Upon reading my fellow classmate Junbeom Yoo’s blog post on the significance of different leadership styles, I completely agree with him about how different leadership styles can greatly affect the stability of an organization. In the group case project, my group and I analyzed the OBHR issues in the movie Horrible Bosses, and one of the characters in the movie, Kurt Buckman, immediately began to hate his job from loving it the moment his affable boss Jack Pellitt dies and his despicable son Bobby takes over.

Because Kurt only liked his job due to the camaraderie that his former boss Jack shared with all the employees, he immediately begins to hate how Bobby establishes a toxic workplace that is filled with prostitutes and drugs. This helps explain how different leadership styles severely impact the motivation of employees to perform their jobs and how much they enjoy it.

People often like to claim how much they love their job without realizing they can easily start to hate it as soon as a few circumstances at the workplace change. During the group case project in class, my group explored the movie Horrible Bosses Project and one character in the movie, Kurt Buckman, epitomized exactly such kind of complete change in attitude. At the beginning of the movie, Kurt claimed to be completely in love working as an accountant at Pellitt Chemicals and how his job was totally his “dream job”. Yet, his love takes a full 180 degree turnaround in one day when his affable boss Jack Pellitt dies and his despicable son Bobby takes over the company.

So what happened? Kurt’s job as an accountant certainly didn’t change, but he still suddenly started to hate his job once his boss died. The explanation behind this is that like Kurt, many people often confuse loving their workplace with loving their job. Kurt loved his job not because he really enjoyed working as an accountant, but rather he loved it because he loved the warm interactions he shared everyday with his boss Jack and the rest of his co-workers. Thus, when Bobby takes over and establishes a toxic workplace environment, Kurt immediately begins to hate his job because the intrinsic motivation behind him loving his job in the first place is gone.

Likewise, reading Alan Zhou’s blog post on how he quickly went from loving his job as a day camp leader at the Strathcona Community Centre to quickly dreading it, I see the same scenario happening. In his blog post, Alan states he originally loved his job while working in the summer because he shared a close relationship with his fellow volunteers that motivated him to go to work everyday. However, when he returned in the winter, the cohort of volunteers had changed and he no longer had the same motivation. This simple change quickly caused him to dread the exact same job he loved only a few months ago.

Cases like Kurt and Alan show that changes in only a few external factors can quickly alter a person’s perception of their job from love to hate.

From safaribooksonline.com “Competition in Workplace”

The importance of ethics has become increasingly pronounced over the past few decades as high profile cases of well-known corporations being guilty of making unethical decisions have sent shockwaves across the general public. For instance, at Wells Fargo, employees secretly created millions of unauthorized and fake credit card accounts in order to achieve their performance results. Furthermore, clothing manufacturers such as Nike and Under Armour are frequently criticized for establishing sweatshops in third-world countries in order to take advantage of cheap labour. As a result, a lot of attention has turned to behavioural ethics in order to understand exactly why unethical acts are committed by organizations.

In the textbook, the “broken window theory” was introduced to show how superficial aspects of an environment, such as outward displays of wealth and status, can affect ethical behaviour in organizations. That is, if signs of status and money are frequently present in a company’s culture, an employee is more likely to be swayed into pursuing wealth and status at the expense of thoroughly considering ethical standards. While I completely agree with the logic behind this theory, I do not believe it accurately explains how wealth and status often emerges as a more important factor in an organization’s culture to end up influencing unethical acts.

By stating that “outward” displays of wealth and status is the root cause of facilitating an unethical culture, the theory is essentially saying that this only happens to organizations who have such kind of explicit superficial culture. However, what the theory fails to consider is that a lot of organizations do not actually have such kind of explicit superficial culture, but status and money can still influence employees to a high degree through implicit means. For instance, a recent blog post by the Harvard Business Review explored how cut-throat internal competition within an organization can easily cause employees to perform unethical acts if the competition causes employees to focus on an coveted bonus or public recognition.

Therefore, it is perfectly possible for an organization to have a humble environment, but still face the same issue of employees valuing money and status over ethical standards because competition within the organization is implicitly elevating the influence of such superficial aspects. Had it been me working at a cut throat organization such as Wells Fargo, I likely would have been pressured to do the same thing in order to meet my performance criterias even though I perfectly understand it is unethical. This is because at many modern workplaces, the mere existence of performance standards elicit fear and anxiety among employees to compete with each other in order to not be the one who gets laid off or humiliated, which leads to them committing unethical acts to survive.

Word Count: 449

Additional Citations:

1.Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 434.