How To Create Equity In The Workplace

Leadership is a hot topic right now. Everywhere on LinkedIn you’ll see posts that in some shape or form promote empathic leadership.

We are collectively trying to create a new organizational style. We want workplaces that are psychologically safe. We want to create environments where people feel free to speak their minds. We are trying to weave flexibility into the fabric of companies.

And most importantly, we want leaders to support their people by listening to them, promoting innovation, and giving a voice to all.

This is no small feat! A rather tall order for the entrepreneurs of the world.

The trend lately is to give the word of the employee full credence and take a leader’s stance with a grain of salt. The truth is…

The leader is responsible for creating the fertile ground for people to thrive, i.e. an employee should expect a psychologically safe work environment, the resources to do his/her job, and the employer keeping up their side of the psychological contract.

Every company and every boss enter into a psychological contract with their employees.

Denise Rousseau, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, defines the psychological contract as an individual’s beliefs about the mutual obligations that exist between the employee and the employer.

It’s a two-way street:

These obligations involve both stated and unstated promises the parties make to one another.

The employer’s stated obligations (the tangibles) include pay, reward systems, benefits, and resources to do the job.

An employee agrees to arrive on time and work to fulfill the employer’s expectations.

But what we’ve seen lately is that an employer’s unstated commitments (the intangibles), including respect, fairness, meaningful work, and other workplace conditions you can’t easily quantify, far outnumber the stated ones. Which leads us to…

John Stacey Adams created his equity theory in 1963, positing that an employee will only be motivated to work if they perceive the rewards for their work to be fair for the output expended.

Equity theory is ultimately based on perception, however: what we perceive to be fair and just. Fairness can easily become subjective when dealing with a wide range of personalities in the workforce.

Two employees may have completely different ideas of fairness for the same work output; and an employer and employee may also be on opposite sides of the fairness fence when it comes to the relationship between work output and rewards for said work.

Adding to the subjectivity is comparison. An employee may have been fine with his / her company’s reward system until they discover some other company’s reward system for the same work output. Now they want what the employees at that other company have, the perception being that the employees of this other company have it better.

The key word here is perception, because that’s the trigger for unfairness to be felt.

If someone perceives something to be unfair or inequitable, or feels an unfair expectation in play, then defensiveness, blame, and finger pointing will rear their heads; it’s hard to repair that.

When dealing with perception and subjectivity it’s difficult to say “I’m right / you’re wrong.” But what can you do is offer these…

Leaders have a lot on their plate. Keeping all parties satisfied can often feel like walking a tightrope. It’s easy to point the finger at higher ups and blame them for our own dissatisfaction. It’s harder to self-examine and take ownership of our own shortcomings.

If we’re not motivated, it may be the fault of your company and leadership team, but the reason may also lie within you.

When it comes down to it, we are all leaders of our own lives. We all have the ability to empower ourselves should we so choose.

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