Quote of the Week ("Why You Hate Your Job" edition)

Those of you who have read me for a while may remember my little battle with Harvard Business Review a few months back, where I vilified the author (both in my blog and in her "Comments" section) for irresponsible journalism only to see the article magically edited to remove much of the offending language.

Well, the HBR is back at it again, with its usual pseudo-science that focuses on an artificially narrow set of outcomes and ignores big-picture implications. If you hate your job, please recognize that studies like this (and your bosses who read them) are the reason why. From the article's Executive Summary (because reading the whole thing is frankly mind-numbing):

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Managers who inundate their teams with the same messages, over and over, via multiple media, need not feel bad about their persistence. In fact, this redundant communication works to get projects completed quickly."
                - Harvard Business Review, on research from HBS professor Tsedal B. Neeley

Oh... oh right, naggers... of course. Thanks for that very insightful commentary, Professor Neeley. You've just made all of our lives needlessly difficult by focusing only on the deliberately vague outcome of "project completion rates" and not longer-term implications like "job satisfaction" or "worker morale" or "desire to see boss fired, publicly humiliated, and/or drawn and quartered", or even, hey, how about this one, "company profitability".
 
Look, people, we all know that nagging is an effective, tried and true method to get somebody to do something--they will do it if only to get you to go away so that they will never have to see you, speak to you, or think about you again. That's, um... not really good management over the long term.

This study also says nothing about follow-on implications of nagging (besides the usual morale/boss-hating stuff I mentioned above). What other tasks is the employee in question being forced to ignore while catering to his bosses' incessant nagging about likely-trivial tasks? Why do we assume that the bosses' prioritization of tasks is proper, and the subordinates' prioritization improper?

Maybe there's a reason the subordinates are ignoring the bosses' pleas on the first 3 occasions, and that they only act on the 4th or 5th prodding, by which point they're probably throwing darts at pictures of their bosses' face, squeezing the life out of stress balls, or uploading their resume on Monster.com while downloading an application to Dunkin Donuts University.

But no, it's sufficient for the purposes of HBR to demonstrate that naggers get stuff done! No reason to go any farther with our research, we've done enough to get our pseudo-science published. Good job, HBR, you've done it again--and another generation of workers will suffer unnecessarily as a result of your ill-found conclusions. Does nagging make companies more profitable? Who cares?!? It gets stuff done!!!

[Harvard Business Review]