Why Sham Employee Participation Is Worse Than No Participation at All

I got an email for an unhappy colleague in Europe this morning, complaining about all the hours that he spent on a faculty committee that was supposed to provide "user input" that would allegedly shape the design of a new building. He complained:  "I feel so used for having agree to be part of the building committee.  I haven't felt this way since I came to [the university].    Not one thing I said or argued for the whole time mattered.  Not one thing the consulting company who did the early study of our needs for space mattered.....[My wife] warned me when I joined the committee that they would use the faculty committee for legitimation and do what they wanted anyway."

It is easy to understand this professor's unhappiness; he devoted a huge amount of time to this process, and felt as if no one listened to his committee at all.  Perhaps the committee did have an impact; but let's just assume -- as he reports -- that the administration did convene this committee, that the committee spent many hours giving input to the process, and that not a single bit of advice they offered was used.   I would call this "sham participation," a term I think I have stolen from another organizational researcher.  This professor isn't the first victim of sham participation and won't be the last.  It will keep happening for several reasons:

1. First, as research on "Institutional Theory" has shown again and again, organizations often take "symbolic actions" that have no effect on what is actually done, but that administrators can point to as evidence that they are doing "the right thing."  In other words, these are "ceremonial" signs that they are conforming to social norms.  The classic case is when an organization appoints a diversity officer, or even builds an entire diversity office, but then takes no steps to hire or promote minorities or women -- and whenever anyone complains about diversity issues or just wants to talk about them, they trot-out the diversity officer.  In the present case, appointing a faculty committee and bringing in a consulting firm to talk to users provides a serious amount of "window dressing" that can be used to "legitimate" decisions even if the faculty had no influence over at all, and perhaps never could have had any influence over the building design.

2.  There is also an issue of power dynamics.  In the case of universities, the users (faculty, staff, and students) are different from the customers.   The administration is the customer, and often, more specifically, the decision is made by building planners, accountants, and other groups who will have the real power over budget and design decisions.  As such, the preferences held by people with the real power will usually trump those of the people who will use and live in the building.  If you look at many other decisions, you can see similar dynamics.  In hospitals, the people who make decisions about medical supplies -- including those used in surgery -- are often different than the people who use the supplies, and on and on.  I have heard a lot of surgeons complain about the lousy equipment that the hospital buys them.   

3. In addition to these more "organizational," explanations, there are some psychological forces at work that make it very difficult for experts (like architects and builders) to learn from users -- who are seen as naive.  Being an expert is great, because you know so much about a given subject, but it is also narrowing.  In general, we all suffer from what psychologists call confirmation bias:  we tend see what we believe, to place great weight on facts or opinions that support our beliefs, and to place less weight on facts and opinions that clash with our beliefs. As Simon and Garfunkel sung it (I think in The Boxer), "a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest."  There is reason to believe that this cognitive bias is even stronger among experts than others.  One of my Stanford colleagues, Pam Hinds, has studied aspects of this problem, which she calls "the curse of expertise." It turns out that experts have an especially difficult time putting themselves in others' shoes.  Or to put it another way, people with great experience have a hard time "listening as if they are wrong."  Over time, the irony is that, the more years of experience an expert has, the harder it may become for him or her to update in the face of new information, as the expert says to him or herself "I've been doing this for 20 years, I know more than you." In such cases, my colleague Andy Hargadon likes to ask: "Do you have 20 years of experience, or the same year of experience 20 times?"

For an extreme view of the danger of experts, see this story about David Sackett, one of the founders of the evidence-based medicine movement in North America.  To give you a taste:

'Writing in this week's British Medical Journal (BMJ), Canadian-based researcher, David Sackett, said that he would "never again lecture, write, or referee anything to do with evidence based clinical practice". Sackett is not doing this because he has ceased to believe in evidence based clinical practice but, as the BMJ comments, because he is worried about the power of experts in stifling new ideas and wants the retirement of experts to be made compulsory.'

So, a host of organizational and psychological forces suggest that administrators will keep using sham participation. Doing so legitimates their decisions even when the users needs are completely ignored; when users are not the customer, they will be routinely ignored (especially when they lack power); and even when experts try to listen to "naive" users, they will have a hard time "hearing" anything users say that clashes with their prior opinions.

My view, however, is that isn't completely hopeless. and I suggest a few guidelines for starters:

1.  If you are an administrator, you should realize that if you really have no intention of listening to users or employees, that they will be happier in the end if you just tell them the truth -- that they don't really have any influence over the decision, and and that you don't want to waste their time by pretending that the users have any influence.

2. If you, as an administrator, feel compelled to still have a symbolic process to point to, if you feel compelled to engage in sham participation anyway, appoint a small committee of employees and select people who aren't doing anything especially valuable anyway.  Also, hold just a few short meetings. That way, the productivity of the organization will suffer as little as possible.

3. Hire the least expensive and least disruptive consultant you can find; if you aren't going to listen to them anyway, you might as well waste as little money and time as possible.

4. If you as an employee or user are asked to join a committee of some kind to provide input or to represent some group of users, and you are fairly certain that it will be an exercise in sham participation, refuse to join the committee. 

5.  In some organizations, a more socially acceptable strategy is to say you will join the committee, but to miss most meetings, and to arrive late and leave early when you do attend a meeting.  I guess this is a safer strategy for anyone who wants to be an effective organizational politician. These latter strategies mirror institutional theory -- you as an individual can engage in "symbolic" membership in the committee, and thus have little or no impact on a committee that, in turn, has little or no impact. That way, you can ingratiate yourself with your superiors by pretending to support the sham, and everyone is happy that you are playing the meaningless game so well (except perhaps for the users whose needs are completely ignored).

These guidelines are, I confess, fairly obnoxious.  Here I turn to my colleague and friend Jeff Pfeffer, who often points out that  leaders and managers in many organizations complain that their people aren't productive enough, while simultaneously placing demands on people that make it impossible for them to find time to actually do their jobs.

Comments? 

Comments

[Arunn]

I am a first time visitor here, so here is my "sham comment".

Nice set of guidelines.

In my case, I have observed the admin, at times, puts the solution (it wants) to the committee, even before the committee begins to discuss the problem.

And the worst part: having told us, the committee, of the solution that we were supposed to suggest, we are asked to anyway waste our time going through the motions of discussing the problem in the committee in real time

Of course, most often I employ your obnoxious solution...

(I liked your 15 things I believe very much)

Cheers,
Arunn

[Shaun Kieran]

It always comes back to us.

We like confidence and self-assurance. We like a “can do” attitude. We like enthusiasm and energy.

There are all kinds of reasons why people who should know better can become entranced by surface - credentials, glibness, certainty, type A demeanor. Mostly its about investing (often correctly by the way) in someone else’s success for our benefit.

Evaluating with skepticism, honesty, and then remembering the outcomes takes energy and concentration we don’t always have, so we defer. It actually works - except when it doesn’t.

[Wally Bock]

I always get nervous when I hear an executive saying that he or she "wants people to feel like they're part of the process." It makes me think they're not and all that's happening is that the executive is going to trick them into thinking they are.

[Fred]

Another sham participation tactic is to schedule meetings and agendas around the schedules of inconvenient committee members.

In my case, key meetings were held and critical decisions made when I was out of town. This was not too hard to arrange since I was spending three months a year on the road.