Mixed signals from the top get in the way of employees’ improvement efforts

When employees propose new ways of doing things, this inevitably challenges the status quo at work. How they think the hierarchy will welcome these initiatives influences their decision to adopt this type of improvement-oriented behaviour. Jean-Sébastien Boudrias, Vincent Rousseau, and Denis Lajoie write that conflicting messages from a supervisor and the manager above the supervisor can in some cases have highly negative effects on employee improvement initiatives.

 
Change-oriented behaviours by employees are more than ever crucial to foster organisational efficacy and agility in the volatile and uncertain business environment. One type of these behaviours is self-started improvement efforts made by employees in the context of their jobs.

Improvement-oriented behaviours entail that employees propose new ways of doing things to gain efficiency in the way work is accomplished. Inevitably, these behaviours challenge the status quo in a work setting. The scientific literature clearly indicates that the adoption of this type of improvement-oriented behaviour depends in large part of how the employees think that the hierarchy will welcome them.

Past studies indicate that employees increase discretionary improvement behaviours when they perceive integrity on the part of organisational decision-makers, and conversely, that lack of integrity and perception of abusive leadership from managers discourage the adoption of such behaviours. Indeed, employees expecting that management will not welcome these behaviours—or worse, that these behaviours will be punished or used by managers in a self-serving manner—will not display improvement-oriented behaviours.

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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk