are you a workplace deviant well do you
check Facebook text your friends and
waste time surfing the net while at work
yes you probably do but that doesn’t
make you a deviant but you could become
deviant if your workplace monitors every
behavior that you engage in and forces
you to hide these activities that we all
do at work you could become deviant if
you’re treated with disrespect and in
response you treat others with
disrespect or if you hide knowledge from
people in order to get ahead the forces
that create deviance at work are very
very strong now I’m a psychologist and
I’m an organizational psychologist and I
like studying the dark side of
organizational behavior now quite often
people get interested in psychology
because they want to engage in research
they want to learn something about
psychology in an effort to fix
themselves now again I like studying bad
behavior at work so am i engaging in
research if so that must mean that I’m a
bad person who likes doing bad things to
people but that’s not the case at least
I don’t think it’s the case I don’t
study bad behavior work because I’m dark
and evil rather I’ve had experiences in
my life that have led me to question how
and why we treat each other badly at
work and I want to share some of those
experiences with you today
and talk about what it means to be
working with people who aren’t
necessarily nice and friendly and
courteous towards you and what you can
do about it so here’s how I became
interested in studying workplace
deviance when I was a graduate student
way back in 1998 I was sitting in our
graduate computer lab one day
working on a paper and I had word and
SPSS open on my computer and I was using
these programs to analyze some data and
write a paper now the phone rang and I
picked it up and the person on the phone
identified himself as being from the IT
department at the University and he told
me that they knew that I tried to access
the student grades database and to alter
a grade for a student he then threatened
to bring me up on academic integrity
charges and had me expelled from the
graduate program and from the University
now I had no idea what he was talking
about ironically my ability to use
computers to program computers was so
bad that in first year undergrad I had
to change majors because I couldn’t pass
an introductory computer science course
so clearly they had the wrong guy now
this person went on to ask me what I was
doing with word in SPSS on my computer I
was astonished how did he know what I
was working on on my computer at that
very moment I quickly looked around the
room to see where the cameras were how
naive I was I had no idea at the time
that workplace surveillance goes well
beyond cameras and can include things
like monitoring every keystroke that you
engage in on your keyboard monitoring
every website you visit monitoring every
email you send and even tracking how
long you’re away from your desk I later
learned that the IT people had actually
searched my office without my knowledge
because they questioned me about a
computer that was left behind by a
former graduate student years ago so
here’s why they invaded my privacy and
threatened me a few days before this
call I had simply forgotten to log out
of a computer
at the end of the day and the
investigation revealed that a professor
had come in and used that computer to
try and change a grade for a student
that’s what triggered all the alarms and
led to the threats against me now in
response to that of that I became
extremely afraid and confused and
thinking that my freedom was no longer
in my control and so I actually stopped
logging into computers in this computer
lab I only worked on computers that
other people had logged into and I
figured well they could know what was
going on in the computer but they
wouldn’t know was me and that was my
first inkling that deviance begets
deviance and that experience has shaped
everything that I’ve studied and
everything that I continue to study to
this very day
so I began to study the effects of close
surveillance on employees and how that
makes them feel and act and what I
learned and from my own experience is
that when we monitor people closely they
are going to retaliate and they’re going
to find ways to engage in even more
deviance than the modern Marven system
is designed to prevent so when you back
people into a corner and you take away
their control people will find ways to
seek out control again usually by doing
things that are worse than the modern is
designed to prevent so for example call
center employees who have their call
times monitored will pick up a client
call and quickly hang up to keep their
call times down employees who are
monitored by cameras will seek out dead
spots where the cameras gaze doesn’t
reach them and that’s where they will go
to engage in deviant behavior often
things like stealing from their employer
in order to get back at them so the
bottom line is when we take away
people’s control and their freedom they
will retaliate and find ways to get it
back
deviance begets even more deviance now a
few years back I was invited to
participate in a roundtable discussion
with a group of knowledge managers now
these are people who are tasked with
getting their employees to share their
knowledge with each other freely and all
of these people were lamenting the fact
that they had built these complex and
expensive knowledge management portals
yet nobody was using them so in essence
they built them but no one came a little
while after that I was invited to this
organizational session on knowledge
management were the senior leaders of
this very large organization we’re
congratulating themselves on the fact
that everyone in that organization
shared their knowledge with each other
freely and they knew this because they
had asked all of their employees to
self-identify whether they had unique
knowledge that needed to be shared and
very few did now I thought to myself I’m
not so surprised that people didn’t
raise their heads and say yes I have
unique knowledge that gives me power in
this organization I want you to force me
to share it with everyone do we share
our knowledge freely with others do you
share your knowledge with others when
asked maybe you do but for most of us in
organizations where we’re all competing
for very limited resources we do not and
I wanted to study why not so rather than
look at ways to increase knowledge
sharing my colleagues and I actually
engaged in a number of studies looking
at how and why people actively hide
knowledge from each other so think about
the last time that you asked someone for
knowledge whether it was to help you at
work or maybe to help you in a course
did they give that knowledge to
freely or did they play dumb and say
they just didn’t know or did they
promise to give you that knowledge at a
later time and they never did or did
they give you a piece of that knowledge
but not everything that you needed to
get your job done how did that make you
feel I bet that you told yourself that
if anyone asked you for knowledge this
person or anyone else that you wouldn’t
share it with them deviants be gets even
more deviants now I’m currently studying
asshole bosses technically we call them
abusive supervisors and then we’re
looking at whether working with asshole
bosses are sorry I should call them
abusive supervisors triggers knowledge
hiding in subordinates so for example I
have a boss who’s highly controlling
very critical of me yells at me takes
credit for my work and in response I
hide knowledge from him or her or from
others now it could be that because I
hide knowledge my boss is very
frustrated frustrated with me very upset
and so he or she behaves abusively
towards me either way it doesn’t matter
everything we do is interconnected it’s
all a cycle
the challenge is how we break that cycle
can we move away from deviance and
create a new cycle of behavior a better
cycle behavior we can and the way to do
that is through trust Trust breaks the
cycle of deviance now people do a lot of
bad things at work but it’s not because
we’re all bad some of us are bad but
most of us aren’t but because we don’t
trust each other we get caught up in
these bad cycles of behavior that lead
us to behave in ways that normally we
would not but if we can treat people
with respect and give them trust that is
a much more effective way of controlling
deviance than in designing
all-encompassing surveillance systems to
monitor their every behavior if we can
remove competitive pressures where
they’re not necessary and reward people
for sharing knowledge as opposed to
punishing them that makes it okay for
people to share their knowledge freely
and it builds a sense of trust amongst
colleagues Trust breaks the cycle of
deviance but engaging with trust is both
very easy and very hard the easy part is
figuring out who you can trust and who
you can not in essence figuring out who
is just by their very nature a bad
person and who by circumstance or
situation is caught up in a bad cycle of
behavior and we have to look for
evidence
Harold Kelly came up with a theory of
causal attributions way back in 1967
that can help us
we have to ask ourselves is this person
we’re dealing with always mean and nasty
with me and mean and nasty with others
are they mean about the outside of work
if the answer is yes to all of those
questions your response is clear you
need to get away from this person
nothing you do is going to change their
behavior this is not someone you should
trust but if this person is only like
that with me I’d not like that with
others and not like that outside of work
maybe it’s something you’ve done and you
can change your behavior and break that
cycle so simply looking for evidence
usually leads us to the right conclusion
about whether we can trust someone
that’s the easy part
the hard part is engaging with trust
because Trust implies vulnerability and
vulnerability is not comfortable but the
only way to break the cycle of deviance
is to create a new cycle based on trust
now as I said we shouldn’t trust
everyone and we shouldn’t be vulnerable
to everyone but engaging with trust to
those who are not bad people
by treating them with respect by sharing
knowledge with them serves to break that
bad cycle of behavior that leads to
deviance we can break that cycle of
deviance we need to create a new cycle
based on trust thank
[Applause]
check Facebook text your friends and
waste time surfing the net while at work
yes you probably do but that doesn’t
make you a deviant but you could become
deviant if your workplace monitors every
behavior that you engage in and forces
you to hide these activities that we all
do at work you could become deviant if
you’re treated with disrespect and in
response you treat others with
disrespect or if you hide knowledge from
people in order to get ahead the forces
that create deviance at work are very
very strong now I’m a psychologist and
I’m an organizational psychologist and I
like studying the dark side of
organizational behavior now quite often
people get interested in psychology
because they want to engage in research
they want to learn something about
psychology in an effort to fix
themselves now again I like studying bad
behavior at work so am i engaging in
research if so that must mean that I’m a
bad person who likes doing bad things to
people but that’s not the case at least
I don’t think it’s the case I don’t
study bad behavior work because I’m dark
and evil rather I’ve had experiences in
my life that have led me to question how
and why we treat each other badly at
work and I want to share some of those
experiences with you today
and talk about what it means to be
working with people who aren’t
necessarily nice and friendly and
courteous towards you and what you can
do about it so here’s how I became
interested in studying workplace
deviance when I was a graduate student
way back in 1998 I was sitting in our
graduate computer lab one day
working on a paper and I had word and
SPSS open on my computer and I was using
these programs to analyze some data and
write a paper now the phone rang and I
picked it up and the person on the phone
identified himself as being from the IT
department at the University and he told
me that they knew that I tried to access
the student grades database and to alter
a grade for a student he then threatened
to bring me up on academic integrity
charges and had me expelled from the
graduate program and from the University
now I had no idea what he was talking
about ironically my ability to use
computers to program computers was so
bad that in first year undergrad I had
to change majors because I couldn’t pass
an introductory computer science course
so clearly they had the wrong guy now
this person went on to ask me what I was
doing with word in SPSS on my computer I
was astonished how did he know what I
was working on on my computer at that
very moment I quickly looked around the
room to see where the cameras were how
naive I was I had no idea at the time
that workplace surveillance goes well
beyond cameras and can include things
like monitoring every keystroke that you
engage in on your keyboard monitoring
every website you visit monitoring every
email you send and even tracking how
long you’re away from your desk I later
learned that the IT people had actually
searched my office without my knowledge
because they questioned me about a
computer that was left behind by a
former graduate student years ago so
here’s why they invaded my privacy and
threatened me a few days before this
call I had simply forgotten to log out
of a computer
at the end of the day and the
investigation revealed that a professor
had come in and used that computer to
try and change a grade for a student
that’s what triggered all the alarms and
led to the threats against me now in
response to that of that I became
extremely afraid and confused and
thinking that my freedom was no longer
in my control and so I actually stopped
logging into computers in this computer
lab I only worked on computers that
other people had logged into and I
figured well they could know what was
going on in the computer but they
wouldn’t know was me and that was my
first inkling that deviance begets
deviance and that experience has shaped
everything that I’ve studied and
everything that I continue to study to
this very day
so I began to study the effects of close
surveillance on employees and how that
makes them feel and act and what I
learned and from my own experience is
that when we monitor people closely they
are going to retaliate and they’re going
to find ways to engage in even more
deviance than the modern Marven system
is designed to prevent so when you back
people into a corner and you take away
their control people will find ways to
seek out control again usually by doing
things that are worse than the modern is
designed to prevent so for example call
center employees who have their call
times monitored will pick up a client
call and quickly hang up to keep their
call times down employees who are
monitored by cameras will seek out dead
spots where the cameras gaze doesn’t
reach them and that’s where they will go
to engage in deviant behavior often
things like stealing from their employer
in order to get back at them so the
bottom line is when we take away
people’s control and their freedom they
will retaliate and find ways to get it
back
deviance begets even more deviance now a
few years back I was invited to
participate in a roundtable discussion
with a group of knowledge managers now
these are people who are tasked with
getting their employees to share their
knowledge with each other freely and all
of these people were lamenting the fact
that they had built these complex and
expensive knowledge management portals
yet nobody was using them so in essence
they built them but no one came a little
while after that I was invited to this
organizational session on knowledge
management were the senior leaders of
this very large organization we’re
congratulating themselves on the fact
that everyone in that organization
shared their knowledge with each other
freely and they knew this because they
had asked all of their employees to
self-identify whether they had unique
knowledge that needed to be shared and
very few did now I thought to myself I’m
not so surprised that people didn’t
raise their heads and say yes I have
unique knowledge that gives me power in
this organization I want you to force me
to share it with everyone do we share
our knowledge freely with others do you
share your knowledge with others when
asked maybe you do but for most of us in
organizations where we’re all competing
for very limited resources we do not and
I wanted to study why not so rather than
look at ways to increase knowledge
sharing my colleagues and I actually
engaged in a number of studies looking
at how and why people actively hide
knowledge from each other so think about
the last time that you asked someone for
knowledge whether it was to help you at
work or maybe to help you in a course
did they give that knowledge to
freely or did they play dumb and say
they just didn’t know or did they
promise to give you that knowledge at a
later time and they never did or did
they give you a piece of that knowledge
but not everything that you needed to
get your job done how did that make you
feel I bet that you told yourself that
if anyone asked you for knowledge this
person or anyone else that you wouldn’t
share it with them deviants be gets even
more deviants now I’m currently studying
asshole bosses technically we call them
abusive supervisors and then we’re
looking at whether working with asshole
bosses are sorry I should call them
abusive supervisors triggers knowledge
hiding in subordinates so for example I
have a boss who’s highly controlling
very critical of me yells at me takes
credit for my work and in response I
hide knowledge from him or her or from
others now it could be that because I
hide knowledge my boss is very
frustrated frustrated with me very upset
and so he or she behaves abusively
towards me either way it doesn’t matter
everything we do is interconnected it’s
all a cycle
the challenge is how we break that cycle
can we move away from deviance and
create a new cycle of behavior a better
cycle behavior we can and the way to do
that is through trust Trust breaks the
cycle of deviance now people do a lot of
bad things at work but it’s not because
we’re all bad some of us are bad but
most of us aren’t but because we don’t
trust each other we get caught up in
these bad cycles of behavior that lead
us to behave in ways that normally we
would not but if we can treat people
with respect and give them trust that is
a much more effective way of controlling
deviance than in designing
all-encompassing surveillance systems to
monitor their every behavior if we can
remove competitive pressures where
they’re not necessary and reward people
for sharing knowledge as opposed to
punishing them that makes it okay for
people to share their knowledge freely
and it builds a sense of trust amongst
colleagues Trust breaks the cycle of
deviance but engaging with trust is both
very easy and very hard the easy part is
figuring out who you can trust and who
you can not in essence figuring out who
is just by their very nature a bad
person and who by circumstance or
situation is caught up in a bad cycle of
behavior and we have to look for
evidence
Harold Kelly came up with a theory of
causal attributions way back in 1967
that can help us
we have to ask ourselves is this person
we’re dealing with always mean and nasty
with me and mean and nasty with others
are they mean about the outside of work
if the answer is yes to all of those
questions your response is clear you
need to get away from this person
nothing you do is going to change their
behavior this is not someone you should
trust but if this person is only like
that with me I’d not like that with
others and not like that outside of work
maybe it’s something you’ve done and you
can change your behavior and break that
cycle so simply looking for evidence
usually leads us to the right conclusion
about whether we can trust someone
that’s the easy part
the hard part is engaging with trust
because Trust implies vulnerability and
vulnerability is not comfortable but the
only way to break the cycle of deviance
is to create a new cycle based on trust
now as I said we shouldn’t trust
everyone and we shouldn’t be vulnerable
to everyone but engaging with trust to
those who are not bad people
by treating them with respect by sharing
knowledge with them serves to break that
bad cycle of behavior that leads to
deviance we can break that cycle of
deviance we need to create a new cycle
based on trust thank
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: