Heider revisited

This article is an original idea from the author and is the result of applying Heider's aribution theory to general management. You may read a previous version of this article in spanish here. For further information, please contact me

I have seen many lists or thumb rules to apply to management but they usually include too many factors or they lack of interrelation between the factors. Heider’s expression is a simple and formal approach with a reduced number of interrelated factors.

(Heider, Austrian psychologist (1896-1988) whose works about perception are a must-read for psychologists, developed this simple expression used to refer to factors that are significant to action outcomes.)

I use this expression as a substitute to those rules of thumb lists as I see a lot of common sense in it. Also it may serve as a “guide” to any context in which you pursue results from action (children education, management, training, sports…)

The expression states that action is a combination of personal and environmental factors. This is something that we all know but amazingly we tend to forget.

The expression is

Action = (AxM)+S

A=Ability

Everybody is tempted to think about ability as physical & mental ability to perform and the popular believe is that little may be done here (genes and so on), but you may also relate it with knowledge and/or developing needed skills to adapt to situations. Don’t forget that we Humans are great adaptative machines (perhaps it’s our greatest value). Hiring strategies and education plans for your team, as well as assigning the people with adequate skills to the correct jobs, or even work on developing some basic skills may provide some benefit.

M= Motivation (here and here)

In psychology motivation has a slightly different meaning of what is commonly understood as motivation. Think of motivation about something formed by two factors: direction (goals) & intensity (how hard I work to achieve those goals and for how long I can keep the effort). Goals need to be clearly stated and they must be known and shared among all participants. About intensity, well, this is another story. Not everyone react in the same way to the same task, there are internal factors hard to control (intrinsic motivation), and some external factors that are easier to understand and control (for example salary, work times, vacations). The rarely told story is that external factors don’t motivate as well as they seem, their effect over time is limited and they should even be handled with care as they may produce undesirable results. People respond in different ways to external motivators, and some may even see a threat on them.

Motivation is a complex field, and managers should get trained on it, but for now, and to keep motivation simple, just consider on having clear and simple goals (avoid ambiguity by all means) and invest some time trying to match people likes to the tasks required for accomplishing the job, even check periodically to see if you can adjust team assignments.

S=Situation

Here situation is about simplicity of the context and luck. Well I’ll forget about luck, period.

There is a tendency for new managers to overwhelm their teams with sets of procedures, standards or rules pretending to control the complexity of reality by defining the course of action for any possible contingency. This approach just gets things worst, what you usually get is a kind of paralysis as people tend to forget goals and they usually require a new education plan just to learn how to do what they have to do.

Some aditional thoughts here

There are some lectures you may get from the expression:

1) One obvious thing is that there are multiplicative and additive factors. That means that even if you forget to work, intentionally or not, on any other aspect of your management function, if you only work on creating a simple working context (simple rules, simple procedures, simple communication flows, simple everything) things may happen.

2) Working on the other parameters also increase probability, but don’t forget you need to work on the other 2 factors at the same time or you'll get what we learnt at school (something by cero is cero) resulting in a useless effort. To illustrate this; If you invest on any of the factors (for example motivation) consider increasing ability in the same direction. Education plans should be goal oriented and their difficulty adapted to people current abilities or you could get negative motivation (you will impact on internal motivators) just try to be sure that people has increased their abilities before continuing with other education actions.

3) You may increase the complexity of the situation if you detect an increase in motivation and ability. An also well known effect is that if you have increased ability and you increase complexity in a controlled way you may get increased values on the energizing component of motivation. We like threats, but not every threat produces the same effects, best outputs are from feasible ones (i.e. adapted to our personal ability). This is something well know in educational fields; complexity may be increased as students increase their knowledge and as new skills appear, trying to “touch” complexity out of time generally incurs in intrinsic motivation reductions.

Personally I think that the most interesting point is how the expression simplifies some complex concepts in an elegant way. The first point (just by reducing complexity you may expect outcomes) may be explained by the fact that ability and motivation are actually interrelated with context in a mutual affecting loop as we are continuously adapting [to] our environment, but the expression somehow includes this relationship just by introducing context as an additive factor.

Simple but effective.