Managers work with people. This can be complicated. Psychologists Simon Moss and Ronald Francis have looked at more than 200 relevant studies so that you won’t have to.

Every individual human is a highly complex mixture of memories, emotions, desires and thought. The more humans you have in one place, the more complex their interactions become. The manager’s role is to enable these people to cooperate in such a way as to yield good results for his business. This requires wisdom, knowledge and skill.

This small paperback book containing roughly 134 pages of relevant information attempts to give the (aspiring) manager some scientifically derived perspectives on his job. Despite its small size, its content does not provide for  bed-time reading. Through seven chapters, the authors will debunk popular management myths and cite you more studies than you would want to read on human psychology at the workplace. The chapter headings are the following:

• What Is This Book About?
• Workplace Objectives
• Team Performance
• Individual Performance
• Addressing Undesirable Behaviour
• Promoting Employee Wellbeing
• Recruitment and Selection

Each chapter contains a number of subtopics and they will address topics such as: what kind of pictures to allow in offices, how to criticize different employees, team work, body language, bonuses and rewards, surveillance, balancing autonomy and rules for employees, recruiting and job interviews. It turns out that some popular methods are rather unproductive or even harmful. But the authors do not only explain the problems, they also offer very practical alternatives.

For example, on the topic of bonuses and rewards, the authors recommend a strategy that doesn’t leave employees competing against each other. This might foster envy, lack of cooperation and an overall unhealthy atmosphere between employees. Instead, managers should consider bonus schemes that incentivize employees to compete against themselves by increasing their own productivity or acquiring new skills.

What if an employee doesn’t fulfil his target? Some managers resort to excusing the behaviour in order to encourage the employee. They might ascribe the failure to outward circumstances. An unintended consequence of this method is that employees might have an increased sense of impotence and discouragement. They feel out of control. Other managers might try to monitor the employee more closely. This can lead to the employee being even more discouraged and to work less so that his failure may be ascribed to a lack of motivation instead of a lack of skill. The alternative offered in the book is to let employees decide when to have their performance appraised and to create a database with excuses for such employees. Based on this database, the manager can encourage the employee set goals that preclude those excuses. This way the employee is confronted with his failure, but in a way that allows him to save face as well as showing him that he is the one fully in charge of his performance.

At times, the book delves a bit deeper into the intricacies of human psychology and emotion. It tries to give managers guidelines to deal with employees in uncomfortable situations, for example when they are uncooperative or affected by family problems. They encourage managers to sometimes assume somewhat of a counselling role. This usually requires some further education since most managers have never prepared themselves for such tasks.

There’s a lot of talk about what makes employees tense, anxious, vulnerable or driven, passionate and altruistic. How do you get them to keep the rules? How do you get them to be more motivated? How do you keep them from stealing the company’s inventory? On page after page you will find lots of references to scientific studies backing up the claims that are being made in this little book. The authors rationalize the results, explaining to the reader why certain things won’t work and why others will. There’s a lot to get out of this, if one invests some time. An index at the end of the book allows the reader to come back and look for specific topics.

The book can be purchased from amazon as a paperback edition (I’d recommend a cheaper, used version) or as the kindle edition (which is currently priced at $12.49).