The best books on (mis)managing people at work

Give and Take presents the literature on pro-social behavior in organizations in a reader-friendly format.

Grant combines storytelling with evidence-based insights in a way that few other social scientists can. The analysis largely focuses on the individual – that is what you can expect as a “giver”, “taker” or “matcher”. However, the insights also say a lot about what organizations can do to create cultures that promote helping and, no less importantly, help-seeking. 

As one who studies interpersonal relations at work, this book was a wake up call about the need to present evidence-based research on critical workplace issues in a manner that is accessible and interesting to all.

Malcom Gladwell is undoubtedly the best translator of social science research writing these days. 

What the Dog Saw is a compendium of New Yorker essays penned by Gladwell, several of which have a direct link to managing people. Two of my favorites are “Late Bloomers” – an essay on the fallacy of inherent talent, and “Most Likely to Succeed”.

These essays say a lot about employee selection and development, challenging the assumptions held by too many managers that good staff are born, not made, and that selecting top talent is the key to competitive advantage. Gladwell goes with the evidence, but does so in a super-engaging manner. 

Aside from my research on rewards management, pro-social organizational behavior, and employee substance misuse, I’ve focused a lot of my attention on workplace incivility. 

Bob Sutton’s book was one of the factors leading me to look at this topic.  We’ve all encountered incivility at work and all know – at least implicitly – how it impacts us. Sutton’s book was one of the first to make sense – at least for me – of such behavior, not only by identify the “dirty dozen” (12 highly prevalent manifestations of workplace incivility), but also by detailing how damaging such behavior can be to individuals and the organizations employing them.

Aside from giving me insight into the prevalence and nature of employee MIS-management, this book was the start of a personal journey to discover some of the less obvious (but potentially more robust) implications of such problematic organizational behavior.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his seminal research on learning and memory. 

This book tells the highly personal story of his scientific journey, starting with his childhood as a Jew in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and his escape to the United States. Kandel explains in layman's terms the way in which organisms (he starts with snails!) remember and learn. How does this all link back to managing people? 

Great managers are – at their core – superb coaches. And great coaches need to understand the neuropsychology of learning – a super-complex process, but one explained by Kandel in terms we can all understand. 

Managers tend to think that the key to managing people is understanding how their subordinates consciously respond to the situations in which they find themselves at work. 

This book, summarizing decades of research by the Nobel-winning author and his colleague, Amos Tversky, shows why no less importance must be paid to employees’ more automatic responses.

This book got me to think about how pay transparency (and other pay-related factors) can impact employee behavior in ways that employees may not even be consciously aware of, and what management must do in order to take these automatic responses into account.