It’s not surprising that managers try to improve productivity and employee effectiveness by exhorting staff to “try harder”, or to make more of an effort in their jobs. It’s a natural human tendency to assume that the simple act of trying harder will result in better results, but more times than not, the assumption is incorrect.
Learn more about this common managerial mistake, its pitfalls, and what to do about it
In our often Western dominated organizational thinking, we attribute a lot of employee success (and our own success) to “trying harder”, or “working harder”. This assumption about the relationship of effort to effectiveness is often incorrect, since there are many more powerful forced that influence results.
Managers often get caught up in the idea that “if only employees would try harder, or work harder, we’d get far better results”. Caught in this incorrect assumption, they rely on exhortation of employees to improve productivity. It doesn’t usually work, and it can end up backfiring.