For employers, the authors suggest three important implications (p. 163):

1. Don’t mistake satisfaction with motivation. Pay can be used to motivate workers, even if it cannot be used to satisfy them.

2. Having a satisfied workforce is important, but being a pay leader, by itself, is not a good strategy for improving the job satisfaction of your workforce. Look to other things like better supervision, a better work environment, and jobs designed to be engaging.

3. A policy of high pay dispersion does make sense if the most highly paid workers are the ones you want to retain.  High pay is potentially satisfying to the extent that an individual worker looks at her/his colleagues that are paid at or above market levels and perceives a significant difference.

Be careful with number three. If you are going to adopt such a policy, make sure the requirements for achieving significantly higher pay are unambiguous, available to all, and consistently applied. Nothing will poison a satisfied workforce faster than the perception of unfair and disinterested management practices.

[This post originally appeared on Positive Organizational Behavior. Find more great content at www.bretlsimmons.com]

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 onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.

Last week, Bob Sutton wrote on his blog: “most management books are based on anecdotes, the biased recollections of some famous executives, or on research that is presented as rigorous (but is not…Good to Great is a perfect example).”

In the same week, friend and LeaderLab contributor Bret Simmons tweeted that “Academic research rarely leads, sometimes informs, and usually lags leadership practice in the best organizations.”

Both of these two brilliant organizational scholars seem to be in conflict of opinion on the role of research. One is championing the researchers and applauding the few times that research breaks through to the realm of the management bookshelf while the other is criticizing the ivory tower of researchers and pointing to organizations themselves as the primary fount of organizational discovery.

And yet they are both right.

Academic research suffers from an inability to inform the organizational leader. The cause is two-fold. Solid research takes a long time to bring to the public; from the design of the study to the final presentation in a peer-reviewed journal is a process that can take years. This process also seems to turn the research into an esoteric language that only other academics can speak. So when research is published, it’s quite easy to turn to the “real-world” and find an organization already operating according to its implications (as an example, consider Atlassian and the research of Deci & Ryan – translated by Daniel Pink, of course). This can lead many to believe that academic research lags behind the practice of leading organizations.

And it does.

But it still holds significant value.

One or two organizations may already be acting in alignment with the research findings. However, the vast majority is not. When research “catches up” to the leading organizations, it is still out in front of this majority. It is then that the research findings validate the actions of these leading firms, showing the reasons why those leadership practices work and the ways they can work across all organizations.

When left alone, Sutton’s aforementioned anecdotes make for interesting reading but often leave leaders with a “that’ll never work here.” When coupled with research, those anecdotes leave one with only one conclusion:

“It must work here.”

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

LeaderLab is partnering with organizational scholars to gather research on the importance of building ethical climates. If you have 10 minutes, please help our research by taking a brief survey.

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Now, though, we might actually have data.

I recently read an interesting study from Gary E. Bolton, Axel Ockenfels and Ulrich Thonemann entitled “Who’s Better at Making Decisions: Managers or Students?” The researchers set up a simple problem involving inventory management and profit maximization. A store manager is tasked with ordering stock when demand is unpredictable and highly volatile. The only information given is past sales. The most common solution is to order based on the average of sales, but this does not maximize profits.

When giving the problem to both business students and real-world managers, the researchers found that those with real world experience faired no better in maximizing profits than did business students. “Given their high levels of experience, you might think so. But they did not.

In fact, when given the chance to learn ways to improve ordering strategies, even though managers’ performance improved, it did not improve as much as the students’.”

The researchers cite anchoring bias – the tendency to over rely on one piece of information  – as the culprit for both business and practitioners. The results suggest that, for those with experience, that experience more heavily anchors them into past modes of operating.

Is experience really the best teacher? How can we use experience to learn without also learning anchoring bias?

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He is an executive coach, a sought-after speaker and an adjunct professor of business at several universities. He can be reached by email here or at his website: davidburkus.com.

LeaderLab is partnering with organizational scholars to gather research on the importance of building ethical climates.

Help us gain a better understanding by taking a brief survey here.

Dr. Roberto is an alum and former professor at Harvard Business School. He is now the Trustee Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Program Innovation at Bryant University. In addition to this course, Dr. Roberto has created a large contribution to the field, including numerous cases and the book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes For an Answer – a worthwhile read as well.

But simply having a large number of women at work did not equate to more women in managerial roles. The study found that women were more integrated into larger organizations that experienced growth. Women have more opportunity to access significant managerial jobs in larger establishments. The data showed that women have the least opportunity to access non-trivial managerial jobs in organizations with less than 100 employees.

One of the most interesting findings of the study was something the authors call the “gender stall effect.” From 1975 to 2005, women have experienced increasing representation in low-status managerial jobs with little authority. Yet even as the overall representation of women in management has increased, their relative status within management is declining. The effect of women in management on desegregation is waning.

Getting into an organization is one thing, moving up the organization is something altogether different. For example, the next time you are in your neighborhood bank, take a look around.  I am going to bet that most of the faces you see behind the teller counter are female. Now look around at the desks occupied by the loan officers, financial advisors, and managers. I bet you are still going to see a large percentage of women in those positions. Now go home and Google that bank and look at the composition of the executive management team and board of directors. Is the percentage of females at the top the same as at the bottom? I doubt it.

We’ve come a long way since 1975, but we still have important work to do. The “level playing field” is much more myth than reality.

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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Human capital is the knowledge, skills, and abilities of your employees. Past research has shown that some of the most important aspects of human capital that drive company strategy and performance are the experiences, education, and training of managers.

This study’s analysis of data from 66 previously published studies found that human capital had a significant and positive impact on global measures of company performance (e.g. ROA and Returns on Sales). The relationship between human capital and performance was strongest when the human capital was firm-specific (e.g. years of experience with a firm) vs. general (e.g. a  stockbroker).  When human capital is general in nature, wages and the threat of turnover are higher because the labor market is more competitive. But specific human capital is more valuable to the performance of your company because it is hard to for you to replace and for your competition to copy.

The study also found that human capital has an even stronger effect on measures of operational performance (e.g. customer service satisfaction, team performance, retention, and innovation).  Operational performance, in-turn, had a strong effect on global measures of company performance. This demonstrates that human capital drives the performance of your company through its effect on operational excellence.  Your company cannot thrive with crappy operations, and your operations cannot thrive without good people.

When I teach the service-profit chain in my MBA classes, my bottom line is that the single most important thing you need to do on a daily basis if you want to grow revenue and profit in your company is to take care of your employees. Inevitably, there are always a few know-it-all managers that smirk when I say this. Like it or not, it’s an empirical fact that your people are the key to success for you and your company.

Take care of your people. Teach them to take care of each other and your customers. Once you develop this very specific human capital in them, don’t treat them like a commodity. Treat them like the performance of your firm depends on them, because it does.

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In contrast to securely attached individuals, anxiously attached people are overdependent and avoidantly attached people are counterdependent on others. Overdependent people cling too tightly to others and as a result tend to drain their critical social support networks, while counterdependent people, believing that no one will be available to turn to, isolate themselves and resist supportive gestures from others.

A study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology sheds some light on the effects of anxious and avoidant attachment styles in the workplace. The researchers summarize their findings as follows:

Taken together, our results are generally consistent with attachment theory in that avoidant individuals tend to be self-reliant and disengage from affiliation with others by suppressing negative emotions and not seeking support to deal with work difficulties, whereas anxious individuals tend to display dysfunctional interaction patterns by being less likely to display prosocial behavior and more likely to think about quitting their job. (p. 11).

One interesting finding from this research was that attachment anxiety was positively related to seeking support at work. This implies that overdependent individuals might be more likely to seek support for stressful situations at work than in romantic or family contexts.

If you are a supervisor, it’s important to understand that people react to stress at work differently, and not everyone will view your attempts to provide support as beneficial. Your employees with a secure attachment style will accept your support, but they are less likely to need it because they probably have a very well developed and healthy support network, both at work and outside of work. Your employees with an anxious attachment style need your support more than others and will likely welcome it. Your employees with an avoidant attachment style will likely let you know they think they are just fine and neither need nor want your help.

Understanding is the key to working with personality at work. Understand your own personality first, and then try to discern the individual differences of your colleagues and employees. Remember, you cannot change anyone’s personality, including your own. But if you understand personality, you can change the thing you have the most control of at work – your own behavior.

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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The problem is it is hardly relevant. Anyone that is truly interested in management would look at those findings and think “duh!”

I’m a strong supporter of evidence-based management. But even as a trained management researcher, I sometimes struggle to interpret some of the studies published in our best journals. And for those studies that I can understand, I’m often left struggling to explain the practical relevance of the findings to practicing managers.

The challenge with evidence-based management is you have to sort through a lot of insignificant excellence to get something relatively novel and useful. Still, the worst evidence is always better than the best anecdotal snake oil.

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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If you are a manager and you are not paying attention to job satisfaction, you are making a big mistake. It’s one of the easiest job attitudes to listen for and observe in employees, and there is a lot of good evidence-based advice on how to improve job satisfaction.

A study published in 2010 in the Journal of Vocational Behavior suggests that how people feel about their co-workers affects their job satisfaction. The interesting thing about this study is they went on to show that satisfaction with co-workers not only affected overall job satisfaction, but it also affected daily satisfaction with life. If you like the people you work with, you are more likely to be satisfied with your job, and ultimately more satisfied with your life.

The research also showed that the affect of work on life satisfaction matters more for some people than others. If you are the type of person that is warm, generous, cooperative, unselfish, and trusting, you have an agreeable personality. The study found that the relationships between co-worker satisfaction, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction were even more pronounced for people with an agreeable personality.

The implications for individuals are obvious. If you don’t like the folks you work with, you probably also don’t like your job, and it’s affecting how you feel about your life. Your well-being matters. Life is too short to work with and for assholes, and if you spend too much time around them at work, it could get even shorter for you. Working with people you like is important.

If you are a manager, you would be wise to focus on creating and maintaining a positive interpersonal work environment. Separate research shows that social job characteristics (e.g. interdependence, feedback from others, social support, and interaction outside of work) affect performance, commitment, and turnover. In other words, decisions you make as a manager about the design of the workplace affect how people get along with each other. If the people that work for you don’t like each other, you can bet it is affecting your bottom line. If they do like each other, they are probably also pretty happy.

Happy employees are more likely to say good things about you and your business, and with the rise of social media they have more opportunities to spread the word. More than ever, happy employees are good for business.

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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An exceptional study published in Personnel Psychology entitled “The Relationships of Age with Job Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis,” tackled that question. The study looked at 800 previously published articles where 35 different attitudes toward work tasks, colleagues, and supervisors had been examined. The researchers also looked at how gender, race, and education level affected the relationships between age and attitudes.

The researchers found that “older workers have more favorable job attitudes (and/or less unfavorable job attitudes) than younger workers do, even though for some attitudes the difference is small or negligible” (p. 705). Age affected 27 of the 35 task-based (e.g. overall job satisfaction, intrinsic work motivation), people-based (e.g. trust, satisfaction with the supervisor), and organization-based (e.g. organizational commitment, loyalty) attitudes. They also found that the correlation between age and job attitudes was “stronger for older workers with longer organizational tenure, minority older workers, and older workers without a college education” (p. 705).

Although most of the relationships between age and attitude were positive, a few of the negative relationships were very interesting. Older female workers were less likely to be satisfied with promotions and had less trust in the organization. Older workers with a college education were more likely to experience role conflict.

Given the well established link between positive job attitudes and performance, this research suggests that an increasingly older workforce can be good news for employers. In addition to having positive job attitudes, separate research (Ng & Feldman, 2008) has shown that “older workers tend to exhibit greater citizenship and less counterproductive work behavior than their younger colleagues do” (p. 710).

If there is a “bad attitude” about older workers, it is being displayed toward them rather than by them. Hopefully this new evidence about the positive attitudes of older workers will help us appreciate them even more.

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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