David Sirota - The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want

About This eBook

ePUB is an open, industry-standard format for eBooks. However, support of ePUB and its many features varies across reading devices and applications. Use your device or app settings to customize the presentation to your liking. Settings that you can customize often include font, font size, single or double column, landscape or portrait mode, and figures that you can click or tap to enlarge. For additional information about the settings and features on your reading device or app, visit the device manufacturers Web site.

Many titles include programming code or configuration examples. To optimize the presentation of these elements, view the eBook in single-column, landscape mode and adjust the font size to the smallest setting. In addition to presenting code and configurations in the reflowable text format, we have included images of the code that mimic the presentation found in the print book; therefore, where the reflowable format may compromise the presentation of the code listing, you will see a Click here to view code image link. Click the link to view the print-fidelity code image. To return to the previous page viewed, click the Back button on your device or app.

The Enthusiastic Employee

How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want

Second Edition

David Sirota
Douglas A. Klein

Vice President, Publisher: Tim Moore
Associate Publisher and Director of Marketing: Amy Neidlinger
Development Editor: Russ Hall
Operations Specialist: Jodi Kemper
Marketing Manager: Megan Graue
Cover Designer: Alan Clements
Managing Editor: Kristy Hart
Project Editor: Andy Beaster
Copy Editor: Karen Gill
Proofreader: Sarah Kearns
Indexer: Lisa Stumpf
Compositor: Gloria Schurick
Manufacturing Buyer: Dan Uhrig

2014 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Publishing as Pearson
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

Pearson offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information, please contact U.S. Corporate and Government Sales, 1-800-382-3419, .

Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing July 2013

ISBN-10: 0-13-324902-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-324902-6

Pearson Education LTD.
Pearson Education Australia PTY, Limited.
Pearson Education Singapore, Pte. Ltd.
Pearson Education Asia, Ltd.
Pearson Education Canada, Ltd.
Pearson Educacin de Mexico, S.A. de C.V.
Pearson EducationJapan
Pearson Education Malaysia, Pte. Ltd.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013939241

This work is dedicated to our families:
Our wives: Barbara and Ilene
And our children: Rima and Abigail,
Brandon and Samantha

Our enthusiasm at its source.

Contents

Acknowledgments

As the saying goes, it takes a village ...to do any number of things. Well, in our case, it took the efforts of an entire company over many years to make this work possible. We refer, of course, to our colleagues, past and present, at Sirota Consulting, LLC. Over the years, the firm has been fortunate to have some of the best minds in the field of industrial and organizational psychology using attitude research methods to study human behavior in the workplace and assist in the improvement of organization effectiveness. As with the first edition, we had the support of a number of our colleagues.

In particular, this book would not have been written without the assistance of the firms senior management, particularly the chairman and CEO, Michael Meltzer. Not only did Michael and his colleagues freely offer their own expertise, but they provided us with the full support of the company to undertake the work. Michael, who is also an attorney, was instrumental in identifying the permissions needed for the quotations used in this second edition and was supported in this by Pam Luciano and Melissa Maia. Others at Sirota played even more substantive roles. Michele Corman helped us select representative employee comments to include in the book from the nearly 200,000 write-ins collected during the past recession. Also, with Scott Gebhardt and Jason Guttaduria, Michele patiently reviewed our 170 citations for accuracy and completeness. Tiffany Ivory reviewed and then updated all the tables and commentary that referenced Sirotas normative database of employee attitudes. Dave Reeves offered his research and statistical skills to help us correlate company morale levels with stock market performance; those results are now part of the strong evidence we present regarding the business-relevance of an enthusiastic workforce. These were all tremendous undertakings, and we are grateful for their help.

Our workthis and the original editionbenefited greatly from the participation of many accomplished senior executives. In the course of writing this book, these leaders allowed us to test our observations and conclusions against their real-life experiences and, simply, to learn from them. They include Ed Finn (Barrons), Mary Dillon (U.S. Cellular), Jeff Elliott (Costco), John Goff (Crescent), Charles R. Larson (Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)), Morton Meyerson (2M Companies), Bill Taylor (formerly of Mercedes), Tripp Welch (Mayo Clinic), Ewout Durieux (Shell Oil), and Tom Rauzi (Dell).

We also wish to express our appreciation to our publishers and the team that worked so hard to bring The Enthusiastic Employee to fruition, especially Russ Hall, our development editor, who supported the project early on and always provided reliable guidance and just the right dose of urgency and common sense; Karen Gill, who labored over the copy and patiently corrected our syntax and hyphens, and Andy Beaster.

On a more personal level, we would like to thank our wives, Barbara and Ilene, and our children for putting up with us for the months it took to get this second edition written. We are most appreciative for their patience and their help.

Finally, we express our gratitude for the insights and inspiration that Louis Mischkind, one of the co-authors of the first edition, provided to us over the years. Lou passed away in 2007, and we miss him greatly.

About the Authors

David Sirota has two abiding professional interests: organization behavior and survey research. Both of these interests took hold at the University of Michigan, where he received his doctorate, and where he worked at that universitys Institute for Social Research, a leading center for applying survey methods to the study of organizations. Upon receiving his doctorate, David was recruited by International Business Machines (IBM) to help initiate behavioral science research there. He stayed at IBM for 12 years in a variety of research and executive positions, leaving in 1972 to set up his own firm, Sirota Consulting, now simply Sirota. The firm specializes in the diagnosis and improvement of the relationships of organizations with all of their key constituencies: employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and communities. In 1996, David became chairman emeritus of the firm, after completing his own succession plan with key employees. He continues to consult with selected clients, primarily on matters of leadership, and collaboration and conflict within and between organizations.

Parallel to his career as a consultant, David has had an academic career, having taught at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations of Cornell University, the School of Industrial Administration of Yale University, the Sloan School of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

David is married with two children and lives in New York City.