Leadership-Interview-Transkript - Sozialpsychologie - Goethe ...

what you cannot do, you have to do it this way, you cannot do it this way. And so what that
leads to I think is a suppression of personal initiative so many people in the workplace do not
feel they have the ability to bring about change or to have influence to what happens in their
organizations and they resist the changes that are imposed on them, because often they feel
those changes will prevent them from doing their jobs as well as they would like to. So for me
that is one of the key factors we need to really encourage cultures in organizations that foster
innovation that encourage people to come up with ideas for new and improved ways of doing
things.
And I think the second obstacle that I have encountered is senior individuals within
organizations who sometimes even say the right things about how to run an organization but
what they do is inconsistent with that. And my opinion is where you have these
inconsistencies between the espout values of leaders in organizations and what those leaders
are actually doing in practice that that undermines trust and safety for all people within the
organization. And as a consequence you begin to get toxicity and you begin to get …
disengagement and you get the kind of stress that you are referring to. When we look in the
National Health Service for example in the United Kingdom which has 1,37 Mio. Employees
so a huge organization, 14 % of the people report being bullied by their managers mobbed by
managers or colleges that’s like one in seven people and that has huge consequences in terms
of absenteeism and the ability of the people to do their jobs effectively. It has to do with both.
First bureaucratization, standardization and ruled banned nature of organizations and the
second is to do leaders who do not practice what we would preach.
Rolf van Dick: Now let me ask you a last question. How important do you think are values in
our modern world or in organizations? And maybe you may link that to the previous
questions.
Michael West: I suppose I have come to the conception that work organizations are just
another form of human community just like a village or a volunteer society or a church. It is a
grouping of humans. But in the end Human communities operate because there is a shared set
of values to which they subscribed explicitly or implicitly. And if we try to create work
organizations where those basic values which were important to all communities are not in
operation not knocked forward then those organizations in the long term will not be
successful because the trust that you need within the community will be absent. I am talking
about values like wisdom, knowledge and the desire for learning. So we need organizations
where leaders are encouraging learning, wisdom and knowledge. Values like courage, the
courage to have a vision of what kind of difference we want to make as a work organization,
the courage to persist, the courage to act with integrity within the organization and also about
humanity or more a value of humanity so that these organizations where there is a cultural of
kindness where we are not nasty to each other, you know because that undermines
effectiveness, where we do want to help and to support each other and a value of Justice
where people are treated fairly, equally, where there is an emphasis on duty, loyalty,
citizenship and humility in the terms of leadership. Furthermore a value of prudence where
we are cautious and careful about how we behave as an example we don not take to many
initiative neither sending of aggressive responses to e-mails. So we act in a way of prudence,
caution, and temperance this is important in any community. And finally it is a value around
wonder and spirituality. When I say spirituality I do not necessarily mean it in a religious
sense, but any human community there is often in the sense of wonder and optimism about
the future, humor, gratitude and appreciation for each other and for the contribution that we
create. It seems to me that those are the sorts of value, which underpin effective human
communities and that we need leaders to embody not just to espouse they really have to
embody if they want to be a creative and effective organizations. I do not belief that creating