This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is an audio-skit entitled “Darth Vader's Employee Evaluation. I’ve been incorporating pop-culture representations of human resource management functions into a revision of the intro to HR course that I coordinate because comedy often reveals unspoken truths about the workplace.
The key joke in the skit is the HR advisor asserting that Vader’s constant force-choking of his subordinates is harming the operational effectiveness of the Empire. The advisor’s suggestion of a more encouraging-management style (“maybe give them a pat on the back?”) is greeted with a very honest reply from Vader: “I don’t understand. How would that kill them?”
The workplace dynamic that this skit hits on (although perhaps not intentionally) is that performance management is essentially one arm of the employer trying to get employees to act in a way that is completely illogical to the worker given the broader structure of rewards and penalties in the workplace created by another arm of the employer.
Specifically, the advisor ignores that Vader’s behaviour is a reaction to the pressures of his job. Vader’s own boss does not tolerate failure by his subordinates. Consequently, Vader cannot tolerate failure among his subordinates and behaves accordingly.
Further, punishing space admirals shifts blame for failure (from Vader to them), there are always junior officers available to replace dead space admirals, and punishing employees is way easier in the short-term than working with them to improve their performance.
HR’s unwillingness to recognize the reasons for Vader’s behaviour means that Vader is unlikely to accept their suggestions. An interesting question is what happens to the HR advisor when he subsequently tries to discipline Vader for continuing to force-choke his subordinates?
-- Bob Barnetson
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