How do orgasnisations balance reliable performance and spontaneous innovation? This is the key question that the paper we are discussing today tries to answer.
This paper by Daniel Katz was published in 1964 and, scarily still has some very relevant takeaways for today’s safety procedures in organisations. We delve into this research and discover the ideas that Katz initiated all those years ago. The problem is that an organization cannot promote one of these concepts without negatively affecting the other. So how are organizations meant to manage this?
We share some personal thoughts on whether or not the world of safety research has since found an answer to dealing with these two contradictory concepts.
Topics:
Quotes:
Katz is really one of the founding fathers in the field of organizational psychology. - Dr. Drew
Rae
It’s not just that you’re physically getting people to stay but getting them to stay and still be willing to be productive. Dr. Drew Rae
“When we promote autonomy, we need to think about what that does to reliable role performance.” - Dr. Drew Rae
Complex situations, clearly need complex solutions. - Dr. David Provan
Resources:
Griffith University Safety Science Innovation Lab
The motivational basis of organizational behavior (Paper)
David: You're listening to The Safety of Work podcast episode 84. Today we're asking the question, how do organizations balance reliable performance and spontaneous innovation? Let's get started.
Hi, everybody. My name is David Provan and I'm here with Drew Rae. We're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to The Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety and we examine the evidence surrounding it.
Today, we're going to look back at a foundational paper. It's one of a personal favorites of mine. It predates and informs a lot of modern safety thinking. We referred back to this paper way back in episode two of the podcast when we talked about why people break rules, but today, we thought we'd do a bit of a deep dive into the paper. Drew, let's jump straight into the paper.
Drew: Okay. The title is, The motivational basis of organizational behavior. The author of the paper is Daniel Katz. If you hear David and I talking about it, we usually just talk about all that Katz paper from 1964. It's one of my favorites too.
Katz is probably one of the only authors we've talked about who gets their own Wikipedia page. We've talked about some papers by people who are pretty well-known in the safety community. Katz is really one of the founding fathers of the whole field of organizational psychology. You look back at the things he's done, most of them seem so simple because we just take them completely for granted now in the way we think about organizations.
One of them I'd never actually heard of, which is open system theory. Then you look at it and basically, he wrote a whole book saying, we need to think of organizations as shaped by the environment they're in instead of as closed independent systems. It's the thing that seems totally obvious but wasn't obvious before Katz. He's obviously published a lot. None of it specifically to do with safety, but lots of it touching on safety and he specifically mentioned safety issues quite a few times throughout his work including in this paper.
David: The paper was published in the journal Behavioral Science, like you mentioned, 1964. It's been cited more than 3000 times since. A few of those citations are our own papers in recent years as well, Drew as we brought some of his ideas into how you and I have been thinking about managing safety.
I thought we might start with a few quotes. This is a quote that we've actually put in our own papers. I'll read it out. "The great paradox of a social organization is that it must not only reduce human variability, to ensure reliable roll performance, but it must also allow room for some variability and in fact, encourage it."
He goes on saying that, "No organizational planning can foresee all contingencies within its operations, or can anticipate with perfect accuracy all environmental changes, or can control perfectly all human variability." Finally, "An organization which depends solely upon its blueprints of prescribed behavior is a very fragile social system." 1964. Drew, what do you think of those quotes?
Drew: What I'm hearing there is those critics of Safety II who say, Safety II and resilience, it's nothing new, there is a little bit of a point there. A lot of these ideas have been understood for a very long time, but arguably not really transferred successfully into safety. These are things that were understood about organizational theory that crept into some of the HR management type stuff but haven't really flowed through to safety theory until relatively recently.
David: As we talk through the rest of this podcast, our listeners might want to reflect on the extent of progress, which you feel that we have or haven't made in the last 60 years. I got a bit sidetracked when we're preparing this episode just now. They asked around the internet, just looking at how much cool social and organizational theory work was going on in the ‘50s and ‘60s. McGregor was developing Theory X and Theory Y closely tied to Abraham Maslow's work on [...] expanded what the theory said, different types of management styles.
Particularly in the US because as this period of really significant racial tensions, the Vietnam War, social injustice, and turmoil, and it created this big explosion in theory and research, which many of which our listeners will know today. Cognitive dissonance was in the late ‘50s. The bystander effect was the same year as this paper. We had the Milgram experiments going on. Kurt Lewin was popularizing his ideas about organizational change. It would have been a pretty cool time to be an academic in social and organizational theory, Drew.
Drew: My immediate thought is it's amazing what you can do without modern ethics restrictions. But yes, at that time, in a lot of fields, the academic world was smaller. I think because it was smaller, it was also a lot more socially vibrant. So a lot of these people weren't just putting out these cool ideas, but they knew each other and they fed off each other in a very personal way. There wasn't the sheer volume of stuff being published to read.
David: And probably less shots across the bow on LinkedIn as well.
Drew: Yeah. A lot of this stuff was readily accessible to lots of people. Whereas today, sometimes, even when people come up with very good ideas, really cool insights, they just get buried and lost until they get rediscovered.
David: The question this paper asks, this idea, is the motivational basis of organizational behavior. What Katz is asking and answering in his own way in this paper is, how and to what extent do people become involved in an organization and committed to its goals? We want our workers to buy into the goals of the organization. How does an organization attract the people it needs, get the right resources with the right capabilities? How does it hold on to them? What makes them want to stay in the company?
This is a big question we're asking in this podcast. How does it induce both reliable performance of people in their role and people's willingness to spontaneously innovate and show initiative on the part of achieving the organization's objectives? I think this last question and the title of the podcast, I'm interested in your views. I'm not sure we're any closer to answering that today 60 years later. In many ways, we might even be further away from the solution.
In contemporary safety theory, we talk about compliance and autonomy as these opposite ends of the spectrum. I think we all know. We all know that it's not an or, it’s an and. We need to have both. We've got language like freedom in a frame or paper that we published on guided adaptability, but I'm not sure. What do you think? Do you think we have any good models for helping organizations dynamically balance this paradox?
Drew: I think the problem is that the word paradox refers to an apparent contradiction. I think that what we genuinely have is a real goal conflict. We have two different types of behaviors that we need, and we need people to do both of those all of the time. It's not like we sometimes deploy one, sometimes deploy the other, we need them both ongoing. But most of the strategies that are available to us promote one at the expense of the other, which means that we have this fourth choice, even though we really, really want and need both.
I don't think that that's unsolvable, but it does require us to recognize that if we've got a strategy that promotes one, we can't think about that in isolation. We need to think about what it's doing to the other. When we promote autonomy, we need to think about what that does for reliable role performance. When we have something that we think works really well providing reliable role performance, we need to think about whether that is hurting the discretionary behaviors. Maybe we need to give up on things that seem really good at doing one because the negative effects on the other are just too much.
David: Yeah. I think there is this idea that complex situations clearly need complex solutions. I'm not sure that anyone still thinks that we can manage complex systems with these simple and binary management approaches, but a lot of heavy lifting to do in the safety space.
Drew: Since we talk about how Katz attacks the problem, how he starts talking about it.
David: Yeah, that's that.
Drew: He sets off the basic idea that he wants to address is that we've got these organizations, which are to him very clearly social systems. He's concerned that, often, the fact that their social systems tend to get discounted. We tend to think of them more as structures, institutions, and frameworks. We don't think about the fact that almost the whole organization, except for buildings, is really just the people and how those people behave and interact with each other.
He says, we need to think then, okay, what do we want these people to be doing? What are the types of behaviors that we want? What motivates people to do those behaviors? What motivational strategies are available to us? What are the conditions under which those motivational patterns are going to operate or work successfully?
If we're clear about each of those three things, we can then start deciding, okay, what do we as an organization want to try to do? Given the conditions we're in, what patterns can we employ to get the behaviors that we want? He then says, there are three basic types of behaviors that we want. This is universal, any organization needs these things.
Number one, people have got to want to join the organization and want to stay there. Number two, people need to carry out their role assignments in a dependable fashion. This is what we mean by dependable role performance or compliance. People must be innovative and spontaneous beyond their role descriptions. We'll go into each of these in detail, but pretty much he says all of the behaviors fall under one of these three categories, and all three of those are essential for every organization.
David: Let's talk about attracting and holding people in the system. Do you want to talk about what Katz laid out in terms of how an organization needs to think about people's willingness to join and stay?
Drew: Personally, I think that this is the most boring part of the behavior. It might have been original and new when he presented it. He basically says that people leave organizations, you need people to come in as fast as they leave, and you don't want that leaving and coming in to be too fast because high turnover costs you.
The author says there's got to be some optimal period. You don't want people to stay around forever either. You want some sort of steady rate of people coming in and people going out. While they're there, they've got to be doing stuff. They can't just be turning up and not helping.
He talks about people who are within the system physically, but maybe psychological absentees, which is something that we talk here, a very modern idea of presenteeism, and people who stay within their organization better are burned out. But he just touches on that we can't be simplistic about this. It's not just physically getting people to stay, but getting them to stay and still be willing to be productive.
David: When people are in our organizations, let's talk first about dependable role performance. Katz goes and he called this an infinite range and variety of human behavior, we know that. Inside organizations, we need to do stuff and produce stuff. We must limit this infinite variability of what people could be doing in our company to a limited number of predictable patterns. Assigned roles get carried out in a consistent way, and then that allows coordinated effort across the organization.
If I know how someone else is going to do their role, then they're part of the organization's function and can be handed off to the next responsible person and the next responsible person. So we need to know how assigned roles are going to be carried out, and what the minimum level of quantity and quality of performance is. An organization needs coordinated effort. The way to coordinate that effort is to know how people are making their individual contributions.
Drew: David, I don't know about you, but even this one being spelled out struck me that it's a weird idea, fairly artificial, that when you join an organization, you are given a particular role. You stop just being a generic human and you become a senior lecturer. There is a set of things that a senior lecturer is expected to do. You are a nurse in an emergency department. There's a certain set of specific things that a nurse in an emergency is meant to do.
Katz says that for almost all of these roles, they've got to set this up, they're supposed to do. Being successful in that role means you do a lot of that thing and you do it well. If everyone's got the right roles, they do a lot of those things in those roles, and we've got the right roles in the organization, then the organization is going a long way to meet its objectives.
David: I think one of the things that I took out of rereading this is this dependable well performance, the purpose is that we know the quality and quantity of outputs that are going to come from an individual or a unit. Your example of a senior lecturer is that they'll say, you need to have a certain number of courses, Drew. You should be teaching two hours a week on this subject and four hours on that. You need to have assessments that add up. You need to do the grades and the assignments and get those submitted by this date. But they don't tell you exactly how to teach for the two hours that you're inside the classroom.
I think this is where we've missed the intention of having this dependable role performance so we can coordinate the organization. As we'll go through the rest of this paper, our motivation is specifying how people do all of the work within their individual areas is less useful.
Drew: There may be times when it is. Certainly, for example, say, if we stick to the lecture on the idea of student experience, then sometimes what we really do want is very dependable role performance. We want every lecturer not just to teach, but to have a course profile. We want them all to have an online site with a reading list in the same format so that the students can easily access it.
We may set minimal standards for the purpose of creating that uniformity to achieve the overall organization's objectives. It's not just a fire and forget to find the role, to find the performance outcomes, and then go for it. There are sometimes good reasons for specifying other aspects of how people perform the roles. But sometimes, we forget that we do that for specific purposes, not just for the sake of having conformance.
David: Yeah, it's a great point. Knowing the specific purpose of why we're creating standardization and consistency in an aspect of a person's role is a good check and balance or a good question for us to ask.
If we move from beyond the dependable role performance to this idea of spontaneous initiative, and we know in contemporary safety theory about performance variability, adaptability, autonomy, and emergence in complex systems. And, I suppose, resilience engineering theory says that the only way that we can keep our systems safe is by the responsible actions of humans responding to situations that they face. How does Katz talk about it in a similar or different way to what we know in contemporary safety theory about these spontaneous initiatives?
Drew: I guess the difference is that modern safety theory emphasizes heavily the idea of, we want variability. Variability is inevitable. We can't control it. It's always going to be there, how do we manage it safely? Whereas what Katz does is he breaks down some very specific examples of things that by definition, we cannot manage through reliable role performance.
He's trying to make that first principles argument. You might think that you can define everything by just carefully specifying the roles, but there are some things that you absolutely can't. There are some things that by definition, you can never create, not just no rule, but no description of what someone is generally supposed to do that would cover all of the things that we expect them to do. They're necessarily undefined.
He goes through it like a set of cases. The first one he goes through is cooperation. He says that there are heaps of everyday acts of people helping each other out that go beyond what's in their role description. If we tried to write a role description for everyone for everything that they're expected to do that involves helping other people out, then it would just be impossibly vague as a role description.
If we tried just carrying a list of these are all the people who might come to you for information. These are all the people who might come to you for help. These are all the people, you might be walking along and see someone who needs a hand with something and try to say, okay, that is your job, then we would no longer have roles to find at all. Yet, if people did just say, that's not my job and stuck to the stuff of their own, then no one would be up to their job because we all depend on other people helping us out.
David: I like the way that he's deepened this framework around this variability. The second one after cooperation is protection. Do you want to talk about a bit of that as well then?
Drew: Yup. He gives a couple of examples here that are out of date. The very first thing he says is there's nothing in the role prescriptions of the worker, which specifies that he is beyond the alert to save life and property in the organization. I actually think that one is no longer true for modern organizations. I think most organizations actually have built into their role descriptions. If they don't, it's literally written into the law that it's part of your job that if there's something that's a danger to other people around you, it is part of your job to help out.
He says the worker who goes out of his way to remove a boulder accidentally lodged in the path of a freight car. Again, we often build this now into our role descriptions that we expect people to spot and report hazards. But then he also says, even to disobey orders when they are obviously wrong and dangerous. That’s one, by definition, you cannot write into a role description, but we absolutely expect. We absolutely expect people not to keep following their role if it is dangerous. We expect them to disobey. By definition, you cannot tell someone in advance when they're expected to disobey the instructions that you're giving them.
David: A few more ideas in here about creative or constructive ideas to finish off this framework around just why we can't specify this initiative that we need.
Drew: The constructive idea is just that even if people are in a job that expects them to come up with ideas, that we still expect people generally to want to improve their workplace, to generally be thinking about different ways to do their job. Sometimes, the idea they have might not be about their job, it might be about someone else's job or something else in the workplace. We expect people to not just keep that to themselves.
The general idea here is that we expect people to think about what the organization is overall trying to do. We expect them sometimes too, rather than what am I expected to do, I think this is what my organization is expected to do and help out with that.
David: Then Katz goes on in the next part of the paper, he talks about a favorable attitude. He's starting to talk about culture and climate because what he's saying there is if we want to attract and retain people in our organization, we want them to work in support of the organization's objectives. We want them to feel the need to deliver their dependable role performance and go beyond their role to support other people and other situations to deliver the organization's objectives.
We need people to have this favorable attitude towards their role in the organization. Do you want to just talk a little bit about this concept and how Katz describes it? He's saying climate, I think, isn't he?
Drew: I don't think he is. I think he's saying that we need the climate, but he's saying that it's made up of individuals who are actually good to work around. Reading between the lines, he's basically saying that if we had an organization filled with people who were productive, role compliant, and even innovative, and they were all jerks, the organization would still grind to a halt. We've got to have everyone actually want to be there and be motivated because that's what this whole paper is about is people are motivated to help the organization.
Having everyone motivated requires people who are in an environment that is motivating. That environment is made up of all the other people around them. In addition to just having people who are good at their jobs, we need people who like their jobs, who like their company. He even says things like, if we want people that have been telling their families that it's a good company. We don't want to just rely on our sales department to promote the company.
Let's pick an example. If everyone who works at Facebook publishes blogs or comes out as whistleblowers and say, look, it is really bad to work at Facebook, that is not good for Facebook. They might be great employees in every other respect. But if their own employees don't like them, that is bad.
They're going to spend a lot of effort, a lot of money, and a lot of rebranding to deal with that problem. Because we need our employees to be brand advocates. We need our employees to work there, to make things good for other people, and to tell the community that it's good to work there. All of that is really hard to write into a job description, but it's definitely something we still want.
David: Yeah, or recruitment and selection process, but again, something that we want. Do you want to just talk about this being similar to maybe military concepts?
Drew: There's something that has been in the military for a very, very long time. When you read up examples of this and go back to the 1700s, Nelson gets talked about a lot in this as well. But it's only really been theorized in the last couple of decades, the idea of mission command. We want, really, everyone in our organization not to be striving to follow orders, but in order to achieve the overall organizational objectives.
A lot of the time, if we're good at giving orders, then you don't just understand the organizational objectives, you also understand what your own intended role is, and you serve your own intended role. But having that broader understanding also means sometimes you have the freedom to adapt your role. We don't want to over-specify.
We want to give people a good sense of what the mission is, a good sense of what their own role is, and a good sense of where they have the freedom to adapt, where they have the freedom to change the role, where they have the freedom to do things that are inconsistent with their direct orders, but consistent with what the mission is.
Katz goes a step even further than the military because he says, okay, the key thing in this is motivation. It's not about understanding what your job is, it's actually wanting to do it. The trick for organizations is we can't control this stuff by orders. We can't control this stuff by just forcing people to do things. We've got to somehow set up an organization where people want to both be compliant with their job, fulfill the minimum roles, and they want to step beyond that.
That's really hard if motivating people for reliable role performance demotivates them for showing initiative. Katz gives them really obvious examples. If you want to attract people to stay in an organization, then you make their job easy. You make it relaxing to come to work. If you want people to be productive, then you want to push them to work hard, that makes them not want to come to work. So it's really hard to balance both.
If you want people to be really productive against really set criteria, then you're disincentivizing them to spend any time or attention on anything outside those metrics. If you want people to do lots of discretionary behavior, then you got to understand that's going to take time and attention away from the core parts of their role.
David: Yeah. I think General Patton said, never tell people how to do things, just tell them what they need to achieve and they'll surprise you with their ingenuity. I think what Katz is saying underneath that, there needs to be the motivation and the commitment to the intrinsic motivation to the organization's objectives. He's got a very core objective in this paper, but each section just goes deeper and deeper like layers of an onion in unpacking this.
Maybe let's talk about rules because underneath his need for dependable role performance, he then goes on to talk about, I suppose, how organizations create that dependability through rules and talks about the legitimacy of those rules. Do you want to kick us off with how he talks about that?
Drew: I'm happy to give it a start, but I might need your help to talk about this one. He's trying to talk about when are people motivated to follow rules. He says people are motivated when they think that the rules are legitimate and that they make sense. That particularly works if rules are setting minimum standards that everyone agrees with. In most people, if you tell them about a particular job, they'll agree that there should be minimum standards.
If you set those minimum standards reasonably, they'll agree to follow those minimum standards. They'll please themselves to follow them, not please other people to follow them. But that same logic also says there's no particular reason for going far beyond the minimum standards. If you've got these rules that are legitimized because they're the minimum necessary standard, then the minimum rules quickly become the maximum rules.
If you want to increase performance, you've got to lift that minimum. But the more you lift the minimum, the harder it is for everyone to agree that yes, that is the minimum standard. Until eventually, you've got a standard that most people have to work really, really hard to meet, and they'll start disagreeing that that's a reasonable minimum standard and rules start to lose legitimacy again.
David: Yeah. Well explained, Drew. No help required, but Katz does go on to talk about conditions conducive to, what he says, the activation of rules, but this is the following. You can think of activation of rules as basically them being functional and followed in an organization. He talks about appropriateness and relevance, which is what you just explained there. He talked about clarity, which was really important like knowing specifically in relation to an individual's role the clarity of exactly what the organization was expecting.
Reinforcement, which we would know of now. Some of these things were fairly newly conceptualized at the time that if we are going to get dependable role performance, these expectations need to be continually reinforced, and then talked about system rewards and individual rewards. People see the consistency of application and rule-following going on in the organization. Then for individuals, how do we reward individuals where they're getting some recognition, potentially personal bonuses, and things like that in relation to how they're going about their dependable parts of their role?
Drew: There's got a really interesting piece as well on the intrinsic side of it. He says, we only really need this if we're extrinsically motivating people. If you can get someone who actually likes doing a particular job, then they're not even going to notice that they've got a minimum amount of work they need to do because they'll just be happy doing it all day. They're not going to notice the minimum standard of quality because they like doing their job well and that's where they get satisfaction from.
Part of that setting off minimum standards is only necessary when people are motivated by the intrinsic systems. If you can get someone who genuinely enjoys doing the work and genuinely enjoys doing the work well, then that motivates them to act totally outside that system of rules, but you still get reliable role performance from them.
David: The paper is full of really well articulated small paragraphs and quotes. I really love Katz's use of language when he describes this. Because without intrinsic job satisfaction, I'll paraphrase a bit here, but he talks about the person who delights in what they're doing is the one that won't worry about the fact that they have to follow certain requirements. Their gratification comes from their accomplishment, their expression of their own abilities, and the exercise of their own decisions.
He links that to craftsmanship, which we hear a little bit about in contemporary safety, which refers to this skilled performer who's got so much intrinsic job satisfaction that they're not a clock watcher and they're not a shoddy performer. He really talks about this intrinsic motivation as being the backbone of organizational performance.
Drew: David, I don't know if you know anything about Katz's organizational politics, but I get a real hint here that he's really not a fan of assembly lines. He follows his section on craftsmanship by saying if there's one thing in all the studies about worker morale, motivation, and intrinsic motivation, it's that people want variety and challenge in their work. A part of getting people motivated like this means that they've got to have gratification from doing the work, which is counter to when the work is very strictly regimented and when they can't see the contribution of their own work to the whole.
David: Yeah. I think this period is 50 years on from Taylor. I think it's also the post-war era as well. Like I was saying earlier, there was so much attention being given to social and political injustice, freedom of speech, human rights, equality, and all of these things. I think this generation of social psychologists were really pro the individual, if that makes some sense.
Drew: There might be one reason why these ideas are resonating at the moment. They've been through a very heavy emphasis on regimented production line type work. They're having a real nostalgia for craftsmanship. But it wasn't just a fake nostalgia, it was a real concern for individual motivation and individual well-being in the workplace.
I'm wondering if we're doing exactly the same thing coming out from the era of quality assurance and its similar emphasis on standardization. The people are now starting to recognize again that individual motivation doesn't come from standardization, it comes from your suitable autonomy in your role, suitable discretion, and suitable pride in the performance of a complete work product. We're doing that same reemergence and re-emphasis on the individual well-being coming from real deep job satisfaction.
David: I'm wondering how many cycles you need for a patent. But just as you were saying that, I think there are these 50 years cycles. So in the 1850s, we had a lot coming out of the coal mining fatalities. We got a whole raft of regulations in the mid-19th century, and then we had these ideas. If you look at some of the writing in the late 1800s, there's a lot of writing about pre-World War I, a lot of writing about craftsmanship, expertise, and judgment.
Then we got the factory acts and scientific management. It seems that we bounced out of it again in the ‘50s and then bounced back into it. Maybe there's just a cycle that repeats every 50 years or so.
Drew: Hopefully, with a little bit of extra understanding about the importance of these things each time. What are the conditions in patents that get people to not just do the reliable role performance, which is what we've been talking about, but also that innovative side of things? The first point that Katz makes is that you can't create rules for innovation, but you can still incentivize it because you can create rules for rewarding innovation. This is what organizations try to do.
They specify individual role performance and they set things up like prizes for ideas or put things into our hazard reporting system, win a ticket in the lotto for a voucher, or something like that. We're trying to create this discretionary behavior, not by mandating it, but still by rewarding it when it happens. That's one approach, but Katz says that what we really want to do is actually have people self-identify with the broader goals of the organization.
That's what gets them beyond role performance into organizational performance is when they see it as part of themselves to step outside their roles and to do these discretionary activities. He sets out a set of conditions again for why this might be the case. His overall banner here is, he said, the other important thing is that we want them to identify not with the organization as a safe and secure haven, but with its major purposes. So not, I like working here because it's a stable job, I get rewarded, and I get to spend my time how I like, but I want to work here because this is what we do and I'm part of that.
The first condition he says is how we select people into the organization is to match the personality of the people with the system. I've seen some very perverse versions of this, but I think this is a general goal, maybe.
David: I suppose there's a tension here. We're seeing some ideas around hire for fit, hire for cultural fit. Then we're also seeing this emergence of ideas around hiring for diversity as well. I suppose I'm not quite sure how our contemporary ideas, whether they're as clear as what Katz is laying out here.
Drew: Yeah, I think we've recognized that it might be a bit more nuanced than that. He's not really talking about homogeneous personalities. He's talking about the organization having values and then selecting people who share those values, which I think is probably a bit clearer.
You can think here about Griffith University has an explicit social justice agenda. Let's hire people who actually care about social justice into that organization. That means that when we want people not just to lecture, but also take part in a community program, we don't need to incentivize them to do it because that's what they like about Griffith. It's the fact that they do that sort of thing. He has this discussion about how what really happens in organizations isn't identification with the organization as a whole. It’s people form these little groups.
The group identity is really what shapes their daily work life. Again, this is a little bit out of date. He says, often those group objectives for workers are more about union objectives than about the organizational objectives. He associates the union objectives with that safe and secure haven. I'm working here in a safe job, good job, pays well, and has good conditions. That's what unions want.
All of that is worthwhile. We don't want that to be why people come to work. We want them to come to work for the organization. To do that, we need them to participate in important decisions, not just be consulted, but genuinely feel like they have a say in where the organization is going. We want them to feel that they're contributing to the group performance in a significant way, so they feel that their work doesn't just matter for its own sake, but matters for the mission. We want them to share in the rewards of the group achieving the mission. When the organization does well, they personally do well. They don't feel like they're just basically working for the man. They're working for themselves.
He touches a little bit just on social satisfaction and affiliate motivation. The alternate way of doing that is not to actually have them identify with the organization, but just to really like the people they're working with, want to be part of a community of people and to think of themselves as coming to work as part of a community, rather than coming to work for the organization as an abstract entity.
David: We've been through the three big questions that Katz was asking, how do we attract and retain the people that we want? How do we get the dependable role performance that we need? How do we inspire and motivate for this spontaneous initiative that contributes to the organization being successful? What practical takeaways can we take out of this paper? Do you want to run through a couple?
Drew: Practical takeaways from a 60-year-old paper? It's scary that there are practical takeaways, really. The first and most obvious message of this is that it's you motivating people to follow rules is not enough. We've got these two discrete aspects—reliable role performance and innovation and extension beyond the role. We need people to be motivated to do both of those.
The paired takeaway with that is that pushing really hard on compliance can be counterproductive for those other behaviors. The more we incentivize and motivate people to be reliable well performers, the more they are afraid, they're scared, and they feel they're wasting time when they step outside and do those other things that we need them to do. We can help a little bit with getting that by giving rewards, extrinsic motivation, but the real goal is to get people to actually want to do more than their role.
That requires us to think seriously about what behaviors to expect from people and how do we really make them feel that it is something that they want to do to exhibit those full range of behaviors. You don't get that from giving them reward systems for doing it. You get that from making them part of our mission, making them really feel that they have a role in defining that mission, and a contributing role to that mission, and sharing the results and rewards of that mission. That's a pretty big ask.
David: Yeah, I think it is. I'm interested in the way you're going to talk to this third takeaway here that you've got as well.
Drew: Okay. The last takeaway that I had was just that this tension between compliance and discretion, which is what we argue about so much in safety today, is very, very old. I really don't know what to make of that. Except that whenever we come up with a new safety theory, it's something that we need to grapple with. It's not that every safety theory is just repeating the past. It's a constant challenge that every safety theory must talk a little bit about because it's so core to organizational dynamics.
When safety theories don't, when they ignore the fact that we need both of those, particularly when they only focus on reliable role performance, then they're really just ignoring this at least 60-year history of understanding about what's necessary for organizational performance.
David: I know there’s lots written about the Prussian armies and how they managed their military activities, consistent with exactly what we've been talking about in this paper. I just want to hear the way you said that, Drew, because I think in one of our earlier episodes when we talked about zero harm and if you believe that zero injuries is achievable, it's basically just telling the world that you're ignorant of math and risks. I thought you would label people as maybe ignorant of social psychology if their organizational programs don't grapple with this tension.
Drew: You thought you could provoke me into the same behavior-based safety programs are ignorant of psychology? I don't need provoking for that, David. I'm happy to say it out right.
David: Very good, in 2021. Taking from the title of this paper, which was the motivational basis of organizational behavior, I think this is such a great area of organizational and safety research that warrants really continued focus and attention. It's not just central to all of our contemporary safety theories, it's central to some of the ideas that have been communicated by the biggest influencers in the world of business like Simon Sinek with his Start With Why, what truly motivates people in companies, Dan Pink's book on Drive where he talks about mastery, autonomy, and purpose.
These big ideas in business organizations and safety are being fueled by, how do we understand what motivates people to contribute to their organization? I'd love safety researchers and practitioners to pick up this challenge and try to build a deeper understanding of how we might make it work for safety.
Drew: I think particularly when we get to the point of our safety programs that are talking about everyone goes home safely, we're really talking about thinking of our workers as just coming to work to work. Every organization aspires to go a bit beyond that. Every organization would benefit from their workers actually sharing the overall mission of the organization. Safety shouldn't be set apart from that and just made this special topic where we know we're just going to think old school union style, work out what the minimum standards are, get people to meet those minimum standards.
David: Great point, Drew. I think the objective of organizations isn't to have their people go home at the end of the day. Their objective as an organization is to have people come to work and go above and beyond their roles. That's what this paper is really trying to say. Don't send your people home safely, send them in the door at the start of a day wanting to go above and beyond.
Drew: David, the answer, how do organizations do this? How do organizations balance reliable role performance and spontaneous innovation?
David: David, the answer to this one was that we don't really know. I'm wondering if there are many organizations out there that don't have a deliberate approach to this, particularly in relation to their safety management programs and practices, like we said a little bit earlier, which is counter to logic. It's also counter to 60 years of organizational and social theory and empirical research. I suppose for our listeners, there's the challenge.
Drew, maybe just before we wrap up, in doing this paper, I suppose we dusted it off because it's a favorite, it's a theory paper, and it's 60 years old, but there's a lot of really cool papers that are a little bit older. So I'd love to get some feedback from our listeners about what they thought of this style of episode, and whether they want us to pick a selection of papers over the last half a century or so which we think can provide some really foundational ways of understanding some things that we're working on in one safety. Let's see if we can get some permission to have a bit of fun with some of these older theory papers.
Drew: Yeah, that'd be great. If you've got particular papers you'd like us to cover, we'll do that. If you just say that you generally would like some interesting older papers, then I'll get to do an episode on Cohen's garbage can model of organizational choice.
David: Excellent. Very good. So that's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Join us in our discussions on LinkedIn or send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.