UC Davis Professor Kim Elsbach: Organizational Behavior From NASCAR Fans To The Cattle Industry

Kimberly Elsbach, professor emerita of management at UC Davis’ Graduate School of Management

Byrne: So stepping away from that conclusion, the lesson for a manager who has to lead a team is what? Inculcate meaning in the work of the people who work for him or her?

Elsbach: Yeah. Why are we doing this? What is the greater good down the line, either in terms of the communities we serve, the customers we serve, the planet? And it doesn’t really matter what you do, you can find some meaning in doing that. I think I learned that way back when I was working at Quaker Oats. Even a line worker who was packing boxes of Cap’n Crunch could find meaning in their work if they understood how important it was to the company and its ability to feed people and create a product that was healthy or delicious. Those are things that you could feel good about.

Byrne: It doesn’t mean that you should underpay people by providing what might be called psychic income, right?

Elsbach: Right. I would say meaning is why people choose an organization, it’s why they join. Things like poor pay, poor working conditions, bad bosses, those are the reasons people leave organizations. So if you get them there and you want to keep them, you have to pay attention to pay and working conditions. But you’re not going to get them in the first place if you don’t provide some meaning.

Byrne: Another topic you’ve spent some time with that’s very relevant for today’s world informs the debate about whether or not people want to go back to work after working remotely through the pandemic. There are many companies that are now demanding their employees come back. And there are employees in Silicon Valley who said they’re going to quit rather than go back to work five days a week. What have you discovered in your research about that?

Elsbach: When companies allowed work from home they were mostly thinking about logistical things like, do we have the bandwidth for Zoom? And do we have enough people in the office to justify having the office? But one of the things they didn’t think about is bias and unconscious bias. And one of the things that I’ve studied is what we call FaceTime bias. It’s an unconscious bias in favor of people who are there, who are present. So if you have some people who are at work, especially people in supervisory roles, and they see some of their employees at work every day, they may not even know what you’re doing, but just the fact that you’re there every day, all day, and even better if you’re there early in the morning and late at night. They have this unconscious bias that will perceive you as more dependable, reliable, committed, and dedicated.
Whereas if you’re not there, you are rated lower on those things unconsciously. And so if nobody’s at work, it doesn’t really hurt you. But if some people are at work and some people aren’t, the people who aren’t are perceived unconsciously as less reliable, dependable, committed, and dedicated. And that hurts you in promotions and in raises and things like that.

Byrne: What about the benefits of working together face-to-face? Many believe that unexpected collisions of people in the hallways or over lunch beds to more ideas and a better sense of community.

Elsbach: Right. And that’s not my research, but I have read a lot of that research on the benefits of being present. If you run into people at work, you’re likely to learn something from them, just casual conversations in the lunchroom or the break room or the water fountain lead to learning. And then the other thing is this sense of rapport, comraderie, community, that develops when you are physically together. That’s harder. It’s not impossible, but it’s harder to do when you’re remote.

Byrne: And you can’t go out to lunch with your buddies or have a drink after work when you might commiserate over that lousy boss you have or what dumb mistake your company just made.

Elsbach: That’s right. And those conversations then turn into, well, how can we fix that? So, yeah, there’s a lot of things that are not impossible, but much harder to do when you’re remote. And I think that’s a challenge for us if companies are going to stay in this remote world. A lot of them will have to find ways to create those interactions that don’t happen when you’re not physically present.

Byrne: Now, having spent a professional lifetime examining people and their behaviors, what have you learned about yourself?

Elsbach: Oh, boy. I am somebody who really does value meaning at work. I am somebody who is outspoken about it, and I feel like I’ve provided myself with ammunition for things that I’ve always believed about the importance of providing meaning to people who are at work and to valuing them as individuals. I don’t think everybody would agree with me on all of that, but I’ve learned that I’m quite committed to those ideas, and it’s a happy accident that I was able to study them. I think it’s the best job in the entire world to be able to study what you’re interested in.

Byrne: Absolutely. What would you consider to be a more meaningful insight that you received from your research?

Elsbach: For me, it’s been the research on crying at work. I found that to be really meaningful to me personally. I’m a crier, full disclosure, and what I discovered was nobody, literally nobody, had studied crying at work. And it’s sort of like that line from A League of Their Own where Tom Hanks says, “There’s no crying in baseball.” When I ask people why there was no studies of this, they said, “Well, there’s no crying at work. People don’t cry at work.” And that is not true. People cry at work every day.

Byrne: I’ve seen plenty of people cry at work.

Elsbach: So for me personally, meaningfully understanding why people cry at work and how that affects perceptions of them has been an eyeopener. And especially since I’m a crier myself. So it’s not necessarily a good thing that I’ve learned this, but it’s good to know it and to pass on that there really are negative consequences for women who cry at work.

Byrne: You found that if a man cries at work, it’s a positive thing, because obviously that man is in touch with his feelings. But if a woman cries at work, it’s emotional and it’s a sign of weakness. Is that right?

Elsbach: We didn’t have enough men in the study to say anything conclusively, we just had two small a sample size. But anecdotally, we found in the few cases where we had men cry, they were perceived more positively. “Oh, isn’t that nice that he’s got a human side?” Or, “Wow, they must’ve done something horrible to him to make him cry.” Obviously, he was justified. Whereas for women who cry, it’s like, “Oh, there she goes, the emotional female who can’t control her emotions.”

Byrne: It doesn’t matter what you cry over?

Elsbach: It does matter what you cry over. So if there’s a death in the family, or a divorce, something big like that, you’re seen as more justified in crying, and you’re given more latitude. If you cry because you’re frustrated in a meeting, because you felt like you were being picked on, or you couldn’t seem to get your point across, then it is perceived badly. If you yell and pound on the table, like men would do often in those cases, it’s perfectly fine. So there’s places where it’s really bad and places where it’s not as bad.

Byrne: Kim, that’s got to really annoy you.

Elsbach: It is what it is. And as every single crier I talked to would tell you, once you start to cry, there’s literally nothing you can do to stop it. So if you know you are a crier, the only thing you can do is leave. Remove yourself from the situation and take a break and say, “We will have to finish this later,” because it’s really impossible to control it. And if you didn’t learn that when you were five years old on the playground where boys and girls learn this, boys learn not to cry, girls don’t learn that skill for the most part, it’s really hard to do it when you’re an adult.

Byrne: That’s why I think most crying occurs in restrooms.

Elsbach: Yeah. Because you’ve just got to leave. And it does happen there a lot.

Byrne: Well, Kim, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Elsbach: Thank you, John.

DON’T MISS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AT UC DAVIS GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Professor Andrew Hargadon On Innovation

Professor Greta Hsu On Category Constraints

Professor Hemant Bhargava On Technology-Based Business & Markets