We’ve talked about the overuse of control as the start of a downward spiral in terms of management and leadership of people. This is an interesting blog post that describes human reactions to control and says that we may even have unconscious reactions when we loose the ability to choose in a situation. Could it be that when employees loose the ability to choose how they work and what they work on they unconsciously and automatically respond by working less effectively?

As some of the comments suggest, this makes “getting the right people on the bus” (ala Jim Collins, Good to Great) even more important.

Read the HBR blog posting here