Management

OPM Finalizes Rule Easing Rehiring Of Ex-Feds

Tracy Stone-Manning listens during a confirmation hearing for her to be the
director of the Bureau of Land Management, during a hearing of the Senate Energy
and National Resources Committee on June 8
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Gibberish Generator
MARCH 24, 2008
FEDBLOG
Tom Shoop
TOM SHOOP
Vice President and Editor in Chief
Here's an excerpt from a piece in the Sunday Denver Post by Fred Brown, the paper's
retired capitol bureau chief:

A reader recently forwarded what amounts to a gibberish generator. It's a list of

30 words, numbered 0 to 9 in each of three columns. The trick is to think of a
three-digit number, then match those numbers with a word from each column. The
result is a three-word phrase of stunningly bureaucratic buzzwords. For example,
today's date, 323, yields "parallel, monitored mobility."
This highly amusing device is known as the Systematic Buzz Phrase Generator. I'd
never heard of it, but apparently it's been around since 1968. And is it any
surprise at all that the person who created it, a guy by the name of Philip
Broughton, was a federal employee at the Public Health Service?

Here, by the way, are some other phrases the generator randomly turns out:
"integrated reciprocal flexibility" (031) and "functional transitional contingency"
(469). It strikes me that those are every bit as meaningful today as they would
have been 40 years ago.

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Uniformly Rejected
MARCH 24, 2008
FEDBLOG
Tom Shoop
TOM SHOOP
Vice President and Editor in Chief
Once you get past issues of basic pay and benefits, nothing raises the ire of
federal employees faster than dress codes -- especially those involving uniforms.
The Air Force waded into this tricky area last summer by moving to require all of
its air reserve technicians to wear uniforms on the job. The technicians
technically are civilian federal employees, but they're required to be in the
reserves as a condition of their employment. They always have worn uniforms while
in military status, but they used to have the choice of deciding whether or not to
suit up while working in their civilian capacity.

The shift to required uniform wear has drawn the ire of Joel Perry, vice president
of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1764 at Travis Air Force Base
in California. In a letter to the editor of the Vacaville, Calif., Reporter, Perry
ripped the new approach, noting that air reserve technicians have served well under
the old policy since 1958. "To have them play dress-up soldier to please the Air
Force Reserve commander is a waste of taxpayers' money and a detriment to the
welfare of the ART employees who serve this nation," he wrote.

Management
OPM Finalizes Rule Easing Rehiring Of Ex-Feds
Tracy Stone-Manning listens during a confirmation hearing for her to be the
director of the Bureau of Land Management, during a hearing of the Senate Energy
and National Resources Committee on June 8
Management
Final Location Of Interior Bureau An Open Question

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Workers Who Feel Powerless Get Paranoid and Aggressive
Workers who feel like they don't have power on the job can start feeling paranoid
and even start lashing out, researchers find.
JUNE 9, 2021 07:00 AM ET
PROMISING PRACTICES
By
FUTURITY
When employees lack power at work, they can feel vulnerable and paranoid.

In turn, that paranoia can cause people to lash out against colleagues or family
members and even seek to undermine their organization’s success, according to new
research.

“History is filled with examples of individuals with little power being subjugated
and objectified, causing many people to associate low power with vulnerability,”
says Min-Hsuan Tu, assistant professor of organization and human resources in the
University at Buffalo School of Management.

“Here, we demonstrate that when employees think they lack power in their workplace,
they can feel threatened and become paranoid.”

This feeling is common, Tu says. For example, consider an entry-level staffer who
closely guards her work, afraid she won’t be able to stand up for herself if
another employee takes credit for it. If you’ve ever stressed over why a coworker
sent you a terse email or didn’t respond at all—”Does she dislike me?” “Is he
trying to push me off this project?”—you’ve experienced it too.

To test the phenomenon, Tu and her coauthors ran five studies with more than 2,300
people. Some experiments asked participants to think about past work situations and
then assessed their sense of power, paranoia, and behavior. Another study,
conducted over two weeks, looked at employees in an actual organization and
measured how their feelings of power each day affected their level of paranoia and
their work and home lives.

Their results showed paranoia increased as people felt less power at work.

In addition, paranoid individuals were more likely to engage in mild forms of

aggression, like being unpleasant or critical toward a coworker, complaining about
work tasks, and purposely wasting company resources. Some even took their
aggression home, getting angry with a family member or spouse.

“Paranoia can cause people to interpret benign interactions—a colleague not saying
hello in the hallway—as hostile or offensive,” Tu says. “Even without any
interaction at all, some people may worry others are talking behind their back or
conspiring against them.”

The researchers discovered, however, two factors that counteracted feelings of low
power: socioeconomic status and workplace culture. Individuals with higher
socioeconomic status, and those who felt supported by their company and manager,
were less likely to experience paranoia than others with similar levels of power.

“Feeling powerless and vulnerable is common and often motivated by subtle

experiences,” Tu says. “That’s why it’s especially important for leaders to create
a supportive work environment, by allocating resources and offering promotions
fairly, strengthening supervisor-subordinate relationships, disincentivizing self-
serving behaviors, and removing job stressors.”

The study will appear in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Additional researchers are from Singapore Management University (SMU), the

University of Maryland, the University at Buffalo, and Indian Institute of
Management Kozhikode.
Source: University at Buffalo

Original Study DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.03.005

This article was originally published in Futurity. Edits have been made to this
republication. It has been republished under the Attribution 4.0 International
license.

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