Finally, if (salaried) employees working long hours is just them trying to signal how hard working they are, at the expense of real productivity, it’s a bit surprising managers haven’t clamped down on that kind of wasteful signaling more.
I’m not sure that “X is wasteful signaling and hurts productivity” is very strong evidence for “managers would minimize X”.
One manager I used to work for got in some social trouble with his peers (other managers in the same organization) for tolerating staff publicly disagreeing with him on technical issues. In a different workplace and industry, I’ve heard managers explicitly discuss the conflicts between “managing up” (convincing your boss that your group do good work) and “managing down” (actually helping your group do good work) — with the understanding that if you do not manage up, you will not have the opportunity to manage down.
A lot of the role of managers seems to be best explained as ape behavior, not agent behavior.
A lot of the role of managers seems to be best explained as ape behavior, not agent behavior.
Localized context warning needed missing here.
There’s also other warnings that need to be thrown in: People who only care about the social-ape aspects are more likely to seek the position. People in general do social-ape stuff, at every level, not just manager level, with the aforementioned selection effect only increasing the apparent ratio. On top of that, instances of social-ape behavior are more salient and, usually, more narratively impactful, both because of how “special” they seem and because the human brain is fine-tuned to pick up on them.
Another unstudied aspect, which I suspect is significant but don’t have much solid evidence about, is that IMO good exec and managerial types seem to snatch up and keep all the “decent” non-ape managers, which would make all the remaining ape dregs look even more predominant in the places that don’t have those snatchers.
But anyway, if you model the “team” as an independent unit acting “against” outside forces or “other tribes” which exert social-ape-type pressures and requirements on the Team’s “tribe”, then the manager’s behavior is much more logical in agent terms: One member of the team is sacrificed to “social-ape concerns”, a maintenance or upkeep cost to pay of sorts, for the rest of the team to do useful and productive things without having the entire group’s productivity smashed to bits by external social-ape pressures.
I find that in relatively-sane (i.e. no VPs coming to look over the shoulder of individual employees or poring over Internet logs and demanding answers and justifications for every little thing) environments with above-average managers, this is usually the case.
I’m not sure that “X is wasteful signaling and hurts productivity” is very strong evidence for “managers would minimize X”.
One manager I used to work for got in some social trouble with his peers (other managers in the same organization) for tolerating staff publicly disagreeing with him on technical issues. In a different workplace and industry, I’ve heard managers explicitly discuss the conflicts between “managing up” (convincing your boss that your group do good work) and “managing down” (actually helping your group do good work) — with the understanding that if you do not manage up, you will not have the opportunity to manage down.
A lot of the role of managers seems to be best explained as ape behavior, not agent behavior.
Localized context warning needed missing here.
There’s also other warnings that need to be thrown in:
People who only care about the social-ape aspects are more likely to seek the position. People in general do social-ape stuff, at every level, not just manager level, with the aforementioned selection effect only increasing the apparent ratio. On top of that, instances of social-ape behavior are more salient and, usually, more narratively impactful, both because of how “special” they seem and because the human brain is fine-tuned to pick up on them.
Another unstudied aspect, which I suspect is significant but don’t have much solid evidence about, is that IMO good exec and managerial types seem to snatch up and keep all the “decent” non-ape managers, which would make all the remaining ape dregs look even more predominant in the places that don’t have those snatchers.
But anyway, if you model the “team” as an independent unit acting “against” outside forces or “other tribes” which exert social-ape-type pressures and requirements on the Team’s “tribe”, then the manager’s behavior is much more logical in agent terms: One member of the team is sacrificed to “social-ape concerns”, a maintenance or upkeep cost to pay of sorts, for the rest of the team to do useful and productive things without having the entire group’s productivity smashed to bits by external social-ape pressures.
I find that in relatively-sane (i.e. no VPs coming to look over the shoulder of individual employees or poring over Internet logs and demanding answers and justifications for every little thing) environments with above-average managers, this is usually the case.