> While many — if not most — of us are motivated by genuine caring for the people who power our organizations, we also intuitively know that employee happiness should boost job performance.
I have a hard time believing that "many — if not most" people in management are actually motivated by this.
I am not, you can add it as a data point. Its just work, you are probably not caring about your manager outside of your performance review. And thats fair.
I absolutely care about my manager, for what it's worth. I've generally (luckily) had very good relationships with basically all my managers, and it's tended to pay off well, even though I'd still care if it didn't pay off.
Like most people we do care, and managers may in general care too, but on the field things become murky and doubt / mixed signals / ambiguity creates more work than people will accept to really care.
It needs to exist in the team spirit already otherwise the will just dries up.
Why? Are you saying people in general don't care about other people's happiness, or just that managers are special and don't care? I believe we care about people in close connection to us (family, friends, employees) but it becomes harder to truly relate the further away and larger the number of people are and it becomes more abstract (hence why it's hard to fix global health and poverty etc). I think there's even a psychological need to care about others once we've fed ourselves and achieved basic securities.
They are generally motivated by the stern, unforgiving managers above them dangling an implicit "I can get anyone to do your job" air of death type of attitude. Management meetings are rarely pretty, and most of the corporate fluff heaped on the rank and file is just not a thing there. I feel sorry for middle managers.
I have a hard time believing that "many — if not most" people in management are actually motivated by this.