Organizational Psychology Follies: Random Reminiscences

Since a couple of readers are keen on Organizational Psychology, and have asked for more related annecdotes, I've decided to tell more stories about behavioral observations from my experience.

When I was a young lad, I worked for a couple of years at Sport Chek, a sporting goods retailer. As it happens, I was fired for insubordination, and anybody who knows me is no doubt shocked to learn that (okay, that was sarcasm).

Anyways, the point of the story: every three or four months, the store manager would announce that a select group of head office executives were doing store tours, and would be in the store the next day. So we would go on a cleaning rampage, spot checking the merchandising against the planograms, doubling up the dusting and the windexing, and making sure the lighting plan wasn't full of burned out bulbs.

Miraculously, every one of these pre-announced store tours got cancelled on the day that the Director, the buyers, or even John Forzani himself was supposed to come by.

Eventually, it became clear (to me, at least) that the store manager was as in the dark about this tactic as the hourly wage staff, and that the pre-announced formal visits that Head Office declared were coming fell on a regular enough schedule that it was obviously a tactic used by senior management to ensure that the stores had their merchandising tuned up and perfected on a regular basis. Fear of Looking Bad was enough to motivate store management to tidy up, and spared senior management the hassle of having to catch a store Looking Bad and then get go through the unpleasantness of disciplinary action for having let the brand standards slide.

Sly? Perhaps. Effective? Definetely.

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