Ethics: A Good Reason To Sit Further Away From Your Boss (telegraph.co.uk)

schwit1 writes to point out an interesting finding about ethics in the workplace, but one that might not surprise anyone in the vast majority of workplaces: namely, that sitting far from your boss has some important advantages when it comes to stopping the spread of unethical behavior; ethics are a chief focus of researcher Gijs van Houwelingen . The research, published in the Journal of Management, sought to find out "how spatial distance between higher and lower management" affects the spread of behaviour and fair procedures in the work place.

"Distance is a very useful tool that can be used to stop negative behaviours from spreading through an organization,... It creates the freedom to make up your own mind."

Comments

Avoidance

[alzoron]

Sounds to me like it's just avoiding the core issue; the boss is a terrible boss and should be replaced. Of course if the company is just rotten to begin with all the way up the management chain you can't really expect this to happen. In that case you should try distancing yourself from the whole company instead of just the management.

Re:Avoidance

[phantomfive]

Unethical boss? Distance yourself from the company.
When a company rips its customers off, you can be sure as night follows day, that it will rip you off soon.

Re:Avoidance

[JMJimmy]

It also has the reverse effect, when you have an ethical boss and underlings who think the boss is 'naive' the distance allows them to behave unethically as long as the boss doesn't find out.

Re:Avoidance

[turbidostato]

"It also has the reverse effect"

Of course it is. The article's conclusion is naive at best and stupid at worst since the real conclusion is "being near the boss facilitates being at boss' reach" which, of course, is a platitude.

You, as a hire are in one of two situations: you either are happy with your position or you are not.

If the former you don't want to be too near to the boss to avoid the chance of being a pawn on his intrigues (if you are OK chances if you move is to the worse), but not so far away that he forgets why is he paying you.

If the later, you are either trying to climb the ladder, in which case you definitely want to be near your boss you maximize your chances of promotion (at a higher chance of screwing up, either really or in his perception) or you are trying to get out of the company, in which case you, yes, want to be as far from your boss as possible to maximize the chances he forgets about you.

Now, you don't need a study to probe the obvious but, if any, to disprove this "common sense" approach.

Re:Avoidance

[hummassa]

True enough. In Admin 101 we learn that when you promote everyone that is good at his job, you end up with everyone at the position they suck the most... then you tank the entire firm because of that. RAISE. If someone is good at their job, the right way of reward them is to raise their salary (you can even compute how much they contribute more to the earnings of the firm, and raise them accordingly), not to "promote" them. That is triply-true in tech companies, because middle management sucks, but BEING middle management sucks more (which probably is a reason why middle management sucks so much).