Accountability and Performance

Are you guided more by what you personally desire in life, or by what is approved of in the communities you’re a part of? In the dimension of Accountability, people operate on a spectrum from Individual to Community accountability

This dimension has been documented extensively, especially through the work of Geert Hofstede. You may have heard of this dimension as Individual and Community Orientation, but we use the term “Accountability” because it gets closer to the core of what the dimension means for the workplace. In this email we’ll consider its effect on work relationships and performance management systems.

Community Accountability

In a strong community accountability setting, you tend to feel accountable first and foremost to your family, tribe, group of clans, or the nation that you come from. Collective achievement is extremely important. Your parents and teachers will likely have raised you to evaluate every situation in terms of the good of the family or even the larger community. The word “obligation” tends to be used more often here than in an individual accountability setting.

 

In a community accountability setting you are given permission to try things, but only if it serves the community or family as a whole. The word “self” in the language of the society is seen as neutral at best, or negative at worst. In individual accountability settings it is often seen as positive.

Individual Accountability

If you come from society with a strong individual accountability culture, your parents would likely have raised you to pursue your “own” path, and to try to discover things “for yourself.” You feel first and foremost accountable to yourself for your opinions, your growth, life direction, and career. Individual accountability cultures often carry a sense of individual freedom and the idea that you are given permission to try things that do not necessarily benefit the community if you think they will benefit you.

Accountability in Performance Management

Most performance management systems in the world have been designed in the context of individual accountability cultures with the assumption that people have that mindset. When individual accountability performance management systems are deployed in community accountability cultures, however, problems result.

If you are working in a community accountability culture, do you still use purely individual measures, or do you try to measure the sales team as a whole in some way? We have found that accountability performance mechanisms in community accountability cultures work best when they consider interpersonal qualities in the workplace, rather than just the work itself. That means you try to measure not just how much revenue the team brought in, but also how much they worked together to generate new accounts.

Work in a Community Accountability Setting can be more Relationship-Oriented

Very often in individual accountability cultures, turnover rates shoot up when the working environment gets toxic. So another community accountability measure could be that you hold the manager and his or her team responsible for staff retention, so that if the team collectively drops their turnover rate, their measured performance increases.

The “togetherness” of the team is extremely important in community accountability cultures. Building social capital is emphasized and work is more relationally centered. However, in individual accountability cultures work tends to be more task-oriented, especially in the short term.

 

In an individual accountability culture you are more likely to hear someone say, “It’s the task that’s important. Liking my colleagues is not necessarily a priority.” Good relationships are extremely important in individual accountability countries, especially for long term performance, but in community accountability cultures people will often flat out refuse to work together with someone they don’t have a good relationship with. If you put these staff members together with people who have an attitude of, “check your emotions at the door and just get the job done,” then you are in for a clash.

In the most extreme cases, applying a performance management system that was developed in an individual accountability culture can decrease performance. In one example, a financial services company would lease a high-class luxury vehicle for salespeople that outperformed their highest performance targets. This worked well in all of the individual accountability countries in which they tried it. However in the community accountability culture none of the sales staff wanted to over-achieve if that meant receiving commissions and bonuses beyond what their manager got, and no one wanted to drive the vehicle that was offered because it was a more prestigious vehicle than the one their manager drove. In response, the sales staff purposely underachieved in order to ensure they would not run the risk of getting rewards that were inappropriate in their community accountability setting.

Performance management is one of the most visible areas where knowledge of the Accountability dimension of culture is vital. Measuring your employees in light of the cultural environment in which they work is crucial to avoid expensive mistakes.  There are other areas, including in building social capital and relationships in the workplace, which are also affected by this dimension.

 

 

* Original from KnowledgeWorkx