New age slavery in the Nineties factory of fear

Is the culture of fear returning to the workplace? John van Maurik argues that it's wasteful, unprofitable and makes bad business sense

"Watch out, the dark ages are on their way back!" A fellow delegate said these words to me during a conference in which a speaker had harangued us on the need for the rebirth of tough-minded management. Flexibility, it seemed, was being dismissed in favour of a new, harsher approach. Empowerment is out and old-fashioned discipline, long thought outdated, is back in.

Examples of fear in organisational life are numerous. One of the best- known is that of Robert Maxwell who, it is reported, delighted in the humiliation of subordinates and fostered a paranoid culture within Mirror Group newspapers.

But does fear really motivate us to produce better results? And how do you distinguish between authoritarianism and genuine authority? It's possible to see the effects of fear and uncertainty in so many areas of work. It is certainly the case that people are taking on a greater burden of work and working longer hours to do so.

At the same time, however, it's generally accepted that the nature of work is changing. Nevertheless, it's tough enough to put up with the continuing problems of ageism and sexism in the office without being told again and again that we can't expect a job for life. Mergers and acquisitions are on the increase and - let's face it - people can be a costly element in business efficiency and profit generation. No wonder the office bully is making a comeback in the insecure world of the Nineties office.

But there are alternatives for the office manager facing pressure from above to crack the whip. Genuine authority does not depend on instilling fear in order to make an impact - it relies on something altogether harder to engender in a workforce: respect.

This does not mean that organisations should avoid stretching themselves, or their workforces. After all, if your boss doesn't make demands on you, it's all too easy to slip into complacency. People are at their best when excited by their work and its potential - employees stimulated by their work naturally push themselves.

In a climate of fear, however, workers tend to expend their energies protecting their backsides and avoiding the pitfalls of office politics instead of devising solutions to problems.

There are, of course, antidotes to fear and they're not that difficult to administer: a clearly communicated vision for your organisation's future; the identification of new markets for your company; the creed that change represents an opportunity rather than a threat - all of these are vital to motivate people in contributing positively to the organisation.

"Make the status quo more alarming than the unknown," Harvey Jones once said. But if the workforce can't conquer the unknown then a maxim like this loses all its meaning.

Fear, if allowed to spread, paralyses initiative, forces people into short-term thinking and is likely to let down that supreme paymaster - the customer! A humane office environment doesn't just make work a nicer place to be - it makes business sense. As Edmund Burke put it: "No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reason as fear."

l John van Maurik is a consultant at P.A. Consulting's Sundridge Park Management Centre and author of "Discovering The Strategist In You"