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Enjoying Your Work Richard Brislin |
Superordinate goals
demand efforts of
all hiresPeople are very sensitive to features that make one individual different from another. At times, individuals emphasize these features and want to have the reputation of being different from others on selected dimensions.
Features leading to judgments about and emphases of differences include skin color, age, gender, social class and section of a country where a person grew up.
Many times, these differences lead to judgments concerning various evaluations. Who is smarter? Who is better looking? Who is a better leader? Who is more dependable in the workplace? Who is better prepared to interact with the company's most important customers?
People who feel that they are similar often form groups, spend time with each other and exchange favors. When behaving in this way, they exclude individuals who are seen as different.
The feelings generated by attention to these differences often works against the goals of a company. If energy is spent on forming and maintaining ingroup alliances and outgroup derision, then energy is drained away from company goals such as product development and good customer service.
If executives want to improve a company's intergroup relations, there are various steps that they can take. One of the most important is that executives, after consulting with employees, should formulate goals that everyone in the workplace accepts as important.
These desired organizational outcomes, called superordinate goals, demand both the acceptance and efforts of all employees. Superordinate goals cannot be achieved by one or a few people: the efforts of all are needed.
Executives need to be sure that everyone sees the importance of these goals and understands how their contributions are needed. If this can be done, petty backbiting and irrelevant ingroup-outgroup squabbles will take a distant second place to the positive energies of common group effort.
My father captured this in advice to his children. The family moved several times during our challenging teenage years, and so we were faced with the task of developing new friendships.
My father advised: "Join clubs that seem important to people at the school. By working with people on shared activities, you'll help the club and also make friends. You will quickly move from being an outsider to a club member."
It is useful to identify places where the results of effective intergroup relations can be seen. Let's consider a college campus. Where are positive intergroup relations essential?
One place is the athletic department. Men and women from very different backgrounds come together and must work together toward group goals. Differences can be due to race, ethnicity, religion, the local/non-local distinction common in Hawaii, and the status and wealth of parents.
However, these distinctions have to be set aside if members of an athletic team are to work toward goals such as a winning season and participation in postseason tournaments. People from different backgrounds do not have to become close friends, although they often do. They must set aside differences that have no bearing on team performance and work together toward shared team goals.
If they put energy into maintaining irrelevant ingroup-ougroup distinctions, there will be a place for them on the bench rather than on the court or playing field.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
The purpose of this column is to increase understanding of human behavior as it has an impact on the workplace. Given the amount of time people spend at work, job satisfaction should ideally be high and it should contribute to general life happiness. Enjoyment can increase as people learn more about workplace psychology, communication, and group influences.
Richard Brislin is a professor in the College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii. He can be reached through the College Relations Office: cro@cba.hawaii.edu