A NECESSARY CONDITION FOR EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT

You have a plum assignment for one of your three team members-a Caribbean trip to scout out property for a key client. Who gets it?

A report is due by 9:00 in the morning-it's complete except for the final section of the report. One person can easily add the section but it will require working late. Who gets it?

How and who you choose for these tasks will determine how even-handed you are perceived. From the perspective of the employee, fairness is the most fundamental characteristic that a manager can possess. In a survey of health care human resource managers conducted by my colleagues and me, playing favorites ranked as the most frequently reported abuse by bullying managers.

It easily beat out "threatening job loss, insulting, or putting-down employees," characteristics most frequently associated with bullying managers.

When questioned, most employees judge the effectiveness of a manager first by passing sentence on the manager's fairness. Managers may be extremely demanding and even ill tempered at times, but if they are perceived as fair, employees are likely to balance these negatives against the manager's ability to distribute excessive demands and ill temper across all employees.

Why this concern with fairness? Even though we are not altogether successful, our society aspires to a merit-based distribution system. Most of us believe in Aristotle's concept of proportional distributive justice. This simply means that we believe that the management contract implies that we are rewarded in proportion to the contributions we make. Most also take this as a core democratic value.

Cultural explanations may not be the whole story, however. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal, argue that desire for fairness is hard-wired into our psyche. Competing demands from our primate evolutionary past for dominance and from our group hunting evolutionary past for cooperation are resolved by giving all members of a group the equal chance to excel, that is to dominate. As they write
The ground rules of the political biogrammar becomes clear: organisms are unequal in their capacity for dominance; they strive to dominate one another; they should have a roughly equal chance to compete in this process.

Since we have evolved little since our group hunting period, it's hard not to escape these fundamental feelings in the modern work environment. The requirement for an equal chance to compete is translated into feelings of unfairness when success in not a product of our efforts but of non-relevant factors, such as favoritism.
Some simple rules to keep in mind when assigning "special" work.

1. Make sure you know every employee's workload you supervise.

2. For assigning either choice or demanding tasks, select employees who can best accomplish them.

3. Make sure you tell chosen employees why they were selected; and make sure all other employees know what your choice criteria were.

4. When anyone can complete the task, use the "who's next" rule, to assign tasks.

5. Finally, be willing to carry out onerous tasks yourself with employees at least half of the time and do not be too quick to assign choice tasks to yourself.

The savvy manager is sensitive to appearances of favoritism. By following a few simple rules, the savvy manager can lay the groundwork for effective management. Although effective management is not assured by fairness, it is almost impossible without it.