Have you ever sat in a meeting, maybe it's a
Tuesday afternoon, the fluorescent lights are
humming, and you look around the table and think,
why are we doing it this way? No, all the time.
Or better yet, have you ever walked into a new
job and within like 10 minutes, you just know
something is off? Yes, the air feels heavy. It
does. People are whispering. It's like walking
into a room where a couple just had a massive
fight, but nobody is saying a word about it.
Oh, absolutely. The vibe. It's helpable. Or,
you know, you get the opposite. You walk into
a place and it's just electric. People are moving
fast. They're laughing. Things are getting done.
Exactly. And we usually just chalk that up to
luck. We think, oh, they just have good chemistry
or that boss is just a jerk. We treat it like
it's random, you know, like the weather. Right.
But what if I told you it isn't random at all?
What if I told you that the reason your team
is dysfunctional or the reason you feel so drained
after a day of fake smiling at customers is actually
a matter of hard science? It is science, and
it's a science that dictates about, what, 90
,000 hours of your life? That is a terrifying
number. It is. That's how much time the average
person spends at work. And yet we spend very
little time thinking about the mechanics of why
we act the way we do in those 90 ,000 hours.
Well, today we are changing that. We are doing
a deep dive into organizational behavior. Or
OB, as the academics call it. Now, I have to
be honest. When I first saw organizational behavior
on our research stack, my first thought was,
OK, this is going to be dry. I can see that.
It sounds like a corporate seminar where they
give you a stress ball and a stale cookie. Yeah.
Digging into this source material, the history,
the psychology, the experiments, it's actually
kind of a thriller. It really is. It's the story
of how we went from treating humans like literal
gears in a machine to realizing that no, humans
are messy, emotional, irrational creatures that
are really, really hard to manage. That's the
perfect summary. OB is the study of that messiness.
It's the interface between three things. Human
behavior, the organization itself, and the organization
as a singular entity. It's how they all collide.
Right. And the source material breaks this down
into three levels of analysis, which I think
is a great roadmap for our conversation today.
It is. You have to visualize it like a camera
zooming out. First, you have the micro level.
The individual. Exactly. That's you. Your brain.
Yeah. how you make decisions, what motivates
you to even get out of bed in the morning. And
you pull back a bit. And you get the mezzo level.
That's the group because, and this is so key,
you are a different person when you are in a
group than when you are alone. For sure. So this
covers things like teams, conflict, leadership,
all that stuff. And finally, the wide shot. The
macro level. This is the organization as a creature.
How does it behave? What is its culture? How
does it survive in? The wild, so to speak. So
that's our mission today. We are going to traverse
all three levels. We're going to look at why
we stopped treating workers like robots mostly
and why modern leadership is so difficult. But
to understand the modern office with its Zoom
calls and its Slack channels and everything else,
we actually have to go back to the beginning.
We have to go back to the moment work changed
forever. The Industrial Revolution. Let's set
the scene here. It's the 1760s. Before this.
If you needed a chair, you went to a guy who
made chairs. Right. A craftsman. He owned his
tools. He worked at his own pace. He probably
drank a beer at lunch. It was all very small
scale. Yes. It was craft based. It was particular.
Then the steam engine arrives. Machines get big
and suddenly you can't just work in your shed
anymore. You have to go to a factory. You have
to coordinate hundreds of people to do one thing.
And it was absolute chaos. There were no rules.
This is where we meet a guy who usually gets
a bad rap, but the sources suggest he was actually
trying to help. Max Weber. Max Weber, the German
sociologist. He looked at this new industrial
world and he saw a huge problem. The old way
of doing things was based on favoritism. Nepotism,
basically. Totally. You got the job because the
foreman was your uncle. You got fired because
the boss didn't like your face. It was completely
unpredictable. So Weber proposes a solution that
today we use as a dirty word. Bureaucracy. it's
fascinating isn't it if i call your company bureaucratic
you'd be insulted you'd think of red tape and
slowness and just inefficiency right a nightmare
but for weber bureaucracy was a utopia a utopia
okay that's a strike no really think about it
he defined it as an organization resting on rational
legal principles what that meant was Rules apply
to everyone equally. It meant you get the job
because you are qualified, not because of your
bloodline. It was designed to maximize efficiency
by removing that messy human element of bias.
Okay, I see that. So the red tape was actually
meant to be protection. It protects the worker
from the tyranny of a whimsical boss. Precisely.
But Weber wasn't blind. He was also deeply worried.
He coined a phrase that is one of the most famous
in sociology, the iron cage. This stuck with
me. It's such a heavy image. It is. He worried
that if we focus purely on efficiency, on rational
calculation, we trap ourselves. We become, and
this is his quote, specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart. Wow. The bureaucracy
protects you, but it also strips you of your
humanity. You become just a function, a cog in
the machine. And if Weber built the cage, the
next guy we need to talk about is the one who
designed the lock on the door, Frederick Taylor.
The father of scientific management. This guy.
I have complicated feelings about him after reading
the source material. On one hand, he's a genius.
On the other hand, he's kind of a nightmare.
He was definitely obsessive. Taylor was an engineer
in the late 19th century, and he believed there
was one best way to do absolutely anything. He
didn't want you to just work hard. No. He wanted
you to work scientifically. The example that
really blew my mind was the science of shoveling.
Can we break that down? Okay. Because it sounds
ridiculous, but it literally changed the world.
It did. It really did. So Taylor is at the Bethlehem
Steel Plant. He watches these guys shoveling
coal and iron ore. Sometimes they use a big shovel,
sometimes a small one. Sometimes they lift five
pounds, sometimes they lift 30. And to Taylor,
that inconsistency is a sin. Yeah. It's pure
chaos. It's waste. So he starts experimenting.
He treats the human body like it's a machine.
Yeah. He runs tons of tests and finds that if
a worker lifts exactly 21 pounds per shovel load,
they can move the maximum amount of material
in a day without collapsing. 21 pounds. Not 20,
not 22. 21. That was the magic number. So he
literally designs different shovels for different
materials. Yes. That's the genius of it. If you're
shoveling heavy iron ore, you get a small shovel,
so the load weighs 21 pounds. If you're shoveling
light coal ashes, you get a massive scoop, so
it weighs 21 pounds. That is incredibly smart.
I mean, productivity must have gone through the
roof. It did. Massively. Some workers were earning
60 % more pay because they were so much more
efficient. But... and here's the iron cage part,
they lost all autonomy. All of it. Taylor famously
told a worker, you are not supposed to think.
There are other people paid for thinking around
here. Ouch. He essentially tried to program humans.
And he wasn't alone in this. The Gilbreths, Frank
and Lillian, they took this even further with
their time and motion studies. Oh, this is wild.
They did film workers, like bricklayers, and
break down their movements into frame -by -frame
analysis. They'd analyze every little tiny motion.
As you move your left hand six inches, you only
needed to move it four inches. That's two inches
of wasted movement. Exactly. They wanted to eliminate
wasted motion. If you paused to scratch your
nose, that was an inefficiency to be eliminated.
And then Henry Ford takes all of this. the bureaucracy
from Weber, the scientific management from Taylor,
and builds the ultimate machine, the assembly
line. Fordism, the standardization of everything.
You don't need a skilled craftsman to build a
car anymore. You just need an unskilled worker
to stand in one spot and tighten bolt number
45 5 ,000 times a day. It's the absolute peak
of the machine age of work. But here's the thing
about machines. They don't have feelings. They
don't have bad days. And eventually... This view
of the worker as just a part started to crack.
It cracked wide open in the 1920s. And the amazing
thing is it happened completely by accident.
The Hawthorne studies. This is my favorite story
in the whole stack. It plays out like a mystery
novel where the detective keeps finding the wrong
clues and getting more confused. It really does.
So this is at the Western Electrics Hawthorne
Works just outside Chicago. It's a big factory.
They bring in a team of researchers to answer
a very Taylor's question. Does better lighting
make workers more productive? Which is a logical
question. Brighter lights, better visibility,
faster work. Makes sense. Right. So they split
the workers into groups. One group gets brighter
lights. And guess what? Productivity goes up.
Success. Theory confirmed. Case closed. But then
they try the reverse. They dim the lights. And
this is where it gets really weird. Productivity
goes up again. Wait. So brighter lights equals
more work? And dimmer lights? Also equals more
work. Yes. They kept dimming them. At one point,
they got it down to the level of moonlight. Productivity
still went up. The researchers are just baffled.
They must have thought their data was broken.
Completely. The temperature productivity goes
up. They change the break. Time's productivity
goes up. No matter what they changed, performance
improved. It's like trying to study a cat. As
soon as you look at the cat, it starts acting
differently. That is exactly what it was. A researcher
named Elton Mayo, who analyzed all this, realized
it wasn't the lights. It wasn't the temperature.
It was the fact that someone was paying attention
to the workers for the first time. The workers
felt special. They bonded as a group because
they were part of this experiment. They felt
seen. The Thorne effect. Correct. And this was
the earthquake that shook the foundation of scientific
management. Mayo proved that you cannot treat
a worker like a machine part. Their performance
is deeply tied to their social relationships,
their feelings, and their sense of being valued.
And that ushered in the human relations movement.
Suddenly, managers couldn't just say, shovel
this. They had to ask, so? How are you feeling
about the shovel? Laughs. Essentially, yes. And
that brings us to the modern era of OB, because
once we admitted workers were humans, we had
to figure out how these human brains actually
work in an organization. Which brings us right
to the micro level, the individual. And the first
thing we had to dismantle was this old idea that
humans are rational. Right. Classical economics
loves the rational man. You know, the idea that
if I give you a choice, you will weigh all the
pros and cons, calculate the probabilities and
make the mathematically optimal decision. But
anyone who has ever binge watched a show on Netflix
until 3 a .m. when they have a huge presentation
the next day knows we are not rational. We are
definitely not. And Herbert Simon won a Nobel
Prize for explaining why. He introduced the concept
of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality.
He said, look. Even if we wanted to be perfectly
rational, we can't be. First, we don't have all
the information. Second, we don't have the brainpower
to process it all, even if we did. And third,
we don't have the time. So our rationality has
limits or bounds. Exactly. So what do we do instead?
What do we do? We satisfy. Satisfy. It's a combination
of the words satisfy and suffice. We don't look
for the best possible solution. We look for the
first solution that is. good enough. This is
the toothpaste aisle in the supermarket. That
is the perfect analogy. You're standing there.
There are 50 kinds of toothpaste. Tarter control,
whitening, baking soda, mint, cinnamon, gel,
paste. Overwhelming. It is. If you were a rational
man, you would read every single ingredient list,
compare the price per ounce, research the efficacy
of fluoride versus whatever else. You'd be there
for four hours. Right. So instead, I just grabbed
the one in the blue box because I recognize the
logo and it's fine. That is satisfying. And in
business, this is huge. Managers often get frustrated
because their teams aren't finding the optimal
strategy. But Simon tells us that looking for
perfection is actually irrational because it
costs too much time and energy. Good enough is
often the most rational choice. So settling isn't
just laziness. It's a survival mechanism for
our brains. It's an efficiency mechanism. Okay,
so we have these boundedly rational brains. Now
let's talk about what actually makes them go.
Motivation. Ah, the million -dollar question.
Resource material lists a ton of theories. Maslow's
Pyramid, equity theory, expectancy theory. But
I want to double -click on Herzberg's two -factor
theory because this one feels like it explains
about 90 % of all workplace complaints. Herzberg
is brilliant because he split motivation into
two completely distinct buckets, hygiene factors
and motivators. And the key insight, the thing
that messes everyone up, is that they are not
on the same spectrum. Explain that because usually
we think, pay me more, I'm happier, pay me less,
I'm sadder. It's one long line. Herzberg says
no. hygiene factors are things like pay working
conditions company policies job security if these
are bad you are dissatisfied you hate your job
okay but and this is the kicker if these things
are good you aren't motivated you're just neutral
you're not dissatisfied well so a big paycheck
prevents me from quitting but it doesn't actually
make me work harder precisely A good salary and
a comfortable office are like good hygiene. They
prevent disease, but they don't make you healthy.
They just keep you from being miserable. So what
makes you healthy or motivated? That's the second
bucket. Motivators. These are things like a sense
of achievement, recognition for your work, the
work itself being interesting, having responsibility,
opportunities for growth. This explains so much.
I've definitely had jobs where the pay was great,
the benefits were amazing, but the work was mind
-numbingly boring. And I had zero autonomy. And
I just checked out. I did the bare minimum to
not get fired. You were not dissatisfied, but
you weren't motivated. And managers get this
wrong all the time. They think morale is low.
Let's buy a ping pong table or let's give everyone
a 2 % bonus. That's just hygiene. It's all hygiene.
If the work itself sucks, the ping pong table
is just a piece of furniture in a room full of
unmotivated people. Speaking of being unmotivated,
let's talk about the emotional toll of work.
Because for a very long time, the rule was check
your emotions at the door. Which is, you know.
Biologically impossible. Right. And the concept
that jumped out at me here is emotional labor.
This is a term coined by the sociologist Arlie
Hochschild. It refers to the effort it takes
to regulate your emotions to meet the organization's
expectations. And this isn't just don't yell
at your boss. This is deeper. It's you must smile.
Yes. The classic example is a flight attendant.
A passenger is screaming at them because there's
no more overhead bin space. The flight attendant
is probably feeling anger or fear or frustration,
but their job requires them to smile and say,
I'm so sorry, sir. Let's see what we can do.
That gap, that space between what they actually
feel, which is anger, and what they have to show,
which is happiness and concern, that's work.
It's exhausting work. It burns more cognitive
and emotional energy than we think. It's called
emotional dissonance. And if you do it for eight
hours a day, five days a week, it leads to burnout
just as fast as lifting heavy boxes does. It's
a hidden tax on the employee. So we've established
that employees are emotional, boundedly rational,
and seeking meaning. That sounds... Complex,
but manageable. But the source material takes
a turn here. It suggests that when you put these
complex humans into high -pressure environments,
things don't just get inefficient, they can get
toxic. Right. Because we aren't just dealing
with mistakes or inefficiencies anymore. We are
dealing with malevolence. The research calls
it counterproductive work behavior, which is
behavior intended to harm the organization or
its members. And this brings us to Section 3,
the dark side of the workplace. Cue the ominous
music. The sources break down mistreatment into
a few distinct categories, and I think it's really
important to distinguish them. Because we tend
to lump everything under the word bullying, but
that's not always accurate. No, precision matters
here. At the top of the pyramid, you have abusive
supervision. The bad boss. The bad boss. But
it's not just a tough boss. It's a sustained
pattern of hostility. We're talking about public
humiliation, ridicule, scapegoating, things like
that. Okay, then you have bullying. Bullying
is interesting because it implies a power imbalance,
but it doesn't have to be the boss. A group of
peers can bully a single colleague. The key elements
are that it's repeated and it's intended to harm.
But the one I want to spend a minute on is incivility,
because this feels like the most common and yet
the hardest to pin down. Incivility is the silent
killer of teams. It's defined in the literature
as low -intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous
intent to harm. Ambiguous intent. That's the
key phrase, isn't it? It is. If I punch you in
the face, the intent is clear. But if you're
speaking in a meeting and I check my phone and
roll my eyes, did I mean to disrespect you or
was I just checking an urgent email? You don't
know. Or if I leave you off an important email
chain. Oops, I forgot. Did you really forget?
Or are you intentionally freezing me out? Exactly.
And because it's ambiguous, the victim can't
really report it. If you go to HR and say, he
rolled his eyes at me, you sound petty. You sound
like you're overreacting. So you just have to
take it. You stew in it. You ruminate. And the
research shows that this constant low -level
incivility actually erodes team performance and
psychological safety faster than open conflict
because it creates this constant background radiation
of paranoia and distrust. So how do people react
to all this? If you're stuck in an iron cage
and the person next to you is rolling his eyes
at you, their eyes and the boss is yelling, what
do you do? You withdraw. It's a defense mechanism.
There's job withdrawal, which is the ultimate
form you quit. But before that, there's work
withdrawal. This is what we call quiet quitting
today. You show up late. You take long lunches.
You stop volunteering for new projects. You stop
sharing ideas. You are physically present, but
psychologically, you have left the building.
It's a way to reclaim some control in a powerless
situation. Exactly. The logic is, you can control
my body for these eight hours, but you can't
have my engagement. You can't have my spirit.
So, if the dark side is so often the result of
bad management, let's talk about the antidote.
Section 4. Leadership. a huge topic and one that
has evolved wildly over the last century it started
with the great man theory right which is basically
the superhero movie version of leadership yes
pretty much for a long time researchers thought
leaders were born not made They looked for specific
traits. What kind of traits? They literally measured
people's height, the depth of their voice, their
jawline. The assumption was that if you were
tall, charismatic, and extroverted, you were
a natural -born leader. I mean, if you look at
the Fortune 500 CEOs today, we haven't totally
escaped that bias. We haven't. That's true. But
the data eventually showed that while those traits
might help you get the job, they don't really
predict how well you do the job. Plenty of tall,
charismatic extroverts drive companies straight
into the ground. So the science had to shift.
It shifted from who are they to what do they
do? Exactly. The behavioral era. The most famous
studies came out of Ohio State in the 50s. They
surveyed tons of people and boiled leadership
down to two fundamental dimensions, consideration
and initiating structure. Which is basically
people versus tasks. That's a perfect way to
put it. Consideration is the people stuff. Do
you ask about my kids? Do you show concern for
my well -being? Do you trust me? Initiating structure
is the task stuff. Do you set clear deadlines?
Do you organize the work? Do you define roles?
And I assume the best leaders are high on both.
Ideally, yes. But then the researchers realized,
wait for it. It depends. The classic academic
cop -out. Laughs. It's true, though. This is
contingency theory. Think about it. If the buildings
is on fire, do you want a leader who stops to
ask, hey, everyone, how are we all feeling about
the smoke levels? Let's form a committee to brainstorm
some potential exits. No, I want a leader who
screams, go out the back door now. Exactly. In
a crisis, you want high initiating structure
and probably low consideration. But if you are
running a creative ad agency and you're trying
to come up with a Super Bowl commercial, that
screaming dictator style will kill every single
good idea in the room. In that case, you need
high consideration. You need psychological safety.
Right. So a good leader isn't a specific personality
type. A good leader is a chameleon. They adapt
their style to the situation. But there's another
theory here that feels painfully real to anyone
who has ever been part of a team. LMX, leader
-member exchange. This one hurts because it's
so true. LMX theory challenges the idea that
a leader treats everyone on their team the same.
It says that leaders form unique one -on -one
relationships or dyads with each employee. Which
inevitably leads to the in -group and the out
-group. Or, as we all called it in elementary
school, the teacher's pets and, well... Everyone
else. But this isn't just about liking someone
more. It fundamentally affects how they work.
Profoundly. If you are in the in -group, the
boss trusts you. You get more autonomy. You get
the benefit of the doubt. If you screw up, it's
viewed as an honest mistake or a learning opportunity.
And if you're in the out -group... You get rules.
You get monitored. You get micromanaged. If you
screw up, it's seen as proof of your incompetence.
And here's the really twisted part. Because the
outgroup is micromanaged and distrusted, they
tend to perform worse. Which confirms the boss's
initial bias. It's a self -fulfilling prophecy.
The leader's perception creates the reality.
That is brutal. It makes you realize how much
power a manager has to shape an employee's entire
reality at work. Which is why transformational
leadership is considered the gold standard now.
It's the inspiring stuff, right? The motivational
speeches. Yes. Transformational leaders don't
just engage in a simple transaction, I pay you.
You work. That's transactional leadership. A
transformational leader offers a vision. They
stimulate you intellectually. They make you feel
like your work matters to some larger purpose.
It sounds a little bit like a cult leader. The
line between a transformational leader and a
cult leader is often just ethics. But yes, it's
about tapping into that deep, intrinsic motivation
we talked about with Hertzberg. Okay. So we've
looked at the person. We've looked at the boss.
Now let's zoom all the way out. Section five.
The organization. The macro level. The big picture.
We hear the word culture thrown around constantly.
We have a great culture here. Usually that means
they have free snacks and a casual dress code.
But the source material says that's not culture.
Those are just artifacts. Correct. This is Edgar
Schein's model of organizational culture, and
it's brilliant. He visualized culture like an
iceberg. Okay. The 10 % sticking out of the water,
those are the artifacts. The ping pong table,
the open plan office, the jargon people use,
the company logo. It's the stuff you can see
and hear. But you can't judge a company by its
ping pong table. No. You have to go deeper. Just
below the surface, level two is espoused values.
This is what the company says it believes. It's
the mission statement on the wall. We value integrity,
safety first, customer obsession. But we all
know companies that have integrity written on
the wall and then go on to lie to their shareholders.
Enron had a great mission statement. Exactly.
Espoused values can be aspirational or they can
be pure PR. That's why you have to dive all the
way to the bottom of the iceberg. Level three.
Shared basic assumptions. This is the deep stuff.
This is the really deep stuff. These are the
unconscious, taken -for -granted beliefs about
how the world works. The unwritten rules that
everyone knows but nobody ever talks about. Give
me an example of an assumption. Okay, imagine
a company that says they value innovation. That's
their espoused value. They even have a cool innovation
lab with whiteboards and beanbags. That's an
artifact. But deep down, the shared basic assumption...
The unwritten rule that everyone knows but nobody
speaks is mistakes are fatal. If you screw up
a project, your career here is over. So nobody
innovates. Because real innovation requires the
risk of making mistakes. Right. The assumption
always eats the value for breakfast. If you really
want to understand a company, ignore the writing
on the wall. Watch what happens when someone
makes a big mistake. Watch who gets promoted.
That tells you the real culture. That feels like
it connects to national culture, too. The sources
mention Hofstede's work on this. Geert Hofstede,
a Dutch researcher who did landmark work for
IBM. He showed that you can't just take a management
style from, say, New York and drop it into Tokyo
and expect it to work. Culture runs deep. What's
the specific dimension where that friction happens?
Power distance is a big one. This measures how
comfortable a culture is with hierarchy and inequality.
So high power distance would be? In high power
distance cultures, like many in Latin America
or Asia, the boss is the authority. You do not
challenge them publicly. It's seen as deeply
disrespectful. The hierarchy is rigid and accepted.
And low power distance? Think of a tech startup
in Silicon Valley. The 22 -year -old intern might
interrupt the CEO in a big meeting and say, actually,
I think that's a bad idea and here's why. In
a low power distance culture, that's seen as
innovation and speaking up. But in a high power
distance culture, that's insubordination. You'd
be fired on the spot. I can see how that would
cause massive problems in a global team. If an
American manager goes to a high power distance
country and says, my door is always open, please
give me your honest feedback. And then nobody
says anything. The American thinks, wow, my team
has no ideas. But the employees are thinking.
I respect you too much as my boss to ever correct
you in public. It's a fundamental misunderstanding
of cultural assumptions. There's one more macro
concept I want to touch on because it uses this
really interesting biological metaphor, organizational
ecology. Yes. This treats companies like species
in an ecosystem. It's about their birth, their
growth, and their death. This makes me think
of dinosaurs. That's a perfect analogy. Imagine
Blockbuster Video. In the 1990s, it was the T
-Rex of its ecosystem. It was huge, dominant,
perfectly adapted to its environment of strip
malls and physical VHS tapes. And then the asteroid
hit. The asteroid was the internet, streaming,
Netflix. Organizational ecology says that Blockbuster
didn't die just because the managers were stupid.
It died because the entire environment changed
and the organism itself, told DNA, couldn't evolve
fast enough to survive in the new climate. So
it's survival of the fittest. But for corporations?
It is. The environment selects the organizations
that have the right fit. If you don't fit the
niche anymore, you go extinct. It's a humbling
reminder that companies aren't permanent. They
are just temporary solutions to a particular
problem in time. Okay, let's bring it into the
present day. Section 6. Contemporary issues.
Because the workplace is changing faster than
ever. It is. The walls are coming down in more
ways than one. Literally and figuratively. One
major topic is diversity and inclusion. And the
sources make a really important distinction here
that I think is key. Diversity is the mix. Inclusion
is getting the mix to work well together. That's
a great way to put it. For a long time, companies
just focused on diversity, you know, getting
different looking people in the room, representation.
But if you have a diverse room, but the culture
demands that everyone act the same way, think
the same way, and conform to the dominant norm,
you... completely lose the benefit. You lose
the whole point. The benefit is supposed to be
different perspectives. Right. We call it cognitive
friction. If everyone in the room has the same
background and thinks the same way, you get groupthink.
It feels smooth and easy, but it leads to terrible
decisions. Diversity introduces a healthy friction.
It makes decision -making harder and slower,
but the outcomes are almost always better. Inclusion
is the skill of managing that friction productively.
Another modern issue that feels more relevant
than ever is work -family conflict. This brings
us right back to the iron cage, but now the cage
is in our pocket. The smartphone. Exactly. Chester
Barnard, an early theorist, said we act differently
in our work roles than in our personal roles.
We put on a mask for work. But now, with Zoom
calls from the kitchen table and Slack messages
at 10 p .m., that mask is slipping. The boundaries
are almost gone. And the conflict isn't just,
I'm busy. It's about incompatible demands. Yes.
That's the key. Your boss demands you be on a
client call at 5 p .m. Your daycare demands you
pick up your kid by 5 p .m. You cannot physically
be in two places at once. That creates a massive,
unrevolvable stress. Before we wrap up, I want
to touch on how we know all this stuff. The research
methods. Because we keep saying research shows,
but what does that actually look like? Are people
just handing out surveys? Surveys are the bread
and butter, for sure. That's the quantitative
side. But some of the really cool cutting -edge
stuff is happening in simulation. Computer simulation?
Yes. Agent -based modeling. Imagine a customized
version of The Sims or a video game, but for
an office. Researchers create these virtual employees
or agents. They program them with specific traits
based on real psychological data. This one is
grumpy. This one is a narcissist. This one is
highly motivated and collaborative. And then
they just hit play and see what happens. Pretty
much. They run the simulation. thousands of times
to see what happens does the team succeed does
a toxic rumor spread through the network does
the narcissist eventually take over the team
it allows us to test complex theories that would
be way too expensive or frankly unethical to
test on real humans right you can't intentionally
introduce a bully into a real team just to watch
what happens But you can in a simulation. It's
helping us model our own messy behavior to understand
it better. It's really the future of the field.
That is fascinating. So let's try to synthesize
all this. We've covered a lot of ground. We have.
We started with the chaos of the early factory,
moved to the iron cage of efficiency, discovered
the importance of human feelings at Hawthorne,
realized our brains are bounded, explored the
dark side of incivility, decoded the hidden rules
of culture, and ended up with computer simulations
of virtual employees. It's a massive journey.
But for you, the listener, what's the big takeaway
here? For me, it's that work isn't just a place
you go. It's a complex social system. And if
you are frustrated by your boss or your team
or your own lack of motivation, don't just blame
yourself or the people around you. Look at the
structure. Look at the incentives. Look at the
culture. It gives you a toolkit to diagnose the
problem. Oh, this isn't just a personality clash.
This is a classic in -group, out -group dynamic
being created by my manager. Exactly. Naming
the demon gives you power over it. It allows
you to see the system behind the frustration.
I want to leave everyone with a final provocative
thought. Something that's been brewing in my
mind as we talked about organizational ecology.
Let's hear it. So we talked about how companies
are selected by their environment. Only the ones
that fit the market survive. And we talked about
how we, as employees, have to adapt to the company
culture to survive inside that organization.
We put on the mask, we do the emotional labor,
we adapt, or we get selected out. So here's the
thought. If the companies are being shaped by
the market, And we are being shaped by the companies
we work for. Are we really shaping the organization?
Or is the organization slowly, over thousands
of hours, over decades, fundamentally reshaping
who we are as a species? That is the ultimate
question, isn't it? If we spend 90 ,000 hours
inside the iron cage, eventually the shape of
our soul might just start to match the shape
of the bars. Something to think about doing your
next performance review. Thanks for diving in
with us. Always a pleasure.