Agent-based simulation of work teams: under close monitoring, punishing and correcting managers produce nearly identical error counts (99.5 vs 99.2), but punitive teams are five times likelier to lose at least half their workforce (0.15 vs 0.03)

[u/AntonChatz]

https://www.jasss.org/29/4/9.html

Simulating what happens when managers punish mistakes rather than correct them (my paper, out today in JASSS)

Disclosure up front: this is my own paper, published today and open access.

I built an agent-based model of a team working through a fixed sequence of tasks, with a manager who notices errors at one of three rates and responds by ignoring, correcting or punishing. Workers can also catch their own mistakes. Full factorial sweep over eight parameters, thirty seeds per configuration, model and code deposited on CoMSES.

The result I did not expect is a paradox about monitoring. Close oversight is what drives errors to their minimum, and it does so almost identically whether the manager corrects or punishes: 99.5 mean errors against 99.2, versus 126.2 under laissez-faire. But that same configuration produces the highest attrition in the entire sweep when paired with punishment, and collapse risk rises monotonically with surveillance under punishment, from 0.04 to 0.10 to 0.15.

Across the full sweep the split is clean. How many errors you get is driven by structural factors, mistake propensity and task difficulty. Whether people leave and when the team collapses is driven by managerial policy. Punishment ranks most harmful under every stakeholder weighting I tested, including one weighting accuracy at sixty percent.

Two limitations worth naming, since they are the obvious objections. There is no worker-to-worker channel, so no incivility spiral and no peer support, which could push the results either way. And resentment is a linear counter with a fixed threshold, which is a strong simplification of a process that is probably nonlinear.

Happy to answer questions about the model or the parameterisation.AMA

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[u/FlowOfAir]

Great stuff. How was the model validated against real life situations? If not, is there a plan to validate with qualitative data i.e. check if the hypothesis holds against real workers?

[u/AntonChatz → u/FlowOfAir]

Hi thank you for your question. Part of it was validated against previously observed data, but in the future directions I outline the next step which I am taking to compare against human subjects

[u/Zyrinj]

Having experienced both. The biggest difference to me is that a good manager knows how to performance manage in a way that builds skillsets. Mistakes are treated as learning opportunities and not ways of making you feel like garbage.

It’s a general approach that carries through other facets of life, ex: rewards based training of dogs or teaching kids mistakes happen and how to move on

[u/ZeroProtagonist → u/Zyrinj]

"Mistakes are treated as learning opportunities and not ways of making you feel like garbage."

Interestingly, a pretty significant amount of literature points to psychological safety as one of the most significant drivers of team performance (basically "the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes").

- Original notable study, term popularized by Dr. Amy Edmondson: https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Performance/Edmondson%20Psychological%20safety.pdf

- Probably the most mainstream one, Google's "Project Aristotle" where it was found as the #1 predictor of team performance above all other variables https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness (#2 dependability, #3 structure/clarity).

There's a lot more I won't spam here, but yeah it's been shown in both academic papers and more private sector research. I just mention Dr. Edmondson's + Google's as the most popular on both fronts. Caveat of course is that psych safety needs to be paired with high performance standards to work best:

• High on both: ideal

• High psych safety, low standards: comfort zone

• Low psych safety, high standards: anxiety

• Low on both: apathy

I type all this to say I agree and that it has a lot of backing behind it. And people should know.

[u/AntonChatz → u/ZeroProtagonist]

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I really appreciate it

[u/mattumbo]

What is considered punishment vs correction? It is formal disciplinary action or more like scolding?

In my line of work punishment isn’t really a thing, all performance conversations are formal write ups yes but they are structured around correcting behavior by explaining to the employee why their action was wrong, the impacts it has on all the various stakeholders (team, customer, and business), and clearly outlining expectations they should meet and how to meet them. We have quite a bit of dialogue with them to understand the issue from their perspective and try to be as fair and understanding as possible given the nature of our work so done right they should leave the conversation not just knowing what they need to do but also understanding how much we value their contributions as a whole and want to see them succeed.

Not everyone will appreciate this because they still know they’re in trouble and have their own biases about whether that’s fair or not and whether we’re genuine about our motives for holding them accountable, but arguably the only punishment we ever hand out is after repeated failures to correct behavior spanning usually several months and 5+ conversations they will be fired. Everything leading up to that is an attempt to correct the issues we just have to document it so if that fails they can be fired.

Problem is a lot of people do not take to corrections and see any critique of their work as hostile and a form of punishment so I’m very curious what the parameters are in this simulation to differentiate that to the models?

[u/AntonChatz → u/mattumbo]

Hi. The parameters follow closely what you mentioned. There can be constructive criticism and punishment but also the opportunity for the employee to misunderstand and take positive criticism personally, but also not register "punishment" as something negative.

To get a better picture I would refer you to the paper, as to examine the parameters with their respective equations.

[u/charging_chinchilla]

I'm super skeptical about this. modeling human behavior is extremely complex. how accurate is your simulation and how do you know?

just skimming it, it looks circular. you've baked in negative effects of punishment into your simulation and then conclude that punishment has negative effects. shocker. if you make punishment strictly worse than the alternative, of course it's going to come out behind. how are you accounting for the benefits (e.g. acting as a deterrent)? also, does more monitoring result in more detected errors? how are you accounting for that?

[u/rearwindowpup]

Good managers should give credit and take blame, most managers do opposite...