[From Kenny Kitzke (2003.09.30)]
<Bruce Nevin (2003.09.23.2133 EDT)>
I have changed the subject to get back a little closer to a question you had raised.
<Don’t we do the same as the monkeys here? We see that we get the same as the other guy. Life is good. Then we see that we get something less than the other guy. Hey! I’m just as good as him! What am I? Chopped banana peel? How come he got a raise and I didn’t?>
I am convinced, like Rick, that there is a perception of “fairness” that humans control and that it seems to fit quite well in the “Principle Level” of HPCT. I am under the impression that monkey’s may not have such a level of perception. The experiment did not change my mind. Some experiment might.
It seems clear that each human’s Principle variable and reference of what is “fair” can be different from that of other humans. Our perception is built up from the outputs of our own lower levels as we experience them and they are compared to a reference point set by our own unique higher System level.
So, this “fairness” control, even in humans, does get pretty squishy. Remember at the Conference, Dick Robertson querried into how we can do experiments or tests of principle level perceptual control. As I recall, Bill Powers not only expressed a view that this is a currently quite difficult methodology, he questioned why anyone would want to do such experiments anyhow? [I hope, Bill, I am not misconveying your remarks. Please correct me if I misspeak and recalling wrongly. If accurate, you might want to comment further on the second part, which, like Dick, I was not too sure I understood at Loyola.]
But, Bruce, I especially noticed your reference to “a raise.” Working as a consultant to management, I have seen this repeatedly come up in employee surveys. If you can believe the answers employees give to surveys, I have repeatedly measured a greater negative response to the “fairness” of the wage raise (compensation) system used in an organization than on whether the raise the individual themselves received was fair. IOW, it was often (but not always) the case that anger was created not because I did not receive enough, but that others who did not diserve more, received more!
I remember one corporate CEO who, when presenting the results of a survey I performed which suggested exactly this (that employees were upset with the unfairness of the pay and raise system, not their raise), dismissed the 100% population data out of hand.
He said something like most people will always want more and complain. Let’s move on. He knew the corporation had given less of a raise than people wanted. It was an executive decision he was paid to make. The local executive I worked for just nodded, not in agreement, but knowing we probably could not change this CEO’s perception/mind about people and their pay and perhaps it was the system of pay discrimination among employees that was the larger issue than the raise increase itself.
I have found Bill Power’s theories of “incentives” or pay rewards extremely powerful in understanding what you can and can’t do to force people to change what they do (like work harder or smarter) very enlightening. I must also admit, that only a precious few CEO’s have been willing to try to learn about “Carrots and Sticks” from a HPCT view. Those that have, have benefited greatly.
In this sense, I see humans and employees clearly controlling for “fairness” and appreciating their executives who seem to understand compensation and fairness more from an HPCT understanding.
Like most of our psychology friends, the resistance to the HPCT view is resisted by stimulus-response, cause-effect compensation “experts” who collect big bucks from organizations for designing performance appraisal and incentive systems which supposedly fairly reward those who appear to produce the most.
Any comments or observations are most welcome, but please leave out your personal political persuasions.