What if your leader was an evil bastard?

I am right now deep in a critical review of the human resources literature for my company and I am amazed at the extent of my own ignorance. At so many points of my life so far as a leader and manager I asked myself what was the best way to do this or that, sometimes going to the extent of conducting social experiments (What if your leader was an evil bastard? Answer: the guillotine), and it never occurred to me to see if anyone had actually done some empirical scholarly research on it. There was always this vague idea floating around that there was someone doing it (those flashy $50 business books keep referencing them, right?) but even while I was swimming in JSTOR last year pulling up obscure research on long memory time-series econometric analysis and dry bulk shipping market freight rate movements I never thought to see if something more obvious like what kind of incentives work best in motivating a team had been talked about. I’m just shaking my head thinking back to all those times this information would have been so useful and banging my head asking “Why didn’t I know this before?”

I am so buying alumnus access to the university libraries.

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