Jeremy Simon

Writer, McCombs School of Business

Your head may be full of business improvement ideas, but there’s a chance your manager doesn’t want to hear them. That’s a problem for your organization, says Ethan Burris, associate professor of management at the McCombs School of Business.

Successful companies seek out ideas from all employees and then put good ideas into practice, Burris noted in his lunchtime talk at the Texas Enterprise Speaker Series on March 31. “If we’re going to increase performance overall, it’s dependent on employees having candid conversations about what works and what doesn’t, and then having their managers take action,” he said.

So why wouldn’t a manager want to hear from employees? Burris pointed to two related theories:

Role theory. According to this theory, “roles produce expectations for the way people behave,” Burris said. Those roles can include membership in a family (mother, father, child), organization (president, priest), or corporation (worker, manager, CEO). In a business hierarchy, competence is supposed to determine who advances up the corporate ladder, such as moving into a management position.

Self-discrepancy theory. An insecure manager may suffer when she or he isn’t meeting expectations. Self-discrepancy theory, which comes from social psychology, addresses this disconnect. “If there is a set of expectations for how you should behave or how you should be, yet you don’t feel like you live up to those expectations, then it feels very threatening for you,” Burris said.

As a result, employees’ well-meaning feedback seems challenging to managers who already feel inadequate.

That can silence employees. “Managers who feel insecure in their roles won’t solicit voice,” also known as employee feedback, he said.

But it’s possible to address managers’ insecurity. In a study, Burris and his fellow researchers tested the theory that getting people to practice self-affirmation can mitigate threats to their egos. The researchers asked study participants to think of, and then write about, a deeply held personal value. That simple act had impressive results.

Regardless of whether that personal value related to the manager’s job, “they felt more comfortable with who they are — and then they were more likely to solicit voice,” Burris said.

His research offers a lesson for managers. “It doesn’t matter how competent or incompetent you actually are,” Burris said. “It matters how competent you feel.”

(Printed in CRII’s Retail & Business with permission from Texas Enterprise:
http://www.texasenterprise.utexas.edu/2015/04/09/workplace/when-managers-are-insecure-employee-voices-aren-t-heard; Retail & Business is India’s leading retail publication)