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https://today.duke.edu/2023/03/managers-exploit-loyal-workers-over-less-committed-colleagues A loyal worker gets more extra work than the fair, honest, or disloyal DURHAM, N.C. – Company loyalty is a double-edged sword, according to a new study. Managers target loyal workers over less committed colleagues when doling out unpaid work and additional job tasks. “Companies want loyal workers, and there is a ton of research showing that loyal workers provide all sorts of positive benefits to companies,” said Matthew Stanley, Ph.D., the lead researcher on the new paper and postdoctoral researcher at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. “But it seems like managers are apt to target them for exploitative practices.” That’s the main conclusion from a series of experiments conducted by Stanley and his colleagues Chris Neck, Ph.D. and Chris Neck, father-and-son researchers at Arizona State University and West Virginia University, respectively. The findings appeared online January 6 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. For the study, Stanley recruited nearly 1,400 managers online to read about a fictional 29-year-old employee named John. The mangers all learned that John’s company was on a tight budget, and to keep costs down, had to decide how willing they would be to task John with extra hours and responsibilities without any extra pay. (Participants handing out the unpaid work in Stanley’s study were compensated $12 an hour.) No matter how Stanley and his colleagues framed the scenario, branding John as loyal always resulted in managers being more willing to ask him to shoulder the unpaid labor. Managers were more willing to exploit Loyal John over Disloyal John. And when a separate group of managers read a letter of recommendation about John, the letters praising John as loyal led to an increased willingness to recruit him for unpaid work over versions of John extolled for honesty or fairness. The reverse was true, too: when John was portrayed as having a reputation to accept extra hours and workload, managers rated him as more loyal than a John who had a reputation to decline the same workload. Agreeable John and Refusal John were rated as similarly honest and fair however, demonstrating that loyalty but not closely related moral traits is bolstered by a history of doing free labor. “It’s a vicious cycle,” Stanley said. “Loyal workers tend to get picked out for exploitation. And then when they do something that's exploitative, they end up getting a boost in their reputation as a loyal worker, making them more likely to get picked out in the future.” One reason managers preyed on loyal workers over others is their belief that it’s just the price to pay for being loyal. Stanley and his team found that managers targeted loyal workers because they believe that loyalty comes with a duty to make personal sacrifices for their company. It’s not all malicious, though. Exploitation may be in part just due to ignorance, or what psychologists call “ethical blindness.” “Most people want to be good,” Stanley said. “Yet, they transgress with surprising frequency in their everyday lives. A lot of it is due to ethical blindness, where people don’t see how what they're doing is inconsistent with whatever principles or values they tend to profess.” The study doesn’t provide a quick fix to eradicate employers’ exploitative practices, but one partial cure might be simply having managers recognize the error of their ways and point out these ethical blind spots, Stanley said. While company loyalty seems to come with consequence, Stanley cautions that it doesn’t mean we should just abandon work commitments or dodge uncompensated overtime. This is just an unfortunate side effect of a mostly positive trait, which Stanley recently found also happens with other aspirational traits, like generosity. “I don't want to suggest that the take-away of the paper is to not be loyal to anybody because it just leads to disaster,” Stanley said. “We value people who are loyal. We think about them in positive terms. They get awarded often. It's not just the negative side. It's really tricky and complex.”

If you're a line mgr, how do you feel about the bell curve and having to shoehorn the way you rate your team to fit the distribution? Is it realistic to expect the same outcome for each department regardless of their differences?

The largest U.S. public pension fund intends to sever ties with roughly half of the firms handling its money, one of the most aggressive industry moves yet to reduce fees paid to Wall Street investment managers. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or Calpers, will tell its investment board on June 15 of its plans to reduce the number of direct relationships it has with private-equity, real-estate and other external funds to about 100 from 212, said Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos. The action will be made public on Monday. The dramatic move by the $305 billion Sacramento-based retirement system will create some big winners and losers in the investing world. The list of external money managers Calpers uses include some of the biggest names on Wall Street, including private-equity firms Carlyle Group LP, KKR & Co. and Blackstone GroupLP. The push by Calpers to downsize could have broader ramifications beyond its own portfolio. Calpers is considered an industry bellwether because of its size and history as an early adopter of alternatives to stocks and bonds, and the shift could prompt other U.S. pensions to scale back their ties to Wall Street. “There really will be a significant amount of discussion at other pensions” about whether they should cut external managers in the wake of Calpers’s decision, said Allan Emkin, a managing director at Pension Consulting Alliance who has advised the fund since the 1980s. The pullback would take place over the next five years and is expected to save Calpers hundreds of millions of dollars in management fees. It paid $1.6 billion to external managers last year. The reduction in outside managers won’t fundamentally change Calpers’s investment strategy, or the percentage of assets managed in-house versus externally. The remaining 100 or so outside managers will simply get a bigger pool of funds varying from $350 million to more than $1 billion, Mr. Eliopoulos added. The goal, Mr. Eliopoulos said, is “to gain the best deal on costs and fees that we can.” The 50-year-old Mr. Eliopoulos became the pension fund’s top investment official last September after helping Calpers recover from severe losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis as head of its real-estate portfolio. His first major move as chief was to shed a $4 billion investment in hedge funds, part of a movement to simplify the approach of a fund that in recent decades loaded up on assets such as real estate, private equity and commodities. Fees paid to outside managers have ballooned over the past decade as many public retirement systems followed Calpers into hedge funds and private equity in an attempt to boost long-term returns and meet their mounting obligations to retirees. But now some pension officials are tiring of the high expenses often charged by outside managers as state and local governments struggle to make up for losses incurred during the financial crisis. Many U.S. pensions, including Calpers, still don’t have enough assets to cover their future costs despite a run-up in the stock market in recent years. “Fees are becoming an increasingly scrutinized area at public pensions,” said Jean-Pierre Aubry, an assistant director at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. In New York City, outside money-management expenses are under review after an April report from Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said external investment firms have cost the city’s local retirement systems billions in the past decade. A similar discussion is under way in New Jersey, where state pensions have paid out $1.5 billion in fees over the past five years, according to a recent report presented to the state Senate last Thursday. In Pennsylvania, where the state is grappling with a $50 billion pension hole, Gov. Tom Wolf declared in a March budget address that “we are going to stop excessive fees to Wall Street managers.” California’s proposed reduction in outside managers is part of a larger effort to reduce risk and complexity at a fund that manages investments and benefits for 1.7 million current and retired workers. Calpers posted a total return of 18.4% for its most recent fiscal year ended June 30, beating its benchmark, but it only has enough assets to cover 77% of its future retirement payouts. As recently as 2007, Calpers had about 300 external managers—a remnant of its pioneering foray into alternative investments such as real estate, hedge funds and private equity. Over the past eight years, it reduced that number to 212, but it is still difficult for the pension fund to effectively monitor all of its investments, according to Mr. Eliopoulos. There are so many outside managers currently that Calpers doesn’t have the ability to make sure all those funds share the same objectives as the large California pension fund and are performing well, according to Calpers Chief Operating Investment Officer Wylie Tollette. “We need to do a better job of keeping track of how those managers evolve, what strategies they’re good at, what they may not be good at to ensure they’re effectively earning their place at the table every year,” said Mr. Tollette, who currently gives Calpers a “B-minus” at doing those tasks. “For an organization like Calpers we need to be an A, if not an A-plus,” Mr. Tollette said. As a measure of overall assets, Calpers currently pays about 0.34% toward management fees, Mr. Tollette said. In 2014, the $1.6 billion spent on those expenses included a one-time incentive payment of $400 million to real-estate funds. Mr. Tollette said that by 2020 he would like to see the amount drop “below” 0.25% of total assets, excluding performance fees. External funds charge management fees, plus a share of the investing profits. Calpers doesn’t expect to immediately terminate outside firms or liquidate holdings, according to Mr. Eliopoulos, who pushed for the hedge-fund decision as well as the move to whittle the number of external funds. The fund’s evaluation of external managers is expected to begin next month. Calpers will consider investing performance, the length of the relationship and strategy, among other factors, Mr. Eliopoulos said. The biggest cuts are expected to occur in Calpers’s private-equity portfolio, where the number of private-equity managers will slim to about 30 from roughly 100. Real estate will go to 15 outside managers from 51. Fixed income and global equity, which is largely managed in-house, will drop to roughly 30 from nearly 60 now. Only the group that invests in timber and infrastructure projects like roadways is expected to rise, from about six managers to 10. Some 15 slots will go to upstart firms that Calpers plans to identify over the next several years. Mr. Eliopoulos said the staff discussed a reduction higher or lower than roughly 100 but decided to land on a whole number. “There’s no science to this. This is a judgment,” he said.

Just curious after reading that SMRT will be bringing in more SAF people into the organization. Who have experienced working with ex-senior officers in the private sector before?

For those in IT Project Management http://www.pmi.org/eNews/Post/2007_10-12/S...07-Members.html Looks like we are still lacking behind US,UK, Aust, NZ PMI Salary Survey 2007.pdf