I recently came across this interesting article from the Kellogg School of Management on a study of status distinctions. It looks at how nightclub bouncers have to immediately judge people in the queue and quickly decide whether to let them in. This is an interesting tribal behaviour in the modern age. People belong to social networks (social groupings) based on their norms, rituals and values, and for club-goers, this includes the visible symbols–the clothes people are wearing, whom they’re with, their attitudes–upon which they are judged by bouncers. [...]

While the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is affecting the public’s perceptions of BP , I don’t think it will affect BP’s ability to attract and retain talent. I said as much in this article on Personnel Today .

Gary Hammel recently wrote a piece called ‘Management’s Dirty Little Secret’ on a Wall Street Journal blog. What it really focuses on is the challenge of employee engagement. It’s no easy matter to get into–on my desk at the moment I have a doctoral thesis on what it takes to get high quality engagement in an organisation, and it’s quite thick.
Engagement has three main factors. The first is intent: what does a manager really intend to do with engagement that he or she wishes to proceed with? I’ve seen many managers with the intent that this corporation should do well, but privately their drive has more to do with their personal ambition. I’ve seen many managers who intend to get an open conversation, but personally find it very difficult to raise uncomfortable issues (which is the whole purpose of engagement). Psychological conflicts of intent [...]

I recently appeared on the BBC World Service to discuss intimate relationships in the workplace. My research has found that 60% of workers during their lifetimes have an intimate relationship in the workplace. By ‘intimate’ I mean something beyond friendship but not necessarily up to physical contact — the Greeks had a word for it: agape, meaning “divine, unconditional,
self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love”.
You can listen to the clip on the BBC site here . Nada and I discussed this topic in further detail in our book Intimacy .

Following up on the recent news that top performing women have higher levels of testosterone , in this audio clip Andrew and I discuss the issue, as well as womens’ career progressions, what happened in Norway when it became the law for women to represent 40% of a company’s board , and how risk is related to testosterone. Listen to the clip here:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Says Andrew:
Prompted by this article by Gil Corkendale on the inequality of wages for women in the City of London, I believe that it continues to be nonsense that women are being paid less than men. The current economic climate exacerbates my concern that inequalities will continue to exist—the need for cost reduction is so high that women will continue to be casualties like anyone else. There’s clearly a lack of diversity being shown in imaginative remuneration packages for women, and other minority groups are suffering the same fate. [...]

I recently came across this article in the Financial Times by Michel Ferrary of the Ceram Business School, in which he argues that companies (and the boards and senior management therein) with a higher number of women managers are better able to face the economic downturn. This finding will certainly find favour across a number of quarters.
However, the research that we have conducted–which spans 12,500 top teams and well over 2,000 boards–suggests that there is no difference in operational or strategic performance between male and female managers. In fact, gender emerged as the least predicted demographic concerning effectiveness of performance.  It should be noted that similar findings applied to education, sector, religion, geographical location and personal background. [...]

Is the global financial crisis motivating people to seek extramarital affairs? Anecdotal evidence from FT columnist Lucy Kellaway suggests this is the case . In the process of doing research for a novel, she found that the adultery-enabling website Illicit Encounters has seen a 300% increase in registrations from London-based men in the financial sector since September. [...]

Earlier this month I came across this survey suggesting that nearly half of all workers think their bosses are incompetent. This can make for a difficult working environment.
In my book Essence of Leadership , I identified 5 reasons for continual tensions in organizations:

Differences between subordinates and bosses (the boss is accountable for a subordinate’s behaviour and contribution).
Differences between the operating businesses and the group centre (i.e. the centre is focused on a broad range of interests while business units are more concerned with the timely and efficient delivery of services or products).
Differences between internally and externally-focused people (people with different stakeholders and protocols may not always see eye-to-eye).
Differences between people who are more sales-oriented as opposed to service-oriented (the tension between getting the sale and provide good service).
Differences [...]

According to the Harvard Business Review, women quit tech careers because of “antigens,” parts of the culture that actively offend women.
From an interview with the author in Computer World :
“They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don’t have what it takes—who see them as genetically inferior. It’s hard to take as a steady stream. It’s predatory and demeaning. It’s distressing to find this kind of data in 2008.”
Clearly the technology companies highlighted in this sector have not established codes of conduct highlighting which behaviours and attitudes will not be tolerated at work. Studies in the past at Cranfield have shown few differences between males and females who hold senior roles. These women shouldn’t feel the need to drop out of their jobs [...]