单项选择题

What sort of boss really cares about his staff
A survey by management consultancy Hudson has found that one in six senior executives think they could get rid of 20% of employees without damaging performance or morale. Nearly half reckon firing up to 5% a year would be a good thing. Even though only 4% actually carry out this threat, it is still a revealing finding. This is what executives really think of their ’most valued asset’: something to be disposed of against a mechanical target.
In another survey, only 38%, of employees feel senior managers treat them with respect. Around a quarter of employees rarely or never look forward to going to work, and almost half are leaving or trying to. ’The findings suggest many managers aren’t doing enough to keep their staff interested,’ said Mike Emmott. The result: underperformance, low productivity and high staff turnover.
The last UK survey for Gallup’s Employee Engagement Index makes similar conclusions. In 2005 just 16% of UK employees were ’positively engaged’—loyal and committed to the organisation. Gallup puts the cost to the economy of active disengagement at ￡40 billion, as employees express their disenchantment by going sick, not trying, leaving, or threatening strikes. The culprit, says Gallup, is poor management. ’Workers say they don’t know what is expected of them and managers don’t care about them as people.’
In a perverted way, then, employers are right when they say there’s something the matter with their workforce. It’s just that they are kidding themselves about where the blame lies. In any case, bottom-slicing the ’worst’ employees is likely to make things worse, not better. Yes, forced ranking is a way of life at General Electric, and Microsoft does it too, but there is no evidence that it is linked to their success and in most cases it usually does more harm than good.
Forced ranking rests on the idea that the performance of the whole is the sum of those of the individual parts. But the sports pages confirm that teams with the most talented individuals don’t always win. Of course, individual ability makes a difference. Sometimes companies do have to get rid of people, particularly if they recruit them incompetently. But forced ranking introduces fear and competition, and while in (economic) theory these optimise individual performance, in (management) practice they damage collective performance. This is the authentic magic of management: getting outstanding performance from ’ordinary’ resources by multiplying individual and organisational talent.