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WORKOUT By: Jennifer Bails

In these recessionary times, the employee-employer alliance is under intense scrutiny by the media, politicians, and the general population. One of the world’s experts in worker management is Carnegie Mellon’s Denise Rousseau, and she has some ideas that could enhance the well-being of employers and employees.

Back home in Santa Rosa, Calif., for Thanksgiving break, the 19-year-old college student hops into her VW bug and heads to the truck yard of the telephone company where her father works. Her dad, Edward Rousseau, spends his days at the company climbing down manholes and scaling poles to repair telephone lines. It’s a demanding job that he complains wears him down, but he carries on to support his wife and four children.

After what must have been another grueling shift, he looks weary to his daughter, Denise Rousseau. As she watches him settle into the passenger seat, she tries to lift his spirits. The University of California at Berkeley student, who transferred there from a nearby junior college after getting a scholarship, starts telling her dad about her favorite class—a course taught by well-known organizational psychologist Milton Blood. The subject, employee management, resonates with her because it seems like every idea her professor talks about relates directly to her family’s life. Management was always a nasty word in Rousseau’s childhood home, where threats of disciplinary action and job loss seemed to loom for her dad. She remembers the dinnertime stories recounting the harsh behavior by her dad’s foreman. Whenever the boss called the house, typically looking for someone to work overtime in an already-long work week, Rousseau and her brothers and sister knew what to say: “Dad’s not here.” If their father would ever answer the phone, declining the overtime wasn’t a plausible option because he feared he might be harassed or even fired just for saying no.

“Dad,” Rousseau says to her downcast passenger, “I’m taking this great class about how to make jobs better for people.” Her father listens in silence, staring at the road ahead as she describes ways to improve worker-management relations and how to ensure that the workplace benefits everybody, not just the employer. At last, her father responds:

“We’ve got to find ways to keep work from grinding men down.” The words come again: “Grinding men down.” And again: “Grinding men down.”

After earning her doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology from Berkeley in 1977, Rousseau can’t shake the memory of those words and her blue-collar upbringing. She decides, not surprisingly, to focus her research on the lives of workers, hoping to improve conditions for the countless other people like her father who toil anonymously in thankless jobs where they are undervalued at best and mistreated at worst.

While teaching at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in the early 1980s, Rousseau begins to investigate whether workers believe they have unspoken responsibilities. Written job descriptions, she recognizes, only reveal some of what people do daily in their vocations. The real nature of work isn’t all about salary and benefits spelled out in legally binding employment agreements. It also lies in the implicit understandings on the part of workers and employers, which Rousseau defines as psychological contracts. For example, fast-food employees paid minimum wage might believe they must work harder if they wish to be selected for management training. Or salaried engineers might feel obligated to put in extra unpaid hours if they seek added job security.

Rousseau spends more than a decade exploring how employers can help shape psychological contracts in ways that are fair for both employees and employers. Her well-cited research on the dynamics of psychological contracts leads to visiting professorships in Singapore, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and most recently, Ireland, along with invitations to advise top government panels and executive programs. She is asked to contribute to Great Minds in Management, a compilation of first-person accounts from the leading thinkers in management about how they developed their seminal theories.

In 1994, Rousseau—fast becoming one of the world’s experts on employee relations—joins Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College as the H.J. Heinz II Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy with a joint appointment in the Tepper School of Business, where her husband, Paul Goodman, also teaches. She is drawn to Carnegie Mellon by the university’s reputation for generating research that has real-world impact. With that in mind, she begins to write a book to help academics and managers understand the powerful role that psychological contracts play in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop businesses on Main Street.

The impetus to finish the project comes with the news of her father’s illness; he is diagnosed with asbestosis, a chronic lung disease he acquired while working as a sheet metal mechanic to fix torpedoed battleships during World War II. “I always had this image of my father out there working, just trying to scrape together a living for his family,” Rousseau says. “So when I planned to write a book on the psychological contract and the work experience, I knew I wanted him to see the finished product.”

In 1996, Psychological Contracts in Organizations wins the prestigious George R. Terry Book Award—bestowed by the Academy of Management to recognize outstanding contributions to the advancement of management knowledge. Rousseau dedicates the prize-winning book to her ailing father and presents a bound manuscript to him as a gift on his 70th birthday. With pride and excitement, he sits down and reads the preprint of his daughter’s tome from cover to cover, refusing to let anyone else see it first.

The story could end neatly here—a scholar devotes her career to improving employment relationships because of the hardships of her father. Finally, after decades of research, she honors him with her success. But for Rousseau, the story doesn’t end here because her father’s words during that ride in the VW won’t go away” “We’ve got to find ways to keep work from grinding men down. Grinding men down. Grinding men down.”

“I really didn’t think that I made any progress on that goal—that hope,” she says. “Sure, my book said things that were true and important, but that’s a far cry from actually motivating a change in the way people are treated.”

Rousseau grows increasingly frustrated that her research isn’t reaching the practicing managers who stand to benefit most—from the barista shift-supervisor at your neighborhood Coffee Tree to Wall Street executives. “For a long time, I had the hope that if I just did the research and tossed it over the transom that somebody would catch it and apply it,” she says. “But as I approached my 30th year in this profession—I’m a slow learner—I said to myself, ‘Denise, this just isn’t working.’ You can do a lot of studies and have no one but another academic ever read them.”

So she begins searching for ways to close the “research-practice gap’—the failure of managers to base their day-to-day decisions on any findings from the vast body of best available scientific evidence, choosing instead to rely on intuition or personal experience, or to follow unsubstantiated, over-simplified advice from trendy, how-to business books.

These are the ideas preoccupying Rousseau as she completes her term as the president of the Academy of Management in 2005 and prepares to give a keynote address at the organization’s annual meeting. The natural, assumed choice would be for her to recount her well-respected studies on psychological contracts in the workplace. Instead, she takes a risk before the oldest and largest scholarly management association in the world. “I knew it was my big chance, because they had to listen to my speech even if they didn’t agree,” says Rousseau. “So I proposed the idea that we aren’t doing what we think we are—that is, we’re giving students models and examples, but we aren’t teaching them the underlying scientific principles. And I sounded the call for evidence-based management.”

Evidence-based management involves deriving principles from scientific evidence and translating them into practices that solve organizational problems. That means knowing where to gather research findings, having the skills to interpret them, and understanding how and when to apply them to managerial decisions. Healthcare professionals have been doing this since the 1980s, when the medical community recognized that patient outcomes would be better if decisions were based on the best available research instead of clinical experiences or gut instincts, says University of Toronto management professor Gary Latham, president of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the field’s main academic organization. Medical professionals today have online services that provide ready access to appropriate clinical practice—supported by peer-reviewed research, based on recommendations of healthcare experts.

“Before that, doctors often used to go on intuition rather than fact,” says Latham. “And the same is still true for managers. They might read something by [former General Electric CEO] Jack Welch and think, ‘Gee, if it worked for Jack, then it will work for me.’” But if you are critically ill with a mysterious ailment, he asks, do you want your doctor combing the archives of the New England Journal of Medicine for answers, or heeding the advice from a column in last week’s Parade Magazine? The stakes in management might not literally be life-or-death, but they can be momentous. When managers learn to use scientific evidence—and use it well—Rousseau has no doubts they can make better decisions that lead to better outcomes for their organizations, employees, and clients.

Take the example of John Zanardelli, whom Rousseau calls the “quintessential evidence-based business manager.” Zanardelli is CEO of Asbury Heights, a western Pennsylvania residential care facility for the elderly. A public health specialist by training, he regularly gathers and analyzes data linking customer experiences and employee behavior with his firm’s financial performance. He uses the data, along with evidence gleaned from the academic literature, to help resolve organizational challenges.

For instance, when budget pressures forced his employees to pay a portion of their health insurance for the first time, he turned to Rousseau’s research on psychological contract violations to make this change less disruptive for his staff. He enlisted the help of his employees in drafting the new health policy, so they would feel like stakeholders in the program, and he also gave them an open forum to vent their anger. “Denise’s work shows there is a process you can go through to ease the pain of making difficult changes,” Zanardelli says. “If you don’t take these steps, you can change, but you are liable to create turmoil and negative energy along the way.”

Zanardelli credits his evidence-based methods for the smooth operations at Asbury Heights—patient outcomes are improving, profits are up, and residents report greater satisfaction with their lives. “We have adopted a scientific approach to everything we do here, all the way down to how our nursing aides wash the hands of residents in our center, and, as a result, things stay pretty calm around here,” he says.

If evidence-based practice holds so much promise, why isn’t everyone doing it? Some pushback stems from the romantic notion that good leadership is an art form, not a science. Managers fear they will lose their freedom to run their organizations as they see fit. Another obstacle is that most managers can’t be expected to read scholarly journals with any regularity, and, even if they tried, they probably wouldn’t understand the technical jargon—what Rousseau calls “the plain English problem.”

And, perhaps most importantly, business schools don’t typically teach their students to know or use scientific evidence, says Rousseau’s collaborator Anthony Kovner, professor of health policy and management at New York University. He says business undergraduates, MBAs, and executives spend most of their time developing quick responses to packaged versions of business problems, rather than learning the science-based principles underlying case studies; few students encounter a peer-reviewed journal while in school, and they often don’t update their knowledge after graduation. “It’s a question of changing the culture in management schools, as well as in management,” says Kovner. “We are still far away from making that a reality—but a lot closer than we would’ve been without Denise Rousseau.”

Latham affectionately calls Rousseau “the mother of evidence-based management” and for good reason. Since giving her academy speech four years ago, she has been working tirelessly to kick-start the evidence-based revolution—beginning at Carnegie Mellon. The university’s emphasis on multidisciplinary learning and its core strengths in organizational science and decision theory make it the perfect testing ground, Rousseau says.

Last fall, she taught the university’s inaugural evidence-based management course to 40 master’s students at Tepper. Together with operations research and public policy professor Jonathan Caulkins, Rousseau plans to offer another class in evidence-based management at the Heinz College this September. Their goal is to rebrand the college’s management program as an evidence-based curriculum. “This is a quantitative, empirical, rational, and practical approach to leadership and decision-making that will serve our students well whether they end up managing a symphony or working in public policy in Washington,” Caulkins says.

As Rousseau begins training the first generation of evidence-based business leaders, she also has formed a group of scientists, textbook writers, consultants, and practicing managers, called the Evidence-Based Management Collaborative (45 members and growing). They meet several times a year at Carnegie Mellon. Their mission is to develop an online clearinghouse of carefully vetted best evidence summarized in ways that can be readily used by business. Rousseau likens the project to building a management science version of WebMD, the popular medical and wellness information service. For example, if a bank branch manager wants to learn how to improve morale among her financial analysts during a time of economic downturn, or the executive director of a food bank seeks to recruit better volunteers, they will be able to quickly access what science has to recommend—translated into easy-to-understand language. Right now, the collaborative is involved in designing the architecture of this Web site and drafting dozens of user-friendly summaries to fill the database. She hopes the first version of the free service will go live by 2012.

Synthesizing and translating an entire field of management research into plain language synopses will require a massive effort. And Rousseau understands orienting managers to use the evidence as a go-to resource and to make better informed decisions won’t happen overnight. It will require a sea change in managerial strategy and culture, further exacerbated by the difficult current economic times for employees and employers alike. Rousseau, though, says she is up for the challenge, inspired, in large part, by the abiding echo of her father’s haunting words. “We’ve got to find ways to keep work from grinding men down.” In 1998, her dad died at age 74 from his work-acquired illness.

Jennifer Bails is a freelance writer and former award-winning newspaper reporter. Her work appears regularly in this magazine.

David Kagen is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.  His clients have included Alec Baldwin, Ted Danson and many other entertainment luminaries, as well as business consultants, lawyers, quality control engineers, and political campaigners for over 35 years.

For more information you can contact David Kagen at:
(818) 752-9678, or through his web site, www.communicateauthentically.com.