每天一篇经济学人 | 工作场所中的“七宗罪”？（2022年第82期）

The arc of current management thinking bends towards virtue. Co-operation is what makes teams purr. Low-ego empathy is the hallmark of a thoroughly modern boss. Purpose matters to employees as much as pay; society looms as large as shareholders. But appealing to people’s better nature, and ignoring their vices, is an incomplete approach. Nor is being good necessarily great for your own career. 

当前管理思想的弧线向美德倾斜。合作让团队充满活力。低自我同理心是现代老板的标志。对员工来说，目标和薪酬一样重要；社会和股东一样重要。但诉诸于人们的善良本性，而忽视他们的恶习，是一种不完整的方法。做得好也不一定对你自己的职业生涯有好处。

Take a look at the seven capital virtues and the seven deadly sins laid out in Christian tradition. The virtues are chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience and humility; the vices are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath and pride. 

让我们来看看基督教传统中列出的七大美德和七宗罪。七大美德是贞洁、节制、仁爱、勤奋、善良、忍耐和谦卑；七宗罪则是色欲、贪食、贪婪、懒惰、嫉妒、愤怒和骄傲。

In aggregate the first set of qualities is the one for managers to emulate. Neither chaste charity nor lustful gluttony have much to recommend them as a management ethos; but only one is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Diligence clearly beats sloth. Greed is out of fashion. Aiyesha Dey of Harvard Business School and her co-authors have found that excessive materialism on the part of a chief executive can be a warning sign of fraudulent activity and out-of-control risk-taking. Pride is also increasingly seen as problematic: in a paper from 2018 academics identified narcissistic bosses by the size of their signatures and found a correlation with poor financial outcomes at the firms they ran.

总的来说，第一组品质是管理者们要效仿的。无论是贞洁仁爱还是好色贪吃，都没有什么值得推荐的管理精神；但只是要注意即将发生的诉讼。勤奋显然能战胜懒惰。贪婪已经过时了。哈佛商学院的艾耶莎•戴伊和她的共同作者发现，首席执行官过度的物质主义可能是欺诈活动和失控的冒险行为的警告信号。骄傲也越来越被视为问题：在2018年的一篇论文中，学者们通过签名的大小来识别自恋的老板，并发现自恋老板与他们所经营的公司财务状况不佳之间的相关性。

Yet saintliness is rare and sinfulness can be underrated. Take envy, for example. By design organisations rely on competition as well as co-operation. A kind person might well be content to applaud other people for their success. An envious one will see someone to catch up with.

然而，圣洁是罕见的，罪恶可能会被低估。以嫉妒为例。从设计上讲，组织既依赖于竞争，也依赖于合作。一个善良的人很可能满足于为别人的成功鼓掌。一个嫉妒的人会看到有人可以追赶。

Psychologists distinguish between malign and benign versions of envy. In one, people try to close gaps in status by bringing others down. In the other, they are motivated to improve their own performance. A recent paper by Danielle Tussing of the University at Buffalo and colleagues discovered a third type of behaviour: people who skipped work or even quit their jobs in order to avoid feelings of envy. Understanding such emotions is a step towards harnessing them.

心理学家区分了恶性嫉妒和良性嫉妒。一种是，人们试图通过贬低他人来缩小地位差距。另一种是，他们有动力提高自己的表现。布法罗大学的丹妮尔·图辛和他的同事在最近的一篇论文中发现了第三种行为:人们为了避免嫉妒感而旷工甚至辞职。理解这些情绪是驾驭它们的一步。

Pride can also lead to greater effort (as well as to gigantic signatures). In an elegant paper looking into the performance of German fighter pilots in the second world war, Philipp Ager of the University of Mannheim and other researchers found that personal rivalry fuelled risk-taking behaviour. When pilots received public recognition for their exploits in a daily bulletin to the German armed forces, peers with whom they had flown in the past redoubled their own efforts. Something propelled them to fly more missions, even though that meant a greater chance of being killed, and it wasn’t humility.

骄傲也会让你付出更大的努力(以及巨大的签名)。曼海姆大学的菲利普•阿格和其他研究人员在一篇研究二战中德国战斗机飞行员表现的简明论文中发现，个人竞争助长了冒险行为。当飞行员的功绩在德国武装部队的每日公报中得到公众认可时，与他们一起飞行的同行们也加倍努力。某种东西推动他们执行更多的任务，即使这意味着更大的死亡几率，但这不是谦逊。

Patience may be a virtue, but it is not always the best quality in a leader. Research on the impact of managers’ moods on performance is pretty thin: one deeply unpersuasive paper from 2017 used facial-recognition software to analyse ceos’ TV appearances and concluded that expressions of anger and fear were associated with improved profitability in the following quarter. Yet forbearance can plainly go too far. Anyone who has worked in an office knows that the boss’s wrath can sometimes be the only thing that gets things moving.

忍耐可能是一种美德，但它并不总是领导者的最佳品质。关于管理者情绪对业绩影响的研究相当少：2017年的一篇非常缺乏说服力的论文使用面部识别软件分析了首席执行官在电视上的表现，得出的结论是，愤怒和恐惧的表情与下一个季度盈利能力的提高有关。然而，忍耐显然会走得更远。任何在办公室工作过的人都知道，老板的愤怒有时可能是推动事情前进的唯一因素。

Greed is not something to admit to in polite society but acquisitiveness still motivates an awful lot of people. In their research into CEO behaviour Ms Dey and her co-authors defined excessive materialism as owning a private home worth twice as much as the median house in the area; owning a car worth more than $75,000; or owning a boat that was longer than 25 feet. Of her sample of CEOs, fully 58% ticked one or more of these boxes; only 42% counted as frugal.

在上流社会，人们不愿承认贪婪，但是贪婪仍然激励着很多人。在对首席执行官行为的研究中，戴伊和她的共同作者将过度物质主义定义为拥有一套价值是当地房价中位数两倍的私人住宅；拥有一辆价值超过7.5万美元的汽车；或者拥有一艘超过25英尺长的船。在她调查的CEO样本中，有整整58%的人选择了上述一个或多个选项；只有42%的人认为自己节俭。

Gluttony may not fuel ambition but it could well be a side-effect of the hierarchies that characterise companies. Research experiments in which strangers are assigned a high-status role and a low-status role and put in a room together have found that those placed in positions of authority help themselves to more biscuits than the others. Even people who mean well may end up behaving badly if they acquire power. 

贪吃可能不会激发野心，但它很可能是公司等级制度的一个副作用。在一些研究实验中，把陌生人分别分到一个地位高的角色和一个地位低的角色，并把他们放在一个房间里。实验发现，处于权威地位的人会比其他人享用更多的饼干。即使是那些本意良好的人，一旦获得权力，也可能最终表现得很糟糕。

If management is about getting the best out of people, it helps to understand base behaviours as well as noble ones. Employees are humans and humans are complex. They seek to improve the world and would quite like their own swimming pool. They want to mentor the disadvantaged and see their rivals fail miserably. They grab the biscuits.

如果管理是为了让人们发挥最大的作用，那么它有助于理解卑劣的行为和高尚的行为。员工是人，而人是复杂的。他们寻求改善世界，又很想拥有自己的游泳池。他们想要成为弱势群体的导师，又想看着自己的对手惨败。他们会抢走饼干。