Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses

[Buster's Uncle]

Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
LiveScience.com
By Chad Brooks, Business News Daily Contributor  March 26, 2014 12:39 PM



Everyone wants their boss to play fair, but new research suggests that while doing so might make employees happy, it's not always so great for the boss.  Specifically, bosses who are fair make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but in the end may burn themselves out, according to a new study led by Michigan State University's Russell Johnson.

Researchers found that the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors both mentally and emotionally. Johnson, an assistant professor of management, said that managers face a double-edged sword in maintaining structured, rule-bound fairness, known as procedural justice.

"While beneficial for their employees and the organization, it's an especially draining activity for managers," he said. "In fact, we found it had negative effects for managers that spilled over to the next workday." [10 Warning Signs Your New Boss Is a Jerk]

As part of the study, researchers surveyed 82 bosses twice a day for a few weeks. Managers who reported mental fatigue from situations involving procedural fairness were less cooperative and less socially engaging with other workers the next day.

"Managers who are mentally fatigued are more prone to making mistakes, and it is more difficult for them to control deviant or counterproductive impulses," Johnson said.

Procedural justice fatigues managers mentally because it requires them to conform to particular fairness rules, such as suppressing personal biases, being consistent over time and across subordinates, and allowing subordinates to voice their concerns, according to Johnson.

"Essentially, managers have to run around making sure their subordinates' perceptions remain positive, whether the threat to the atmosphere of the workplace is real or imagined," he said. "Dealing with all of this uncertainty and ambiguity is depleting."

Knowing this type of burnout can occur, Johnson said it's critical managers create situations in which they are better prepared to cope with fatigue. He suggests several tips, including getting sufficient sleep, taking short mental breaks during the workday, adhering to a healthy diet and detaching from work completely when outside of the office.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, was co-authored by Klodiana Lanaj, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, and Christopher Barnes, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Both were former Michigan State doctoral students.


http://news.yahoo.com/why-good-bosses-often-unhappy-bosses-163922819.html

...

Leaves out the benefits of establishing a corporate culture where such fairness problems arise less...  That's how I do it on an internet forum full of internet gaming nerdz...

[Yitzi]

Of course, even with a good corporate culture doing the job right would be fairly stressful...keeping bosses' workload low by having enough could help there, though.  (Of course, that requires finding enough people who won't go mad with power...)

[Buster's Uncle]

That's part of the secret, too, though.  We have Yitzi on the team.  Seriously - I don't know what we'd do without you and your contributions.

[Yitzi]

You wouldn't have such a good unofficial patch?  It's not like I do much for the administration of this site...

[Buster's Uncle]

You do a lot for activity by being active, leaving out the considerable star power of your patch.


-Speaking of which, let's put our heads together and write up a promotional news item for the Yitzi patch.  I can directly publish it to the front page at 'poly, and shouldn't have any trouble talking Petek into it at CFC; that's a lot of eyes to draw to your project, and why not now?  scient has taught us the folly of putting anything off...

[Buster's Uncle]

So unless you feel inspired to write a draft, let's start with an interview.  It'll give me a big picture overview, and quotes to use.

...

What's the purpose of your .exec modding?

[Yitzi]

Firstly, it's .exe, not .exec.  And the main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.

[Buster's Uncle]

What do you want people to know about your project?

[Yitzi]

It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.

(Speaking of modding options, here's a fun scenario you might want to make: You play as the Usurpers, and have just PB'ed out everyone else, but now Planet is really mad, so you have to either summon the fleet or take over via Transcendence.  Map reflects PB use and you start with appropriate tech, conquest victory is disabled, Voice of Planet set to destroyed (so you can't build it but don't need it), centauri preserve unavailable, and set starting clean minerals to -10, -1 clean minerals per fungal pop, 0 per facility, 10 ecodamage per base, and all PLANET bonuses removed from social engineering.  No techs increase resource production in fungus.  Global warming rate set to 1/4.  Have fun...)

[Buster's Uncle]

I like.

How did you get into .exe modding?

[Yitzi]

I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself.

[Buster's Uncle]

Now, if we let this turn into a puff piece about you, we'd want to talk about your faith, and your history with things geeky and the internet and all, especially SMACXwise...  Are you familiar with Dune and the other Frank Herbert works that influenced SMAC?  -We can skip all this, according to your inclination.

Also, what would you say to a SMACer about why to try your patch?

[Yitzi]

I have read Dune, but I was not aware that it had substantially influenced SMAC/X.

As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside.

[Buster's Uncle]

Can you give me some pointers on how you imagine an acceptable news item going?

[Yitzi]

No, as I have no idea of what constitutes an "acceptable news item", and am not that sure what really qualifies as a "news item" without the condition of acceptability.