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A Little Book on Employeeship
3 Umeå, 2021
A Little Book on Employeeship
ISBN 978-91-8020-684-6
© 2021 Stefan Söderfjäll & Christopher Svensson
Graphic Design: Daniel Åberg/Åbergs stilus et forma
Cover: Daniel Åberg//Åbergs stilus et forma
Cover image: Shutterstock/Agny Illustration
English Translation: Darren Packman/The Craft Consultant
Copyright Notice:
This work is protected by copyright law. Infringement of the author’s rights under the Copyright Act may result in penalties (fines or imprisonment), damages and seizure/destruction of illegally produced material.
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5 Introduction .......................................... 9 What is employeeship? ......................... 15 A Definition ................................................................. 16 Trustworthiness – living up to or exceeding expectations ................................................................. 19 Adaptivity – handling change ................................... 20 Proactivity – initiating and achieving change ..........22 Employeeship and change .......................................... 23 References .................................................................... 27 Bad employeeship .................................. 31 Counterproductive employeeship .............................. 33 Counterproductivity in relation to your own tasks 34 Counterproductivity in relation to your coworkers 36 Counterproductivity in relation to your employer .. 37 References .................................................................... 41 Trustworthiness – living up to or exceeding expectations ................ 45 Trustworthiness in relation to your own tasks ........ 48 CONTENTS
6 Trustworthiness in relation to your coworkers ........ 50 Trustworthiness in relation to your employer ......... 52 References .................................................................... 57 Adaptivity - handling change ............ 61 Adaptivity in relation to your own tasks .................. 63 Adaptivity in relation to your coworkers ................. 64 Adaptivity in relation to your employer ...................67 References .................................................................... 71 Proactivity - initiating and achieving change ......................... 73 Proactivity in relation to your own tasks .................. 75 Proactivity in relation to your coworkers ................. 78 Proactivity in relation to your employer.................. 80 References .................................................................... 84 Ideal conditions for effective employeeship ........................................ 87 For the individual ........................................................89 For the task at hand .................................................... 91 For the social environment around you ................... 92 For the organisation you work in .............................. 93 References ....................................................................97
Employeeship and leadership .......... 101 The functions of leadership ...................................... 103 Effective leadership ................................................... 105 Contingent reward leadership ..................................106 Management by exceptions ......................................106 Transformational leadership .................................... 107 Leadership, employeeship and trust ........................ 108 References .................................................................. 111 And finally ......................................... 115 About the authors ............................. 119 About ‘A Little Book’ ......................... 121
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It is safe to say that the number of employees in almost all the world’s companies and organisations exceeds the number of managers and leaders by a very healthy margin. Given this, you might think that there would be much more written about employees than about the much smaller group of people that lead them. Just enter the word ‘leadership’ into an online search engine, browse a database of scientific articles or scroll through the titles of a major online bookstore and then compare the number of hits you get when you enter the word ‘employeeship’ instead. You’ll find that the number of publications dedicated to the first phenomenon is significantly larger than the latter.
In other words, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the relative prevalence of leadership and employeeship and the amount of words written
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Introduction
about each phenomenon. However, there are many indications this reverse relationship is misleading, and that there are, in reality, as many books and articles about employeeship as there are about managers and leaders. Unlike the accepted concept of leadership, at least in academic literature, there is no singular defined concept for describing employees’ attitudes, strategies, behaviours and everything else that has anything to do with employeeship though. This doesn’t mean there is any lack of studies, theories or models. On the contrary; the terminology for describing employees’ commitments, attitudes and behavioural patterns is both comprehensive and rich in content, but the absence of a unified concept can easily give the impression that employeeship is still a relatively unexplored phenomenon.
Even if interest in the two phenomena is not as unbalanced as you might think at first glance, there seems to be a common perception that the importance and impact of managers and leaders greatly exceeds the importance and impact of employees. This has probably been a fairly widespread assumption for as long as businesses have existed. It is sometimes described as the ‘romanticisation of leadership’ – in which the importance of active, committed and
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enterprising employees receives far less attention. Employees have long dutifully played supporting roles to their managers and leaders, who have been left to bask in the spotlight of any successes. Managers and leaders, likewise, have also often had to bear the responsibility for failed achievements and poor results, despite the fact that it was most likely the employees that failed to live up to their expectations.
We feel this romanticisation of leadership still prevails today, albeit to a lesser extent, which is what motivated us to dedicate this book to the legions of often overlooked employees. This doesn’t mean we have any intention of understating the importance of leadership, either in working life or in any other contexts where leaders and leadership are needed. On the contrary; we both have extensive experience of highlighting the significance of leading others. Leadership and employeeship do not need to be mutually exclusive, and should rather be seen as prerequisites and complements to one another. Good leadership and equally good employeeship serve each other, and enable managers and employees to develop and maintain the mutual trust in each other’s specific roles that is so important for successful professional relationships. That is why one of this book’s chapters
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is specifically dedicated to leadership and the relationships between leaders and employees. What we really want, however, is to shine the spotlight on the employees and let them take centre stage – if only for the relatively short time it takes you to read the pages of this book.
Regardless of whether you are an employee, a manager of employees or work with the recruitment, training or development of employees, this book has been written specifically for you. In its pages we want to present what we, after having immersed ourselves in academic literature, think the phenomenon that we call employeeship really is. We’ll also explore what happens when employeeship works well, not quite so well or even disastrously, and the types of conditions you need in order for it to thrive.
Having said all this, however, we should emphasise that we’d never claim this book is an exhaustive compilation of all the available research on the subject of employeeship. That would be impossible, particularly given the format of this little book. We have, however, referenced the most reliable sources we could find, in the hope of providing a clear and balanced picture of the current state of knowledge regarding employeeship. For those of you who want to study
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the subject in greater depth, we have included a reference list at the end of each chapter that contains the sources on which each chapter is founded.
Like previous books in this series of ‘Little Books’ (see the other available titles at the end of this book), our intention is to make the presentation of this subject as short and concise as possible without sacrificing too much valuable substance. Therefore let’s not devote any more space to introducing the subject of this book, and instead tackle head-on the question everyone wants the answer to: what actually is employeeship?
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Chapter 1. What is employeeship?
Imagine the following scenario. You, together with a dozen other colleagues, have been given the task of defining the concept of employeeship. During a normal working day at a workplace of your choice, you get the opportunity to be a fly on the wall and observe the different goings-on that take place right in front of your own eyes, and the degree of employeeship that occurs in these situations. You and your fellow ‘flies’ record the behaviours you all observe and then individually justify why these particular behaviours should be categorised as employeeship. At the end of the day, as you all sit down and collectively compare your observations, do you think you will have noticed and described
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approximately the same behaviours and motives as your colleagues?
In all probability you will not be in complete agreement. And the result would probably be the same if you, instead of observing employees, turned your attention to a group of managers with the ambition of defining the concept of leadership. Leadership and employeeship are great examples of concepts we use daily, and whose meaning we at least think we agree on. But if we scratch the surface a little we often realise that we have taken the meaning of these concepts a little too much for granted. Because of this it is important to begin this little book on employeeship by attempting to describe what this phenomenon actually is.
A Definition
Employeeship cannot be defined as easily as similar concepts. It is multifaceted and potentially includes a wide range of attitudes, approaches and behaviours that can be applied in various contexts, with different purposes and goals. It depends, to put it simply, on who you ask and how narrow or extensive the per-
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son’s perception is of what employeeship represents.
In work psychology literature there are several concepts that intend to describe various forms of preferred employee behaviour – such as organisational citizenship behaviours, general performance, proactivity, prosocial behaviours, adaptivity, innovative behaviours, propensity for change, contextual performance and followership.
In other words, the way employeeship should be defined is not entirely obvious, but there are a couple of things that can more or less be accepted as given. Employeeship has to do with employees, and employees are found in a workplace. This workplace is usually part of a smaller or larger organisation where each individual employee has an assigned role. Within the framework of this role, the employee is expected to perform one or a number of tasks in order for the organisation to be able to deliver the goods or services that it provides. In the workplace an employee is seldom completely alone, as there are often others working there that also contribute to the running of the organisation. So on this basis employeeship can be defined as follows:
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