Thursday, May 6, 2010

OB Mini Case (0): I've been a MS Evangelist!

From now on, I'll be writing some mini organizational behavior cases from my own point of view and hopefully mixing them with the taste of software development stories. If I'm lucky, I'll be posting or receiving commentaries from my professors, scholars and even my colleagues. So let's face my first real small story:



Things have changed in my new workplace. I've worked with various software development teams with different expertise and sizes. We've had almost always lived in peace. But this time, we've been wasting time in purposeless debates of .NET vs. Java!
I believe both sides have profound capabilities. They share identical concepts and are more effective in various specific cases. Anyway, guys are still engaging in stressful discussions of future trends and possibilities of job loss!
From a senior developer side, the debates seem fun but not cool in middle of schedule deadlines. Looking from the glasses of a MBA, they are leveraging the stress levels and might cause job dissatisfaction in long term since some guys apparently have lost hope of their current position based on the outcome of arguments! So unfortunately, IMHO they are loosing the drive to bond*.
Are those discussions useful? Are they affecting people in a good manner or not? What about the impact on employee motivations and emotions? I'm not sure. But I think they should be somehow controlled. The problem is how to.

* The drive to bond refers to the four drives that underlie motivation from Harvard Business Review |
Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg, and Linda-Eling Lee, July–August 2008: Employee Motivation A Powerful New Model.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hmmmm

MyOpenDraft said...

Nice post, thanks for sharing.