Study: People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
- Being forced to do work assigned to someone else.
- Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation
- Being forced to appear as though under someone else's control (other than direct manager)
- Being forced to do the more dangerous, risky, difficult, or thankless work
- Being forced to do work far below one's qualifications
- Being forced to take over failed projects or projects that have already been rejected by upper management.
> Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation
Autonomy is king. Without it, I personally cannot function.
Maybe I should spend more time thinking about this :)
edit: And I only have to work two hours a day!
I like the traditional setup. Some stuff is abstracted away nicely (benefits, office space, working hours).
“I wouldn’t be able to handle the added stress” was the response, and I can see why from that answer more people don’t do this. Decide to freelance in addition to doing a 9-5 and you’ll not only put more work on your table but other sorts of responsibilities - accounting, client relations, being your own project manager, etc. - will make it much more harder to decompress if you had a shit day at work.
For the Apple store in particular I've seen it get so crowded without adequate app discovery mechanisms in place that it seems like without serious marketing money you're essentially rolling the dice on how successful your app is going to be. I don't really want to spend a bunch of my time on that, when I could spend it on other pursuits.
But maybe this is a mistaken perception? Why do you think it's so simple to do? Just because you've found success or is your approach different than the norm somehow?
But when you do get one, it can generate revenue for a long time coming.
I think with some good market research you could probably be more sure though. And also going into partnership with somebody lowers the risk as you can churn out more apps then share the profits when you do get a successful one. Personally I have not had much luck with the Apple app stores because of their crowded/discovery issues etc, but I also have not put much effort into them due to their horrible restrictions (the sandbox is a killer with the way they've implemented it, and a lot of my software needs admin privs to run)
> And how do you achieve autonomy if not via taking power?
I have a yearly performance review which is a friendly sit down with the boss in which I, for the most part, set the agenda and generally boils down to a summary of the professional development I've undertaken throughout the year. The meeting runs for 1 hour and has always been conducted as a meeting of equals, not as a shakedown.
The job is mostly performed in isolation which results in collegial interactions that are professional and respectful. After all, the profession is not adversarial. My colleagues have nothing to gain from making me look bad.
I often have to pinch myself when I think about the work I do. I am essentially my own boss without any of the uncertainty, volatility or downside.
If you're thinking of a career to teaching, beware and make your decision wisely. My understanding is that in the US it is a disaster. Poor pay, micromanaged to death with all the joy sucked out via standardised testing. It varies country by country. As always do your homework before making any rash decisions.
I imagine there are other professions that offer similar autonomy. Medicine springs to mind.
I'm not familiar with this phrase. Could you clarify?
Damn, I wish teaching here worked like it does for you. I'd have much happier friends, and might consider it myself.
Which is fascinating, when you think about it enough. And explains a lot of why as companies get bigger they find it harder to do anything well.
The next time you're on a death march, or even just the "usual" period of "sucking it up" at the end of a schedule, consider that the only people who will actually benefit from hitting the schedule are the project lead and the manager. The schedule is most likely imposed from sales and marketing without consultation.
Death marches and schedule success don't show on your resume unless you're one of those two people; "Brought in X, Y and Z on schedule."
You are a stepping stone.
- Being forced to do work far below one's qualifications
That seems to be based on self-determination theory mentioned in the article that autonomy, relatedness, and competence are human's basic psychological needs.
The link (http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2004_DeciVa...) about self-determination takes you to a paper that references a researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has done a lot of research on optimal experience and has written a great book about it called Flow.
His statement in the book is that traditional methods of improving performance -- more pay for more work -- just doesn't work for tasks that require problem solving. In fact, counter-intuitively, experiments have demonstrated lower performance when paid to accomplish problem solving tasks.
What Pink outlines is that to improve performance on problem solving tasks (including creative tasks) you have to provide people with Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy.
The latter thing is often missing from most managerial textbooks since most managerial textbooks seem to have been written for industrial workers where precise control is emphasized. This totally backfires for IT jobs (and other types of jobs), and everyone has seen those disasters.
I get really sceptical about these social sciences studies, especially after the recent round of replication attempts that failed.
And you're aware that the core part of that documentary is based on an (AFAIK) unreproduced study on psychopathy - by somebody who likely has a vested interest in psychopathy being a problem. (Robert Hare - see www.hare.org)
I'm all for questioning the accuracy of studies, but I'd hope we'd use somewhat higher standards than that.
Human beings are complicated and difficult to study, so I can appreciate the challenge that social science researchers have in front of them. But, propagating conclusions from a field of research that has a 33% reproducibility rate is just negligent journalism. It's not true just because it's in one study and it matches our intuition or something we read in a Malcolm Gladwell book.
1. Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test. http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f...
Well that's a positive way to put it. I wonder whether it is possible to find steady cause and effect patterns at all.
Same goes for economy (which IS basically a proxy for human behavior). You can certainly have a go at documenting its history but the present and future are probably not predictable because they are subject to evolutionary responses. When I had to take an economics 101 class negative interest rates were out of the question and look what we have now.
So the criticism of the criticism seems to be quite overstated. If the study can only be replicated at a single university (or even all in a general area), it means that we need to be very careful in generalizing the results. So to the extent that people take a study of one very specific group and generalize to an entire culture (or worse, to all humans), the criticism sticks.
Back when I was getting my psychology degree, there was a joke that 90% of the findings in psychology can only be generalized to broke American college students who are willing to be lab rats for beer money. While that overstates the problem, there is still a lot of truth in it.
The response to the paper points out few examples where the replication was not judicious in picking a sample that minimized its influence on the measured effect. Even besides that, the original study had sampling and scoring procedures which contradicted its original aims.
Lastly, sensationalist headlines of "more than half of all papers are not replicable" are blatantly wrong and not what the original paper even states.
As to your point, I agree that only being able to replicate in one sample type is grounds for skepticism, but more replications have to be done to ensure the replication sample is not the one that is flawed. One can't really draw conclusions unless the replication is repeated a large number of times across a wider sample space.
Link to response paper in case anyone's interested: http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/psychology-replications...
All this shows is that psychology is less useful that people thing because any data is likely only applicable to the given group. Even if we say the studies are still good, this means that psychology loses the ability to be generalized to others groups beyond the one studied. And given how often psychology has that done to it, we must question every finding all the more.
I have been a manager in situations where I could fire at will and others where I had no ability to fire. When I could fire I could just explain to my reports what needed to be done and leave them to get on with - when I couldn't fire the only way to get the work done was by micromanaging. I hated every moment of micromanaging, but there was no other way to get done what had to be done. Responsibility without power is a nightmare.
ME(1997)::Uh, boss about that. Those 12 dealers hate my program because they get 10% commission instead of 30% commission like they usually do. They actively work against me! Instead of feeding me leads, they are trying to sell competitors product because they make more money!! They hate my program! They make less money!
BOSS:: (hits loop phase of discussion) You have 12 dealers in that territory who should be feeding you leads! Make those sales numbers or your fired!
ME:: well, shit. <proceeds to make sales numbers by not telling dealers anything>
When money fell from the sky, dealers didn't seem to care if it was 10% or 30% money because it showed up like free money. 0 effort for them. It was hell working with a group that not only I couldn't fire, the corporation could not even discipline them. They were independent dealers. I could make a sale, and they could refuse to process it (happened a few times). In those cases it was then a no-sale. I had to sell the customer and the dealer. Or do the deal without the dealer knowing about it until they received the check. After a year of free money, the worst dealer became the best dealer. He had been around 30 years, a grumpy old codger who was king of his area and all his customers trusted him 100%. His change in opinion (in his area alone) was worth about $25,000 a year in commissions in 1998. Thanks again Bob!
I vowed to myself to never get in a position where I had all the responsibility to make something happen, but none of the authority to make it happen. That vow has kept me out of some situations, and whenever I break it is when I get miserable again. Then I re-vow ...
The team that I can't fire is the team that I consider a net negative amount of work performed because I or another person I delegate has to do their work for them repeatedly. They have shown no capacity to learn (we have to write runbooks for them still to the detail that we should just write a shell script with the time spent, so now we have unreliable humans that are executing bash scripts).
> Miles leaned forward into the vid pickup. [...] "If you surrender quietly, I can control what happens. If ImpSec has to detain you by force, it will be up to chance, chaos, and the reflexes of some overexcited young men with guns and gallant visions of thwarting mad Komarran terrorists."
> [...] "If you unleash ImpSec, the consequences will be your doing," said Cappell.
> "Almost correct," Miles agreed. "If I unleash ImpSec, the consequences will be my responsibility. It's that devil's distinction between being in charge and being in control. I'm in charge; you're in control. You can imagine how much this thrills me."
-- A standoff in "Komarr", by Lois McMaster Bujold
There is one pattern of thought that i think is missed by this experiment, but another one could just as well measure it too and i hope someone decides to: it's easier to order people to do what you think is right than it is to convince them that you are right. I think under circumstances where a person feels frustrated that their point of view isn't being validated by others they will have a greater tendency towards authoritarian power as opposed to autonomous power.
Certainly, how many of us have gone through the phase of growing up where we think that if everyone just listened to us and did what we said, everyone would be better off? I think well intentioned paternalism is a greater cause for authoritarian desires than narcissism and ego validation.
This, absolutely.
"For humans the fundamental problem of life is getting a feeling of security in the face of the anxiety from our realization that alone we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society."
rough quote from memory.
So, alone we feel vulnerable. So, we want security in the face of that vulnerability.
Notably, Fromm does not say that money or power will give that feeling of security and, instead, claims that the first recommended solution is a good romantic relationship, that is, with "knowledge, caring, respect, and responsiveness" where the knowledge means the couple readily exchanges knowledge of themselves.
Sure, one can try to use autonomy and self-sufficiency, and those via, say, money and/or power to get the feeling of security. But if only by omission, Fromm is saying that being so alone won't work well.
My entire concept of office politics is based on a work by Fromm, Escape From Freedom. His Premise in the book is that people don't want to have to make decisions or be responsible, that they would rather have other people make decisions for them. He makes a point there there is a relationship, like a ratio, between being responsible and freedom. People would gladly give up freedom over being responsible.
However, I realize that people who want less responsibility and make no decisions are looking for a sense of stability and security in their lives. They want to wake up each morning, go to work, come home, and get paid on a regular basis. They want the regular paycheck.
The irony of this, of course, is that this course of action is no less risky than entrepreneurship, because, at a moment's notice, your employer could fire you and destroy the illusion, even if you've worked over a decade for them. No matter what path you take in life, you need to own it. The days of working for a company for a few decades following a defined path were brief.
There are worse things than being alone.
The article defines autonomy as the absence of unwanted influence. But in a human society, unwanted influence is not something you can simply opt out of. Having autonomy without isolating yourself from the rest of the society means having at least some degree of influence over those who would like to influence you in unwanted ways.
As long as there are people out there (politicians, marketers, burglars, terrorists, etc.) who are trying their damnedest to influence you, the only way you can achieve autonomy is to be able to tell them to get the fuck off your lawn. Sometimes you need to push people physically off your lawn. Sometimes you need to kill them, because they would kill you if you don't. An autonomous person without effective power will quickly cease to be autonomous.
So autonomy is just another form of power. Some might even say that everything is power, and it's not just empty rhetoric.
I think it boiled down to freedom being the absence of coercion in any form.
I'm sure I was reading results of studies > 10 years ago, about stress levels of people within some number of large organisations, and finding people towards the top of the hierarchy were less stressed than those at the bottom. It was possibly speculative, though I'm sure I recall they'd confirmed it somehow, that it was due to people towards the bottom of an organisational structure had far less control over what their day or week looked like, and how they could plan out their tasks, than those at the top.
I think this is one of the primary reasons people have chased power for millennia - either to have control over themselves, change the world they live in, or lord over (seek retribution) those who've wronged (done arbitrary things to) them (perceived or otherwise).
But as I'm not, And as I'm free, white and 21 I don't need more power than I've got... Except sometimes, when I'm broke"
In a poorly-run hierarchy, having a manager means playing along for someone else more powerful, playing along with their personal politic, etc. That can be very distracting and exhausting, because for less-adequate managers it involves a lot of mental effort. And, importantly, it feels very person-centred rather than craft- or value-centred.
Contrast that with freelance work: yes, clients can be very difficult to deal with, and in fact may require more "high touch" interaction. However, at that stage it is just a social contract, customer service, explicitly outlined interaction. And the relationship is transactional from the outset, there is a clear value focus. Plus, one could theoretically fire their client and move on (although that is not always realistic).
As another comparison, let's look at a trades job in a highly unionized company: it can actually be quite liberating, because promotion and career track are again detached from specific personal impressions and set to a highly regulated and enforced schedule. People feel empowered, because it is a shield of sorts (albeit one that comes with costs as well).
Tell me about why you don't think you have to answer to your customers.
The only one or thing you absolutely have to answer to is the market, people can complain all they want about whatever they want, but so long as there are people who will open their wallet you really don't need to pay attention. This is completely different from typical boss-employee relationships, you're solving a problem in an autonomous fashion not following orders.
Taking that thought exercise a step further--I've tried to think of professions where one truly is beholden to no other individuals.
The only thing that comes to mind is a securities trader. If you are trading, sure the markets change, but you can make money on the upside or downside, and you really don't have any "customers." Now in theory you can be part of a larger bank, and being a solo trader can be harder, but it is possible.
Are there any other careers where one truly is independent and accountable to ones self and nobody else?
E.g. A composer called Conlon Nancarrow spent most of his life in Mexico, punching holes in player piano rolls to make music that was impossible for humans to play.
He was pretty much ignored until he was 65, by which time he'd been writing music with no audience for most of his life, making next to no money from anything.
His career finally took off in a big way when he got a MacArthur award at the age of 70.
The two professions are pretty similar - they both involve a zero sum game you're playing against other people.
I mean, sure, in some sense you're "working for" your customers and "working for" a boss, but that's just using the same phrase to describe two fundamentally different relationships. Customers have no meaningful say in anything beyond buying your product or not; they can't dictate culture, they can't play politics, they can't drag you down with pointless meetings... etc.
Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent. Especially for consumer-oriented products, they're faceless. In a hierarchy, you have one immediate boss and a some bounded number of executives above them, all of whom operate more or less as a single entity. You can't just decide to ignore a segment of your management the way you can change focus to a different class of clients. And you have to deal with your boss one-on-one in a way that you can avoid for any individual customer.
And hey, customers don't misbehave in the same ways. They fundamentally can't micromanage or claim credit for your work. Any customer by themselves probably has relatively little direct power over you which means they have less latitude to be jerks and if they are, it's easier to deal with.
Obviously, this isn't true for all customers. If you're beholden to a small handful of large customers or you're consulting, the relationship is a lot more like having a boss. But for consumer-oriented products and any businesses that scale—basically anything you could reasonably describe as a product—having customers is completely different from having a boss.
> Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent
This gives me freedom. Sure, it would be best if I just received a one billion dollar gift (I don't think small :P) but until then, having the freedom to choose what projects I'm willing to work on is amazing.
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.Market makers like Janestreet come to mind.
When you have a business, you can have tens if not tens of thousands of customers. They can still fire you, but you can fire them as well.
What affects you more. Losing your sole source of income or losing 1/100th of your company's revenues?
When doing something a customer asks for, you are doing something for someone's benefit (usually...).
When doing something the boss asks for, well, you may never know whether it makes any sense to anybody at all if the company sufficiently detaches employees from the results of their work. There are places where you just feel like you are wasting time for nothing.
Besides that, you can always (but not too often ;)) tell some particularly annoying customer to leave and pick up another one.