Here are 33 traditional and voguish beliefs that, on the basis of their research, the authors of The Enthusiastic Employee say have little or no basis in reality. These beliefs, covering a variety of areas, are widespread and, when applied to the typical employee and work situation, are wrong. They also often contradict each other, as “common sense” beliefs often do. The 33 myths are:
1. All that most workers care about is their pay and benefits
2. People will never be happy with their pay
3. When employees complain about their pay, they are really unhappy with something else
4. To a significant degree, praise can be a substitute for money
5. Traditional merit pay systems work
6. Profit sharing is a major motivator of employee performance
7. To survive in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, companies should keep wages as low as they possibly can
8. Employees object to a large difference between their earnings and the earnings of senior management
9. People who feel secure in their jobs become complacent
10. Telling people they’ve done a good job makes them complacent
11. Companies that have no hesitation laying off surplus workers do better than companies that go to great lengths to keep their workers employed
12. Most people doing routine work hate it
13. Most people dislike work of any kind
14. Most people don’t care whether they do a quality job
15. Professionals are much more concerned about doing a quality job than are nonprofessionals
16. Whether workers should be treated as thinking human beings depends on the type of work they do. For example, it is useless — even counterproductive — for employees doing routine, highly standardized work to be involved in decisions about the work.
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17. If they are not supervised closely, most workers will try to get away with whatever they can
18. Most workers dislike their immediate managers
19. It is the immediate manager that is the cause of most employee morale problems
20. No matter how nicely a manager does it, correcting an employee’s performance will be resented by the employee
21. People who have too much to do are more unhappy than people who have too little to do
22. There are major differences between generations in what people want from their jobs
23. Young people today resent authority much more than young people did two or three decades ago
24. Young people today are much less concerned with job security than were previous generations
25. There are major differences between cultures and countries in what people want from their jobs
26. Loyalty between employees and their employer is — and should be — dead
27. Companies that are loyal to their employees are less successful as businesses
28. Traditional organization principles — such as the need for hierarchy — are stifling and outmoded in today’s “new economy”
29. Whether a company is ethical and a good corporate citizen is of little concern to most of its employees
30. It is best to foster internal competition to improve performance
31. Most employees resist change, whatever the change is
32. “A bitching army is a good army” — when employees are happy it is because their employer is giving them too much and not demanding enough from them
33. You can’t generalize about people at work because every individual is different