Playing games, is it worth it?

Hello, in this week’s blog I will talk about organizational gaming and performance measurements. If you are like me, I did not really know what organizational gaming meant but I did know what performance measures were. I initially surmised that organizational gaming was a form of cheating and misrepresentation of the real facts. In other words, I put the two together and thought that they were used in a manner by those in power to lie about the real state of an organization, division or project. This got me thinking, why would those in power approve and conduct such actions that could be detrimental to not only their career but the organization?

Organizational gaming is basically the ways that organizations will alter the data in order to meet the standard that was given at the inception of the project or year. These standards are limits that are meant to determine whether or not an individual, project or organization is successful or not. It should be obvious that these measures are usually connected to either a financial reward or job retention as long as the requisite target numbers are achieved. On the converse side of this coin, the failure of not obtaining the performance measure could also result in the loss of employment for either the individual or division within the organization. This could be as a result of the organization believing that the project was not financially fruitful, therefore the organization will not continue to fund a project that is not making money plain and simple.

Based upon that fact that an individual’s career as well as others are dependent upon meeting or exceeding a performance goal, you can see that there would be great motivation for some individuals to conduct some of these unethical games. Some of the organizational games are known as Ratchet effects, Output distortion, Output tunnel vision, Cherry picking, Favorable focus and Cutting corners. A brief description of these games are as follows:

Ratchet effects: “Deliberately restraining current performance to avoid having to achieve higher levels I the future”.

Output distortion: “Deliberately manipulating data and results by various forms of cheating, including altering performance data or misreporting performance data or misreporting performance”.

Output tunnel vision: “Improving performance only for qualities that can be measured at the expense of qualities that cannot be or are not measured”.

Cherry-picking: “Reporting on or servicing only cases where high performance can be achieved more easily while neglecting or not reporting hard cases that are costly to handle”.

Favorable focus: “Supplying, developing, or promoting performance measures that are easy to obtain and favorable of abandoning those that are hard to obtain or unfavorable”.

Cutting corners: “Doing sloppy work or quick and dirty delivery of services in order to boost performance measures”.

Definitions were taken from Public Service Ethics by Bowman and West.

As you can see there are several ways in which data can be manipulated and altered in order to satisfactorily meet the set performance standards. The problem with using these unethical games is that it compounds the initial failure of meeting the performance goal. Let’s assume that you were the supervisor in charge of reporting all of the data at the end of the year for Project X. This example is only one way in which the use of organizational games could affect an organization.

Although Project X is in its first year of existence, the organization set a performance goal in order to determine if the project was financially beneficial or a hindrance to the organization. The organization will run a 3 year study and then decide to keep or eliminate Project X. Since you have three years to make the project a success you are positive and upbeat. Being the supervisor, you have a staff of 1000 subordinates and as such you have their welfare at heart.

The first year is now over and the end of year numbers do not look good. In fact, the numbers are only 10% off of the performance goal. Is it ok to “fudge” the end results on a project since the numbers are very close to the target numbers that were agreed upon at the beginning of the project? What’s 10% right? Based upon the volume of product sold, who is going to notice 10% and in fact using one of the organizational games will allow you to hide the truth. You decide to “fudge” so your report looks good for the first year. The second year, the end of the year results were worse than the first year and the Project X numbers were 20% under from the performance measure. This year you decide to play another round of organizational games but you choose to do it in order to keep your subordinates employed. Remember, the Board of Directors believe that Project X is a success as they see that the measures are being met. You as a supervisor know that the project is failing but you continue to give inaccurate data. Year three comes and goes and the project continues to fail but his year the project is 40% below the performance measure. As you can see, the problem with misrepresenting the “true” facts will be disastrous, not only for the supervisor and employees but the organization and the surrounding community. In most cases the outcome does not justify the means. You as the supervisor were playing with borrowed time in which the situation only got worse. Sooner or later, the truth will come out as audits will be conducted and questions will be asked and you will be on the hook. After the realization that the data was in fact falsified, you will be terminated. I can only assume but I doubt that you will be able to obtain gainfully employment in the same career field after the word gets out about your unethical decision making and behavior if you manage to get out of criminal charges. In a lot of cases, an organization will go back and try to figure out what is wrong and attempt to fix the problem if they obtained the real data in the first place. In addition, by revealing the truth the organization will know that you are in fact ethical and in some cases would assign you to other projects or promote you based upon your ethical fortitude and honesty. Why can’t a supervisor put the energy they use into cheating into finding out what is wrong and make the necessary corrections for the project to be successful? I personally would rather lose my job knowing that I gave an accurate report as to the real data than lie about it and have that continually held over my head. At least I can apply for another job with my head held high knowing that I am moral and have ethical beliefs. Which path would you choose?

References:

Bowman, J., & West, J. (2015). Public service ethics. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc.