What we know about motivation came from the 1900s through the likes of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who invented what he called “scientific management”. Now this is the puzzle. Over the century (1900-2012), the world has morphed in so many ways that we can’t resist asking if what we know about motivating people isn’t ‘outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in [modern] science’. Daniel Pink in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, provides in easy to read prose, a most audacious and thought-provoking expose of ‘what … [Read more...]
How Employee Happiness Impacts Organisational Performance (2)
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This is the second part of this article, you can read the first part here. Acting on Feelings – Strong settings vs Weak settings Although all of us have feelings and attitudes about many aspects of our organisational work, we do not always act on them. Whether we do, or do not, act on our feelings and attitudes in a particular situation can be clarified by distinguishing between strong and weak settings. Strong settings are those with powerful normative expectations and incentives to behave in certain constrained ways. Weak settings are ones in … [Read more...]
How Employee Happiness Impacts Organisational Performance
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The question of whether happy workers are more productive than unhappy ones has spawned decades of research exploring every kind of happiness and possible variation in job performance. There are many reasons for perennial popularity of what has bee called the happy productive-worker thesis (making workers happy cause them to be more productive): it allows labour negotiators to claim that happier workers will be more productive (so deserving higher pay), it allows human resources professionals and researchers to be supportive of both labour and … [Read more...]
Is There A Place for Feelings In The Workplace?
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Is there a place for feelings in the workplace? Has a misunderstanding of feelings brought more harm than good into our workplaces? Do we even know what feelings are? Do they bear advantages that managers and employees canleverage on? The first part of this discourse attempts to provide us an understanding of feelings in the workplace. From the book, Organisational Behaviour Real Research for Real Managers by Jone L. Pearce is presented an excerpt from the article Making Sense of Feelings at Work: Why would managers need to worry about squishy stuff … [Read more...]
NIS Recruitment Crash: The HR Manifesto
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With the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) recruitment held on the 15th of March 2014, which claimed precious lives, a humongous price has been paid for our ignorance and existing mindset, with regards to recruitment in Nigeria. We must learn from this. We will learn from this. And here is the matter: our philosophy to recruitment in Nigeria is fundamentally flawed and everyone is at fault. To learn successfully from this avoidable incidence, we must unearth the foundational issues surrounding how we in the public and private sectors view … [Read more...]
Changing a Job is a Job (Part 2)
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The first part of this two-part article focused on the work and principles shared by Herminia Ibara in her book, Working Identity. Loads of people would like to reinvent their working lives but don’t know the steps to take and when they do know, they aren’t certain of the outcomes of those steps. Herminia asserts that, “most of us know what we are trying to escape: the lockstep of a narrowly defined career, inauthentic or unstimulating work, numbing corporate politics, a lack of time for life outside of work. Finding an alternative that truly fits, like … [Read more...]
Changing a Job is a Job
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My antenna is always roaming to and fro seeking for new or disruptive ideas that seem to question well-worn methods or beliefs. Less than ten years ago I stumbled on this research published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). It had the title, How to stay stuck in the wrong career and was the work by Herminia Ibara. Some few years ago I decided to buy her book, Working Identity, in which she expounded on the research. To aid assimilation of her concept, this article is a copious, largely unedited version of Herminia’s work as published in HBR. Who … [Read more...]
HR consultant, Life & Career Coach, Job Search Strategist, Author, Writer, Workplace Readiness Coach & Youth Instigator 
