Many of the implicit or explicit assumptions behind HR policy and process is that we have to control, motivate and persuade employees to do a good job, co-operate with others and work for the good of the company. Could we have been getting this wrong?
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review challenged my thinking. The article was a summary of the science on human selfishness. Or rather, unselfishness. Since Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan published in 1651 humans have been thought to act from self-interest. It is the assumption on which our financial markets and business philosophy are based.
But recent research is calling this fundamental assumption into question and the evidence is quite compelling. The article quotes from a number of different disciplines, such as sociology, neuroscience, and economics, showing people are not entirely selfish and may even have evolved because they are predisposed to co-operate with others.
But if this is true what are the implications for HR? If employees are inherently unselfish, how different the HR world would be!
Our time would be focused on creating environments that allow employees to do what comes naturally: helping colleagues and customers, and working for the greater good of the group or company.
Compensation policy would be thrown up in the air. No more huge bonuses for individual producers and much more team reward. We would find ourselves diversifying the reward structure, something already suggested by Dan Pink in his book Drive, and spend much more time developing policy that fosters mutual support and engagement across the firm.
As an experiment, spend today checking the underlying assumption behind your advice to leaders and managers, and how different it would be if you assumed the best in people. You never know - it might become a habit, with interesting results.