I dislike it (and most forward-thinking companies wouldn't risk scaring off people who are the type that work on their own time), however I can see the reasons.
How do they know you did it at home, not during work hours? How do they know it didn't affect your work? If you're salaried, there aren't set start/stop times. How do they know they weren't paying you at the time you came up with the idea, or thought through a problem? Did you do it on a work laptop? Did you use a copy of Photoshop that work paid for? Is it something you did for your job, and now you want to sell it to other people -- even if the code has been rewritten?
Again, I don't think it's very enforceable or even a good idea. However, I can understand why a lawyer would slip it in.
That's an awful lot of maybes. Maybe I was a good employee, met my deadlines, respected both company time and my own, and also enjoyed working on pet projects in my free time. It is absolutely absurd that a company feels entitled to my personal work because of "maybe."
Maybe I was a good employee, met my deadlines, respected both company time and my own, and also enjoyed working on pet projects in my free time. It is absolutely absurd that a company feels entitled to my personal work because of "maybe."
Organizations tend toward pessimism because people respond more strongly to shame, insult, and embarrassment (of themselves and others) than to victory, pride, altruism, and shared glory. They turn toward a certain paranoia. That's why there's so much HR literature on how to conduct "low performer" witch hunts (get those time thieves!) while companies don't do the least thing to support high performers (except offer them more money when they seem likely to leave).
Ultimately, most things controlled by humans devolve into feudalistic, dysfunctional reputation economies in which the trade of social credibility becomes the only thing that matters, and the organization's original purpose is either forgotten, ignored, or half-assed. There are counterexamples and exceptions and processes that prevent this, but they're uncommon. Most companies have much fear of the humiliation of "that guy" stealing time to launch his own career, and only a slight background hum (if even that, as sometimes it's dead silence) of fear for the real existential threats: crumbling morale, widespread distrust, and the death of innovation.
Organizations tend toward pessimism because people respond more strongly to shame, insult, and embarrassment (of themselves and others) than to victory, pride, altruism, and shared glory.
My understanding is the exact opposite [1]. At least that what we were often taught in our teacher prep classes. I know that other research indicates that people are more loss averse than gain seeking [2], but I'm not sure that indicates that a pessimistic environment is actually productive in the long-run. I think that may be your point though, in your second paragraph.
He is saying that more people on average will respond more directly and immediately to punishment than reinforcement.
The context is that organizations' behavior influence via punishment is a short-term tactic: in the long run, we would like to believe that reinforcement poses a net gain. However cultural influence results in short-term behavior control tactics from organizations prevailing, and little heed paid to the tradeoff.
One might also argue that it is cheaper in the short term to punish than to reward, and this further perpetuates the downward cycle as a staple of organization culture.
It depends heavily on the individual person. People who have a negative unconscious self-image respond more strongly to shame, insult, and embarrassment, because it confirms their self-image and resonates with how they see the world. Every time something negative happens, it confirms their worldview and pushes them further into cynicism.
People who have a positive self-image respond more strongly to victory, pride, and altruism, because it resonates with how they see the world. If someone tries to shame or insult them, they remove themselves from that person's presence, or shrug off the insult by recognizing that other person as trying to discharge his own emotional hurt on other people.
The interesting thing is that both worldviews are self-reinforcing. The latter kind of people typically refuse to work with the first, because why would you put yourself in a position where you're listening to someone who only understands shame, insult, and embarrassment? As a result, positive people tend to work only with other positive people, and negative people tend to work with only other negative people (this usually manifests itself as scheming and backbiting, as few folks have the courage and social-ineptness to be negative to one's face). Their worlds and experiences become congruent with their worldviews, which just confirms the worldviews in the first place. That's why psychologists often say that negative fears often cause themselves to come true: they make you act in a way that pushes away positive experiences and attunes you to negative ones.
It is possible to shift between worldviews, but this is often psychologically traumatic for the person involved and involves some sense of crisis. Going from negative to positive, the catalyst is often psychotherapy, a strong mentor, or having a core value (like a child's well-being) threatened. Going from positive to negative, the catalyst is often economic, being trapped with a bad boss or in a bad relationship because you lack the means to leave. Teachers and parents are taught to focus on positive emotions because they effectively are the ones to start the cycle off, and children are trapped in their care. It's not really that children innately respond better to one or another, it's that the way you treat them primes them for what sort of reinforcement they will accept later on in life, and so if you want children who naturally respond to and offer positive reinforcement, you should model that early on.
> That's why there's so much HR literature on how to conduct "low performer" witch hunts (get those time thieves!) while companies don't do the least thing to support high performers (except offer them more money when they seem likely to leave).
No, that's because a company is trying to reduce its expenditures. If a high performer isn't leaving, the company sees no evidence of any advantage in paying them more.
Its to reduce the risk of them leaving unpredictably when another offer comes in. If they've received regular raises for performance, then they balance that against a single windfall salary increase.
Maybe your boss is paid to have some clues about how you spend your time at work?
Concerning the property of the tooling: if I bring my personal stapler to work, it's enough to taint everything I staple as my own property? how do we decide the property of the company paper I stapled with my staples? You can say it's reputed being the company property because you're on work time in company premises, but the whole principle of reputation is that you can bring a proof against (the stapled paper is your house insurance contract for example).
The 'usual' distinction is how closely something is to the type of work your doing at the company. So, if your designing a CPU and you come up with a novel cashing algorithm it's owned by the company but if you come up with a novel shovel design it's independent. Which means there is still plenty of options to tinker in your own time but you can't sell an idea to a direct competitor.
The problem though is company's like IBM cover so many areas that things get vary fuzzy.
How do they know you did it at home, not during work hours? How do they know it didn't affect your work? If you're salaried, there aren't set start/stop times. How do they know they weren't paying you at the time you came up with the idea, or thought through a problem? Did you do it on a work laptop? Did you use a copy of Photoshop that work paid for? Is it something you did for your job, and now you want to sell it to other people -- even if the code has been rewritten?
Again, I don't think it's very enforceable or even a good idea. However, I can understand why a lawyer would slip it in.