Hr Library
Trending

Are you making your people feel disgusted?

By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics

Actions speak louder than words. Many businesses have a set of values but they are often seen as irrelevant and even a source of disgust by staff. This is because they don’t see the connection between the stated values and behaviour of senior management. For example; I know of one business where ‘Professionalism’ and ‘Respect’ were Values that the MD wanted people to live up to, and yet he would sometimes demand that certain staff were to be ‘got rid of’ because he didn’t like them or felt they weren’t any good. When staff realised he was saying things like this, often dependent on his mood, it not only created fear it also created a deep sense of unfairness.

Recent studies show that when we deem something is unfair it activates a part of the brain called the Insular. The Insular is involved in intense emotions including the response when you eat, or even think about having to eat, something disgusting. There is now evidence that a feeling of fairness is a critical element of our social makeup, as important as food and safety.

Even as important as Money

In one experiment by Golanza Tabibnia at the Carnegie Mellon University he found that people would rather go without getting any money than seeing another person get an unfair amount. In another experiment it showed that people’s reward centres light up a lot more when they receive $5, if they know it’s from a pot of $10, than if it is $5 out of $20. So it seems that a sense of fairness is even more important to us than money.

Click here to read the full article

Source
LinkedIn
Show More

Related Articles

Back to top button