Salz Review - Wall Street Journal

Salz Review
An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices
192
There is a considerable body of research which points toward the role of nonfinancial
rewards as key to motivation and performance at work. A survey of one thousand
executives by McKinsey 293 for example, highlights that non-cash rewards, such as praise
from immediate managers, leadership attention (for example, one-on-one conversations),
and a chance to lead projects or task forces, are even more effective motivators than the
three highest-rated financial incentives: cash bonuses, increased base pay, and stock or
stock options.
The secret to performance maintenance and engagement at work (and at home) is the
human need to direct our own lives, to learn, to create new things, and to have engaging
social relations with those that we work with. The role of culture is to create an
environment in which this can happen. Reward and remuneration are powerful levers if
used to best effect and with a clear understanding of where they sit in the hierarchy of
needs. 294
Avoiding Cultural Corruption
As humans we would like to think that morality is linked inherently to our individual
personalities or values. However, a century’s worth of research suggests it is not.
Employees who are routinely dishonest at work are not dishonest at home; people who are
courageous at home are not routinely courageous at work. Moral behaviour does not
exhibit what researchers call cross-situational stability. 295 Rather, it seems to be powerfully
influenced by context and, in an organisational sense, this context is the culture and cultural
norms.
Work by Lasch (1979) 296 and Long (2008) 297 points toward evidence that cultures which are
highly individualistic, verging on narcissistic, create a collective dynamic which reinforces
perverse behaviour through the process of turning a blind eye. 298 In organisations such as
financial services, which are highly people and knowledge centric, denial of knowledge is
significant. There is a challenge about our relationship with knowledge, particularly in
environments where control and control frameworks are knowledge that one might not
want to know. “I know things, but they are of no use to me in terms of what I am trying to
achieve”. Instead, I value some constructed knowledge that I can rationalise as being
‘better or a different lens through which to see the control framework to help me achieve
my needs’. This is known as delusion and Mannie Sher, a researcher who has studied the
group dynamics of turning a blind eye and its corrupting influence, suggests that this can
often be seen at the start of group corruption. 299 ‘I/we know it is wrong but I/we can
construct a rationale, logical framework which means that I/we can subvert my/our moral
compass.’ No-one in the group speaks out about the concerns of what might be right or
wrong for fear of being seen to be disloyal. Rationale and logic is encouraged at the
expense of that which we know/feel deep down to be right.
293 McKinsey, Motivating People: Getting beyond Money, 2009.
294 Daniel Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, 2011.
295 David Magnusson and Hakan Stattin, Stability of Cross-Situational Patterns of Behaviour, 1981.
296 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the Age of Diminishing Expectations, 1979.
297 Susan Long, The Perverse Organisation and its Deadly Sins, 2008.
298 Paul Hoggett, Partisans in an Uncertain World, 1992.
299 Mannie Sher, Managing Change, 2012.