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posted by janrinok on Thursday October 22 2015, @03:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the leadership dept.

Small signals of appreciation have a decisive influence on the output and quality of the work of employees. A field experiment of KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) economist Petra Nieken and two colleagues revealed that a combination of performance-oriented piece wage and motivating words increases the performance by 20% and reduces the error rate by 40%.

"Our results are relevant to entrepreneurial practice," Nieken emphasizes. She holds the Chair for Human Resources Management of KIT's Institute of Management. How can staff members be motivated? Theory lists two instruments: Financial incentives, such as bonuses or piece wages, and the capability of executives to motivate their staff members. The question whether and how these two instruments complement, strengthen or weaken each other, however, is not clearly answered by theory. That is why this question was in the focus of the study performed at Bonn University.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2015, @03:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2015, @03:36PM (#253624)

    Dear Roach Molecular Systems,

      Having just been terminated after a mere four weeks as a contract employee, I question your explanation of events.

      My read is that Roach - or, more precisely, Arick - needed someone to fill in for their IT manager, Jason, while he was on a two-week vacation, in Hawaii.

      So, as I reconstruct events, Roach brought someone onboard a week before the IT manager - Jason - went on vacation ... gave them a week to get up to speed ... ONLY THEN, did they tell this contractor - me - that the other guy - Jason - was going on vacation for two weeks ... THEN, after the guy - Jason - returned from his two-week vacation in Hawaii, Roach waited a few days for things to settle down, and terminated their contractor - me ... as, with the IT manager, Jason, returned, they no longer needed their contractor's - my - services.

      My read is that Roach withheld the fact that their IT guy, Jason, was going on vacation from me, the candidate, during the interview phase, because Roche was concealing Roach's true short-term motives for employing me, from me, the candidate, and misrepresenting the situation to me, as a long-term relationship, when, in fact, a six-month employment contract was never Roach's true intention.

      Based on information and belief, that would be fraud.

      My read is that Arick never bothered to interview me, because he never intended to retain me for longer than the time required for me to cover for Jason, while Jason was in Hawaii, on vacation.

      My read is that Jason never bothered to complete the paperwork that had been submitted to him, electronically, three weeks ago, so that I could get the second, "pseudo" administrative account required to complete the administrative responsibilities that I had been assigned - because he knew, three weeks ago, that I was not going to be retained, after he returned from his vacation.

      Also, because his inactions gave Jason a convenient - albeit, some might say, crooked - excuse to terminate the contract.

      It's a fact, that the Monday morning of my last week at Roach ... as soon as Jason had returned from his vacation and within ten minutes of coming onsite, Jason cornered me, took me into an empty office, closed the door, and yelled at me.

      Jason was angry that I had helped Siemens personnel - onsite to secure the Sequencing Unit computer room - log in to Roach's "Guest" wireless network, after an administrative assistant had asked me to help, at 7:30 AM, well before the usual IT staff were onsite.

    He thought I should have opened a ticket and waited until 9 AM, maybe 9:30 AM, for the regular IT guys to get on site.

    WTF?

      Jason was also angry at me for replying to an email - from a researcher, by the name of Amrita - asking why, if a computer had 24 CPUs, only one of the CPUs was active. I gave her a quick, four-paragraph briefing on parallel programming paradigms, along with helpful URLs.

      Jason said that he did not want to confuse the researchers about the level of service being provided - apparently, I had been TOO HELPFUL, and, I now surmise, I made the level of service that Jason was providing to his customers, look ... well, shoddy.

      Jason ordered me to NOT provide any desktop support, and also ordered me to NOT communicate with any customers. This was affirmed in a follow-up email - so it's in writing.

      Interpreted literally, Jason was instructing me to not respond to any of the tickets I was being assigned!

      There is a name for such a situation - it is referred to as a double-bind ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind, [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson [wikipedia.org] ) and it is considered an indicator of schizophrenia.

      Double-bind scenarios are not an indicator of good management, in my opinion. Just the opposite. It's abuse - or worse.

      I haven't even touched on the conflict that already existed, between Jason, and Amrita, before I even arrived.

      From what I overheard, Amrita and her krewe were constantly trying to measure the resources available to them ... and Jason was constantly trying to thwart her, and her krewe's, efforts.

      Why, on my last day there at Roach, I asked if I could install an open source utility called htop(1) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htop [wikipedia.org] ) on some of the Linux servers, so that resource utilization could be better measured. Jason refused me permission, without explanation.

      Why would a system manager deliberately go out of his way to deny his customers - even his own L3 support engineers - access to the very open source tools that professionals use, everywhere, to measure capacity and performance?

      I wondered if Jason and Amrita had both come from 454 ... and if there had been a grudge between them, even before the company had been absorbed, by Roach.

      My sympathies were with Amrita - whose efforts to install a Nagios server were undone when Jason discovered it, and destroyed the installation.

    Why would Jason do such a thing? The Sequencing Unit does not lack for computing and networking capacity.

    (Those problems the Sequencing Unit experienced with the NetApp server, while Jason was on vacation were, I think, a consequence of Sequencing Unit's IT staff using default NFS mount options - leading to a network lockup - precisely as I had warned, on my very first day at Roach Molecular Systems.)

      I was so upset by the event, with Jason - in the office, with the door closed - that I looked up Jason's manager - Arick - and Arick's manager - Aleksandra, in the employee database - FUD4ALL.

      My analysis is that this action of Roach's is a violation of my employment contract, insofar as their termination decision is based upon fraud and deceit.

      My read is that Bungle Consulting was probably a willing party to the deception.

      My analysis is that because Roach, and Bungle Consulting, deliberately engineered a situation where I was manipulated into leaving the premises with equipment that I no longer needed - as I was no longer employed - that the burden and cost of recovering that equipment is Bungle's, and Roach's - not mine.

      So I'll be happy to ship it back to Bungle, or Roach, via FedEx - as soon as you give me a FedEx account number to use.

      Not a moment earlier.

      I'm not spending any of my own money returning equipment that could have been recovered by either:

      (a) Arick, or
      (b) Jason, or
      (c) Farhan, or
      (d) one of the other two IT guys in the building, or
      (e) one of the half a dozen security people onsite, or
      (f) one of half a dozen people working at Bungle Consulting.

      In vernacular Olde English: Fuck you!

      Where is the excellence? What have you done with it?

    I've worked with excellent people. I've worked FOR excellent people. I know excellence when I see it.

    None of you are excellent at anything other than misrepresenting the truth.

      It's hard to feel sympathetic for you or your organizations - you all set out to find the smartest, most-experienced, fastest-learning computer person you could find, on short notice ... and then, you tried to lie to him, to trick him, to fool him, and to abuse his trust.

      You even tried to trick him into returning, at his own expense, the very equipment that you had tricked him into removing from the premises!

      You are some very sick people.

    In closing, I also want to ask: what does Roach Molecular Systems intend to do about that hepatitis B vaccine sequence they requested me to initiate?

    As part of working at Roach Molecular Systems, I was encouraged to get a hepatitis B vaccine.

    After receiving the first sht I was informed that it was a three-shot sequence spread out across slightly more than six months - that is, it would take longer to finish the hepatitis B vaccine sequence than my contract was intended to last. I felt the first stirrings of concern. That didn't seem very diligent on the part of Roach Molecular Systems.

    Now, it's two weeks later. The contract has been terminated.

    Does Roach intend to complete the vaccine sequence that it requested me to initiate?

    Or are they just going to apply the first shot, and walk away from it, as a bad investment, and let me deal with the medical consequences?

    Inquiring minds want to know.