Does laziness motivate proactive behaviour?

Does Laziness motivate Proactive Behaviour?

Abstract

Laziness has always been associated with a lack of motivation and an unwillingness to work. However recent statements by famous managers begs the question if laziness might also be a motivator for proactive behaviour. This exploratory paper tries to define what laziness is exactly and if this character trait leads to personal initiative among employees. For this the variables procrastination and perceived stress are used. Furthermore, this paper also discovers that the relationship between a manager and its employee also affects the amount of personal initiative an employee takes. This relationship is measured with power distance.

C.A.F. Lammers 10019464

27- 06- 2015

Supervisor: R.E. van Geffen Bachelor Thesis

Statement of Originality

This document is written by Student Coen Lammers who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document. I declare that the text and the work presented in this document is original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.

Table of conduct

1. Introduction 4 2. Theoretical framework 5 2.1 Relevance 5 2.2 Defining laziness 5 2.3 Procrastination 6 2.4 Perceived Stress 7 2.5 Adaptive coping 8 ` 2.6 Initiative in an organisation 9 2.7 Power distance 10 3. Methodology 12 3.1 Survey 12 3.2 Sample 14 3.3 Data collection 16 3.4 Measures 18 4. Results 22 4.1 Sample 22 4.2 Reliability 23 4.3 Scale test 24

4.4 Testing the hypotheses 25

5. Discussion 28

5.1 Interpreting results 28

5.2 Contribution to existing literature 29

5.3 Limitations 30

5.4 Future research 31

6. Conclusion 32

7. References 33

1.Introduction

“For a difficult job, I choose a lazy person”. A quote whose origin lies with either Bill Gates or Walter Crysler and seems paradoxical when looking at it for the first time. Laziness is mostly associated with a lack of motivation to apply tasks, being slow to do something and providing a minimalistic amount of work (Seltzer, 2008). Therefor it seems strange that the CEO of a huge company would explicitly choose such a person to solve a difficult problem at its firm. However this quote is not as paradoxical as it seems.

The underlying idea of this theory is a lazy employee wants to spend a minimalistic amount of effort on a certain job. This kind of employee is especially chosen and burdened with the task, because (s)he will search for opportunities to get the job done in the easiest way possible to eliminate unnecessary movements and fatigue (Kelly, 1947).

Bill Gates and Walter Crysler are not alone in this idea. Over the last couple decades certain influential businessmen and renowned authors have made similar statements such as Frank Gilberth Sr (Kelly,1947), Evan Esar (Esar, 1968) and Edward A. Murphy (Bloch, 1980). From this we can derive that some managers believe that the lazy employees in there department are, apart from lazy, also efficient in making a job simpler. This is also confirmed by for instance Jachimowicz (2015) who says that laziness is not a lack of ability but a unwillingness to work or use energy.

If we believe this to be true, a couple of questions derive from this: “What is laziness exactly?”, “Do lazy employees take personal initiative to make their jobs more efficient” and “does the working environment has an effect on either or both personal initiative or laziness?” The following of this paper will address to these topics and questions.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1 Relevance

Hard work pays off, although that is what we are ought to believe. However hard work does not necessarily mean that someone does his job effectively continuous. Laziness is seen in modern society as a useless and inconvenient way to spend your time and almost always associated with bad behaviour.

However, nowadays a lot of books appear about being effective with your time and spending more time on the things you love. Farris (2013), for instance, describes in his book that you would only need 4 effective hours work a week as long as there are all four effective. In this time of flex working and taking part time jobs due to dual parenting the 9 to 5 business are slowly disappearing (Schwabel, 2011) is seems strange that a concept like laziness has never before been scientifically described or been researched in organizational settings. If it is indeed a motivator for pro-active behaviour it could change our whole view on performing at a job.

2.2 Defining Laziness

For this research to make sense, we first have to make sense of what laziness is exactly. Here lies a bit of a challenge, since laziness has never been scientifically described or been researched in organizational settings. This means that there are no existing prior scales of laziness itself, which can be directly used in this paper. The first step is therefore logically to allocate certain independent variables scales, which together should compose a measurable and scientifically supported dependent variable laziness.

When browsing the world wide web, the first thing to notice is that there are a lot of definitions that all try to define the word laziness. Although they are all trying to define the same word, they are all seem to differ a bit from each other. A couple of examples are for instance the famous French author Jules Renard (1880) who wrote that laziness is nothing more than “a habit of resting before you get tired”, while the Holy Bible and comparable books like the Tora and the Koran describe laziness as not managing time efficiently and being skilled enough for a task, but lacking the motivation to be productive hence failing to love God with all ones heart”.

If this paper hopes to answer the questions about laziness it has to be consistent about what laziness is. Since there are countless definitions of laziness, that all differ from each other to some extent, it is important to choose one definition laziness for the remainder of this paper. The definition that is chosen is the one proposed by the English dictionary because it is the most overall description of the concept. This definition is as followed. “slow moving; sluggish” and “a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so”.

2.3 Procrastination

From the first definition (slow moving; sluggish) we derive the first variable to determine laziness. This variable is procrastination. Procrastination is to put off acting on one’s intentions (Schouwenburg & Lay, 1995) and seems an appropriate an logical variable to describe the concept of laziness. In their paper, Schouwenburg & Lay (1995) explore several traits behind procrastination. With correlation coefficients range from 0.62 to 0.5, they find that being undisciplined, lazy or disorderly are the main reasons to procrastinate. The argument that procrastination and laziness are related is also supported by Ferrari et al. (1995) who describe procrastinators as lazy and self-indulgent individuals. However it is not as simple as to say that procrastination is always a sign for being lazy. There are various other reasons why people procrastinate.

Other reasons for procrastination are for instance the fear of failure. In Schouwenburgs (1992) it is shown that some students procrastinate, because they have a low self-esteem and are afraid to start with a task which might be too much for them. By putting off work, these students gain short term satisfaction for not having to cope with these problems/tasks right away, but it makes their situation only more troublesome over the long term.

Another reason to procrastinate that shows up more than ones in previous literature is that some people have to procrastinate, because they are not able to cope with the myriad tasks (major and minor) that accumulated daily on their desks (Milgram, 1991). To describe these people as lazy would be unfair, because the main reason for them to procrastinate is that they have the feeling that the workload/work pressure is too demanding to handle in the amount of time given. Whether this feeling is justified or just in an employee his mind is not important for the issue.

In the above section it is shown that procrastination is sometimes an indicator for laziness. However there are at least two other reasons why employees might procrastinate. Therefor it is wise to include a second variable to measure someone his/her laziness to divide the different types of procrastinators. Going back to the English dictionary, laziness was described as “Slow moving, sluggish”, but also as a “disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so”. This description of laziness is also supported by for instance Jachimowicz (2015) who says that laziness implies an unwillingness to work or use energy, despite having the ability to do so. In both these sentences especially the last part is of great importance. Lazy employees have the ability, but are to some extend reluctant to use it. It is this attitude that depicts them as being lazy. So to distinguish between lazy procrastinators and procrastinators who have other reasons (low self-esteem, fear for failure or not being able to handle the amount of work properly in time) we have to use a second variable to describe laziness, which helps to give more insight in the reason for procrastination.

2.4 Perceived Stress

Miller et al. (1993) give a good suggestion of what this second variable should be. In their paper they find that employees that are not able to perform well due to a focus on past failures or having unrealistic high standards of themselves, cope with high levels of stress and anxiety. Bridges & Roig (1997) also find that how employees handle stress, seems to influence an employee his expectancy about its own qualities. In Bridges & Roig (1997) it is stated that an emotion focused response to anxiety creates a low expectancy of self-efficacy.

Those who score low on self-perception or have a high focus on failure also seem to score high on stress. Having a low amount of perceived stress seems to exclude two possibilities of procrastination which are not considered lazy. The official scales of stress management (Cohen & Williamson, 1988) also seems to account for the perceived workload, which was the third and last proposed reason to procrastinate stated by Milgram (1991). Deriving from Burn-Callander (2015) it becomes clear that perceived workload is indeed an indication if an employee is lazy or not as she states that “lazy people can have more downtime than their peers due to being really efficient”. By

including perceived stress as a variable to determine laziness it becomes possible to make a distinction between certain types of procrastinators.

2.5 Adoptive coping

Siriois & Kitner (2015) seems to agree with the statement of Burn-Callander (2015). In their paper they find that procrastination lead either to maladaptive coping or adaptive coping. Maladaptive copers try to avoid unpleasant news and try to escape stress by doing things that immediately decrease their stress on the short term, but this ironically increases their overall perceived stress on the long term as it does not reduce the source of the stress. Adaptive copers are their exact opposites. When they procrastinate they tend to think keep the long term in mind, which in return lowers their overall perceived stress.

This paper uses the same variables (procrastination and perceived stress). Lazy employees most likely procrastinate but score low on perceived stress, as is explained in the segment above. These are both traits of adaptive copers, hence there is a possibility that lazy employees who procrastinate overall use an adaptive coping strategy to be effective with their time so they can decrease the stress they might experience from it.

This adaptive coping strategy can be done in numerous ways. It can involve taking action and/or finding resources to deal with the problem that causes stress, including planning and seeking out information or emotional support from others (Sirois & Kitner, 2015) This has a lot in common with the proactive behaviour: personal initiative since this is described as a behavioural pattern whereby individuals take an active, self-starting approach to work (Frese et al., 1996) or as Aspinwall & Taylor (1997) describe it “Taking action to prevent or modify stressful situations before they happen ” Both seem to promote taking charge of ones surroundings.

Frese et al. (1997) also state that employees that take personal initiative tend to hold the longer terms in mind. If a machine is broken it should get fixed, but if there is a possibility than the idea of Frese et al. (1997) is that an employee will ask for advice how to handle the machine with more care so it will not break again. Keeping the long term in mind is a prerequisites of initiative, but is also part of adaptive coping. It would also fit perfectly with Burn-Callender (2015) her statement that lazy

employees as more efficient than other employees. Since Motowildo & Scotter (1994) say that initiative increase effectiveness. If it is true that most lazy employees use an adaptive coping approach the following hypothesis derives:

H1: The lazier an employee the more personal initiative (s)he will take.

2.6 Initiative in an organisation

However Frese et al. (1996) are of the opinion that personal initiative is foremost characterized by the aspect that it is consistent with the organisations mission. Staw & Boetger (1990) also make a comparable statement in their paper, that it initiative should always imply pro-company goals.

The work environment seems to be of great importance when it comes to personal initiative and it seems smart to include this variable in this research as it might influence the hypothesis above.

Munene (1995) is another person who also agrees that initiative should be measured from the perspective of a company. He links personal initiative to organizational citizenship behaviour. The idea behind organizational citizenship behaviour is that an employee will try to be helpful and altruistic for its colleagues from the perspective of a supervisor. An employee will have this role prescriptive behaviour to impress its supervisor and therefor it is focused on a short-term positive social orientation at the workplace (Eastman,1994). Although both organizational citizenship behaviour and personal initiative go beyond the normal job description and contributes to the organizational effectiveness it is not entirely correct to describe them as the same.

Frese et al. (1997) see a couple of differences between organizational citizenship behaviour and initiative. The main difference is the time frame. As was described above by Eastman (1994), organizational citizenship behaviour is role prescriptive behaviour and has a short time frame. Initiative is focused on making a program, organisation more effective. Initiative occurs to solve or prevent more long term problems and is not necessarily a role-prescribed behaviour. This statement is also supported by George & Brief (1992). In fact Frese et al. (1997) say that personal initiative becomes more important when the surveillance function of a supervisor is decreased.

2.7 Power distance

The organisation and to be more specific the relation with a supervisor, seems to be an important factor in the amount of personal initiative employees want to commit. Power distance seems like a good variable to describe this relationship. This variable is first introduced by Hofstede (2001). Power distance can be generally divided into high power distance and low power distance cultures (Hofstede, 2001). Employees in a high power distance culture tend to view power as a reality of life and believe everyone has a specific place in the hierarchy of power (Hofstede, 2001). Orders are seldom questioned and are followed simply because your role in the hierarchy is to follow orders (Hofstede, 2001). Low power distance cultures are the complete opposites. Power distance measures the felt gap between an employee and his supervisor. Another important thing about the measurer power distance is that it is measured from the viewpoint of the employee. Since it is important how the employee perceives the power distance for him/her to take personal initiative this seems like a good scale.

Procrastination is also influenced by power distance. This can be seen in numerous occasions. It is best described by Cremer (2013) who shows that employees working at a high power distance firm will procrastinate less because they fear conflicts with their boss, but also have a strong feeling of distrust. If employees are kept out of decisions then they are not motivated to serve others interest or show initiative (Cremer, 2013).

A connection between perceived stress and power distance can sadly not be found in previous research. However there is another variable that differs a bit from perceived stress that implicates this connection might exist. Speier & Frese (1997) state that the relationship between control at work and personal initiative is intervened by work-related self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a belief in one’s capabilities (Bandura, 1997)or a conviction that if we put our mind to something, we'll be effective with it Scheltzer (2008). Schelzer (2008) states that a poor sense of self-efficacy leads anxiety and that it prevents you from completing a task. As is stated before by Bridges & Roig (1997) anxiety is created by a low expectancy of self-efficacy. This is most common among those who perceive high amounts of stress. Self-efficacy is an indication that one knows its strengths and capabilities and it can be assumed that the amount of perceived stress is limited. This could mean that there is a

connection between the amount of control at work and perceived stress. Since perceived stress and self-efficacy seem to be closely intertwined.

If both these assumptions are correct about power distance influencing procrastination, perceived stress (through self-efficacy) and personal initiative than there could be a possibility that it also influences the relationship between laziness and personal initiative. To test this effect power distance will be a moderator variable in this paper. This also creates a second hypothesis

H2: Low power distance creates more opportunity for lazy employees to take personal initiative

To make it easier to understand how all these variables interact with each other, a model is composed which can be seen below.

Figure 1

3. Method

In the segment above four variables have been given to measure the proposed hypotheses. All of these variables (perceived stress, procrastination, power distance and personal initiative) already have existing quantitative scales to measure the variables independently. As most of these scales have already proven to be scientifically accurate it seems only logical to use these scales for this research also. For this reason, a quantitative questionnaire-based survey is used to collect data and test the proposed hypotheses. Laziness - Procrastination - Perceived Stress Moderator - Power Distance Pro-activity - Personal initiative

3.1 The survey

A quantitative questionnaire-based survey is also an easy way to collect a lot of data in a short amount of time (Saunders et al, 2009). Since this paper is written in a period of only two months, it is important to use this short amount of time to its fullest content and collect data in a quick, but efficient way. The results of these data are only reliable if they come in large amounts of a least 30 responses (Saunders et al, 2009) and since the combined questions of the four variables given above are not more than twenty, a survey would be done in a very short amount of time.

At the time this paper is written, no more than four other students also write a paper about a (sub)form of proactive behaviour. As some of these questions have some overlap, it was decided to combine the five questionnaires with each other. This makes the questionnaire longer, but since none of these bachelor students have more than two friends in common (on Facebook at least) , it will increase the span of the survey fivefold, making it easier to get enough recipients and thereby making the received data more reliable.

In the survey, the 5 point Likert scale is used. This for the reason that the scales used in the questionnaire are without any exception already questions with a 5 point Likert scale. The Likert scale is also commonly in research that employs questionnaires and it is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research, such that the term is often used interchangeably with rating scales (Wuensch, 2005). Since this paper also deals with quantitative data there is no reason to change this. The five different options to choose from in this Likert scale are, as always, totally agree/agree/neutral/disagree/ totally disagree. Over the whole survey the totally disagree option always stood at the far left and the totally agree option on the far right. The reason for this is to make sure that readers who are not paying attention are less likely to make a mistake if the order of the answers stays the same.

All questions of the survey are asked in Dutch. The two major reasons for this is that Dutch is the mother language of all the five students who would use these results of the survey for their individual papers, but even more important, Dutch is also the mother language of most intended participants (family, friends, colleagues etc.) A couple of the scales can only be found in English so where needed to, the questions are translated in Dutch. These scales are translated in Dutch first by the

student who wanted to use them in the questionnaire. After a student has translated all the questions of the scales he intends to ask participants, two other students will translate these questions also to see if they agree that the translated question covers the topic of the English question in the same matter. If the three independently translated questions do not differ from each other than we can assume that the translation is reliable. If in a rare case, one of these students has an different opinion about the translation, a short discussion and a majority vote about which translated question covers the subject matter the best should solve the debate. The options of the Likert scale are naturally also translated in Dutch.

Because this survey uses a Likert scale it is quite easy to administrate the survey by oneself since no much explaining is needed. Participants have to choose between how strongly they agree with a certain statement and no further explain is required or can be given. This makes the survey a very quick and easy way to collect data which, as is explained above, is very welcome when time is limited. People can do the survey whenever they have the time and do not have to schedule an appointment or anything of that sort. Being self-administrated also makes the results of questionnaire reliable as there is no interviewer or administrator who could direct/distract/confuse a participant with the intonation of his/her voice or putting major focus on particular questions. Because the questions are the same for everyone it is also easier to compare the results (Saunders, 2009). Next to that, self-administration is also an affordable way to collect data, since the only thing participants get as an reward for filling in this survey is gratitude.

A self-administrated questionnaire also gives the opportunity to guarantee participants completely anonymity. This is important, because participants could influence the results with participants bias if they fear that giving a truthful answer could cause them harm in any kind of way (Saunder, 2009). Participants were noted that the results would be registered, but that it could not be linked to them in any kind of way. This was explained in the e-mail, which also requested to fill in the questionnaire (more of this email will be explained in ‘data collection’ in the segment below). Although anonymity provides more truthful/reliable answers one should always consider that a downside to this way of collecting data is that there is only one moment to collect data and if future questions arrive they cannot be asked.

The longer a survey, the less people are willingly to fill it in (Saunders, 2009). To make the survey shorter for the participants and to get even more reliable results about certain scales a dyad design was implement in this survey. Dyad studies are very common among behavioral sciences and sociology (Watne & Brenan, 2010), since this questionnaire also adopts with behavior and was quite long due to combining 5 surveys it is an obvious choice. A dyad study lets a person fill in a couple of questions about one of the participants. Instead of asking the questions to the participant himself/herself the participant had to ask a colleague to fill in the questions with a different questionnaire. The colleague received a different e-mail with the instructions, which will be explained in more detail in data collection. Of the four variable, the participant will answer questions about three of them (procrastination, perceived stress and power distance). The colleague will fill in questions about his/her perception of the amount of personal initiative that the participant has undertaken at work (more of this will be explained in chapter 3.4 Measures)

The participant and the colleague have to agree on a certain password and file this on their individual questionnaires so that the anonymity can still be granted. This is done to making clear which surveys belong to each other. The colleague will fill in questions about the participating participant. These are no more than 20 questions to ensure that it does not take too long. These questions belong to scales which are mostly about perceptions of their colleague. Questions are mostly about how their colleague handles risk, if he/she takes personal initiative at the work floor or how well he operates in a team.

Both the survey of the colleague and the participant end with a thank you note and the statement that you should leave your e-mail if you would like to participate in more surveys or if you are interested in the results.

3.2 Sample

This paper tries to address lazy people in general. To prevent making premature conclusions it is important to know how certain target groups are divided among the participant. In order to prevent later generalisation of the results, because the sample of participants is not representative of the Dutch population three demographics variables are included in this survey. These demographics are: Gender,

Age and highest completed Education. Participants had to pick one out of every category so that a good overview of the sample distribution was possible: Gender is distributed as followed in the Netherlands 49,5% male and 50,5% female. (CBS, 2015) and for that reason the only two options for gender to choose from in the survey are male or female.

Age is distributed in categories by the CBS, as this makes is way easier than having around 100 different options. Participant can choose from these following categories. Below 20, 20-30,30-40, 40-50, 50-60 and 60+. There was no reason to make categories for people between 0-10 and 70 and higher because these people are not part of the working population of the Netherlands and therefor irrelevant for this paper. These ages are represented as followed in the Netherlands (CBS, 2015):

Age Percentage of population

< 20 23%

20 – 40 24,5%

40 – 60 35,3%

60+ 17,2%

Participants can choose one of the following for the highest know education: high school, MBO, HBO or University. In Dutch society the highest known education is divided as followed:

Highest know education Percentage of population

High School 35%

MBO 36,5%

HBO 17,1%

University 11,4%

In this paper, not only it is strived to have a large enough sample, but it is also preferred to match the distribution above so that the results can be generalized. This is done by targeting specific groups when requesting to fill in the survey.

3.3 Data collection

This bachelor thesis uses an online survey made with the program Qualtrics. Using the site www.qualtrics.com it is easy to compose a survey and because of its user-friendliness it is quite simple to arrange the question and the possible Likert scale ratings in an easy comprehend order. The answers of the Likert scale always appeared in the same order to prevent confusion, as was described and explained in the beginning of this chapter. Using an online survey instead of a printed survey has a couple of advantages. It grants full anonymity, it is cheaper because you do not have to print them on paper, but most importantly, it is faster! Having an online survey instead of a printed one gives the opportunity to send the questionnaire by e-mail. Not only can a lot more people be reached in the same time then when it would be handed out on paper, but people also can fill in the requested survey in a moment which fits their schedule. Last but not least, when participants are finished with the survey, it is automatically accessible for the interviewer instead of having to wait until it is handed over.

The survey in qualtrics is attached to an e-mail (see Appendix A), which asks if one would be so kind as to fill in the questionnaire using a link to the survey made in qualtrics. Furthermore it explains that the data are used for five bachelor theses and that participation will be completely anonymous. After that the next sentences will explain that to meet all requirements a participants has to inform an (ex)colleague or friend that he is taking this survey and if this (ex)colleague/friend would be so kind as to help completing the survey by clicking a link to a different survey (also made with qualtrics), with questions about their colleague. The mail also mentions that the approximate time to complete the survey is around 10 minutes.

It is important that both the questionnaire of the participant and the colleague can be matched, because only together the surveys make a whole. If either the colleague or the participant does not fill in the questionnaire the other questionnaire also become useless because of the fact that it makes an incomplete survey. To make it easier to match the participant and colleague are asked to come up with a certain code word. This code word has to consist of exactly six symbols and can be anything as long as both of them use the same. With so many possibilities it is deemed very unlikely that two different couples would choose the exact same combination.

Because this is a lot of information and it is not wishful that the participant has to explain this to his colleague and risk explaining it wrong, a separate email is made for the colleague with all the information he needs. This mail (see Appendix B) explains briefly that the participant has agreed to fill in the survey and chose him/her to be its colleague to fill in a couple of questions. The link to the colleague survey, together with a short explanation about the code word and its restrictions is also send with this.

For this paper to have any generalizable results it is important to match to some extent the demographic population of the Netherlands. The closer the sample is to the population the more reliable the results are for the population as whole. For this reason not only Facebook was used to distribute the survey. Although Facebook is the easiest forum it is mainly used by young adults in the category 18-29 (British insider, 2014). To reach the group of 30 years and above, personal networks of the students are being used (family, friends and colleagues) and send the mail explained above to fill in the survey.

After a week a reminder is sent. Thanking the participants who have already participated and asking those who did not yet, if they would be so kindly to do so. A second reminder is sent after three days after the second reminder. However this mail differs a little bit from the first to mails (see Appendix C). In this mail, again people are thanked if they have participated and if not if they would be so kind to do so, but this mail contains also the list of all the code words of the participants who have already filled in the form, but from whom the colleague survey is still missing and vice versa . Since the questionnaire is anonymous and it is impossible to track down to whom the participants have send the colleague survey they are asked to check if their code word is among the list and if so to either fill in the questionnaire themselves or hush their colleague to do so.

The last reminder is send a week before the deadline (a week after the second reminder). This mail is not different from the first reminder with the exception that this will be the last mail they get and that participants who wish to help can do only until the end of this week as the deadline is a due on Friday (mail was sent on a Monday). Friends and family are also being noted of this deadline and are asked for the last time to please fill in the survey. This last notification will be send through Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and local calling.

3.4 Measures

To test the hypotheses made in this paper, four different measures are needed. The most important thing about a measurer is that the questions give a fair and good indication of a certain variable. For that reason it is important to have measurers who have already proven to be scientifically accurate. The more scales already existing, the more relevant and accurate a prediction can be made because there is no doubt if the measurer is correct or not. This paper was so lucky to find that all its four variables had already existing scales. All four of these scales also use the 5 point Likert scale and for that reasons no scales will have to be composed and can be used directly. The segment beneath will explain the four different variable scales in more detail.

Laziness

As is explained in the introduction (chapter 1) no prior academic paper exists of laziness, because it has never been researched before. For that reason it is impossible to import the scales of laziness in this paper, because they do not exist. However in the theoretical framework it becomes clear that laziness is composed of two independent variables: Procrastination and Perceived Stress. Though a scale for laziness may not exist, these two variables do have existing measures, which can be used for testing the hypotheses in this paper.

Procrastination

The scale used for procrastination is the very first scale ever created about procrastination, made by Tuckman (1991). In this paper Tuckman searches for 72 items who might have a possible connection with procrastination. A factor analysis showed that 35 of these items had a relation with each other. In a subsequent study a second factor analysis shows that only 16 of these items correlated positively with each other. A shortened version was recommended for use. In this paper only three questions are used. These are the three questions that prove the best indication of procrastination seeing their overall factor loadings in Tuckman (1991). These are questions 2, 4 and 18. An example of these questions is for instance “I postpone starting on things I don’t like to do”.

Perceived Stress

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is the most widely used psychological instrument for measuring the perception of stress (Cohen 1994). The test is mostly used in communities and thereby making it a useful scale as two of the hypotheses address either laziness and/or proactivity at work.

The 10 questions on the PSS, measures how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded respondents find their lives and to what degree and which situations in one’s life are appraised as stressful. (Cohen,1994). The items/questions are easy to understand and ask how often a participant has experienced certain feelings on a 5 point Likert scale(Cohen, 1994), making it perfect for a survey that is also open for people who have only graduated from high school for instance. The evidence for validity of this scale can, for instance, be found in a paper by Cohen & Williamson (1988) that show that a high score on PSS can be associated with stress measures, a failure to quit smoking and a greater vulnerability to stressful life events. What is interesting is that the Perceived Stress Scale also has questions relating to perceived workload (question 6 and 8). Milgram (1991) proposed that perceived workload could be a reason to procrastinate. These questions do not only link procrastination to perceived stress management, but they rule some possibilities out for procrastination other than laziness. Cohen is of the opinion that an increase in workload increases stress and has therefor included these questions in the Perceived Stress Scales. Questions that are included are for instance “how often do you feel nervous and stressed out?”

Power distance

The most well-known scale for measuring power distance is the one made and invented by Hofstede (2001). In his 5 cultural dimensions model he describes organisations from all over the world by the means of five different characteristics. These five dimensions are Power distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty avoidance and Long term vs Short term.

Hofstede (2001) describes power distance as the degree of inequality in power between a less powerful individual (I) and a more powerful Other (O), in which I and O belong to the same (loosely or tight knit) social system. Although in most cases the source of a scale is the most preferred to use as a

measurer because it is widely used, cited and published, this paper has chosen to not blindly include Hofstede power distance dimension for it scales.

Hofstede’ dimensions are focused on cultural differences and the survey which he uses is quite long. He has solved this by including only three questions about power distance. This seems a bit too little questions and since the focus of the paper of Hofstede’s paper and thereby his questions are about cultural differences other questions of this survey are not relevant for this paper.

Ly (2013) had the same problem with the paper of Hofstede and for that reason she decided to include a couple of other questions that seemed relevant to ask when propping the variable power distance. These were questions such as: “How frequently, in your experience, do Employees express disagreement with their managers?” In total she added six more questions, based off Hostede paper in 2001, but who were more leaning toward power distance in general, than power distance as a difference in culture. As this paper also has nothing to do with cultural differences and the proposed question of Ly (2013) give a more overall view about power distance in general it seems only logical to use this scale. Having a final count of 9 questions in total for power distance.

Personal initiative

Personal initiative is first introduced as a form of proactive behaviour by Frese, Fay, Hilburger, Leng and Tag in 1997. The founder of the scale is most of the time the most requested and smartest choice to use when searching for proper scales. Although some alterations on these scales server the purpose of the research more. In this case the scales that are provided by Frese et al. (1997) measure the variable of personal initiative sufficient enough.

However some alterations were made to the proposed measuring and the scales of Frese et al. (1997). Frese et al (1997) give three reasons why they think a that personal initiative should not be measured with a questionnaire alone. At the time that Frese et al. published their paper the theme of initiative was well discussed around the media. The author of the paper feared that doing only a questionnaire would lead to social desirable answers. The second reason for them to conduct more than a questionnaire was because they feared that a questionnaire only measures what a person say, but not necessarily reflect the real behaviour of a person (Spencer & Spencer 1993). The last reason for

Frese et al, to include an interview after the survey was because of triangulation. When both interview and questionnaire lead to similar results of the same person, the data received are much more convincing (Web et al, 1966). Though all three arguments are justified, this paper has neglected the idea to include an interview with the survey.

The reasons for this are multiple. First of all, the argument mentioned of influence of the media is not relevant any longer. Personal initiative is not a major topic in Dutch media as of June 2015 so this argument is not important. The second argument however is still relevant. People tend to give answers that might not reflect their real behaviour, because they might fear reprisals. This paper chose to eliminate this problem by not letting the participant fill in these questions about himself/herself, but a colleague. Since a colleague has plenty of opportunity to observe the participant he can count how many times the participant shows certain behaviour that is asked in the questionnaire. The colleague has to answer questions like “my colleague is particularly good at realising ideas.

The last argument is the most convincing. It is true that by doing a multi-mixed method of both quantitative and qualitative investigation the research will get more convincing results (Saunder et al, 2009). However, keeping in mind that there is very limited time and wanting to uphold the promise of anonymity this argument its weight decreases. In the segments above it is already discussed that doing an face to face measuring requires time (of the participant and of the researcher) and since not all participants are willing or able to conduct an interview a lot of completed surveys would be rendered useless. Which paradoxically leads to less complete participants and thereby less accurate results.

For the same reasons as explained above only the self-reported initiative questions are being used. These are the first seven questions about personal initiative at work that do not require an interviewer. The second part of the questions of personal initiative where asked by an interviewer and are about overcoming barriers. The questions are mainly about future career plans and such like, thereby not that relevant for this paper making it not a real problem to exclude them.

4. Results

4.1 The sample

The final number of participants that answered the call to fill in the questionnaire explained above in chapter 3 was 122. Of these 122 surveys only 88 had found a colleague willing to fill in the questionnaire. Only these questionnaires could be used since the answers that the colleague had to provide are just as vital as the questions filled in by the participant itself.

Of these 88 surveys only 73 proved to be useful. The 15 that were left out mainly had no matching code word or did not fill in the whole questionnaire. Although this was made impossible in Qualtrics, some people managed to do this any way. The final sample consisted of 73 participants with completed questionnaires.

It was strived to get a good representation of the Dutch population. The output of the data in SPSS can be seen in appendix D and shows that 50,5% of the respondents is female and that the other 49,5% is male. This is quite consistent with the slightly higher population of woman in the Netherlands.

The survey also aimed to have a highly divided age distribution. Though this paper managed to get a least a couple of responses for every age group, the distribution is not completely consistent with the Dutch population. As can be seen in the circle diagram in appendix E the main respondents were people in their 20’s. This is not really surprising since the main peer group of all the 5 students who distributed the questionnaire, consisted of students around this age. The green part shows this group. Surprisingly a lot of participants are also around the age of 51-60 (the yellow part). These are most likely family members and elder colleagues.

The last demographic question, asks about the highest known education a participant has had. Again the results show that during the data gathering it managed to get respondents of every branch, but again the responses are not entirely consistent with the Dutch population since more than half of the respondents had enjoyed the highest form of education that can be offered.

A part of this distribution can again be explained by the fact that a lot of the respondents are likely to be peers from the university. Another reason for the high amount of University grads is that some of the 5 students who distributed this questionnaire worked full time at a firm where a University

grad was required. This could be another reason was the purple part in this the diagram in appendix F is much higher.

4.2 Reliability

To test the hypotheses of this paper, it is first needed to look at the output of certain scales. Both Perceived stress and Power distance have so called counter-indicative questions that need to be transformed to get a usable outcomes. Although the use of counter-indicative questions is a bit inconvenient there are a couple of reasons to use them. Counter-indicative questions measure the opposite of what is actually being measured. So for instance in the perceived stress scale question 4 asks “how many times do you have the feeling that things are going your way”. The Likert scale score participant give should be the exact opposite of other questions like “how many times do you feel angry about things you cannot control”. If they do not than it can be assumed that a participant did not read the questions, but mindlessly filled in the survey to be done with it. Counter-indicative questions are also sometimes included because a positive question could have a slight different meaning when it is transformed into a negative one and vice versa. The easier way is to transform the data of these counter-indicative questions in the output.

The Perceived Stress Scale has a total of 4 counter-indicative questions. These are question 4,5, 7 and 8 and need to be transformed to get a good overview of how stressed a certain person is (Cohen, 1994). However in the theoretical frame work it is stated that lazy people will overall have a low score on stress and a high score on procrastination. If on is to combine these two it is way easier to combine two outcomes that either measure both a high score or a low score as a mean is easier taken. For this reason the answers of questions 4,5, 7 and 8 are kept intact while the other question (1,2,3,6,9 and 10) where transformed. This is done by putting all the outcomes in an Excell sheet and then using the following formula (Answer – 6) x -1. This transformed all negative answers into positives and vice versa. The results of the 10 questions after the transformation would now indicate how tolerant a participant was of stress, instead of how stressed he was.

The same is done with the question 5 and 7 of power distance (Ly, 2013). The higher the score the less distance is felt by an employee with his employer. Since this variable does not have to be used in combination there is no use in transforming otherwise.

4.3 Scale test

Next it is important to test the reliability of the scales that are used to test the hypotheses of this paper.

Procrastination

From the results of SPSS follows that the scale of procrastination has an Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.756 This is more than the prescribed 0.7 which makes the questions reliable. One could argue to exclude the first question of procrastination, since this would increase the Cronbach’s Alpha 0.756 to 0.757, but this is such a minimalist increase that it does not wager against the high increase in the scale variance of this particular scale.

Stress Management

The perceived stress scale also has a Cronbach’s Alpha 0.756. Again excluding a question (in this case question 8) would increase the Cronbach’s Alpha. However just as with question 1 of procrastination the increase is not really needed, is very limited and makes increase the scale variance quite much. For these reasons no questions are deleted in this case.

Power distance

The Cronbach’s Alpha of power distance is quite low. Since 0.345 is lower than the preferred 0.7. For that reason it might be wise to delete a couple questions to increase the Cronbach’s Alpha. Question 8 shows the most promise as it increases the Cronbach’s Alpha by more than 0.06 points. Question 8 askes participant if they should participate more in decisions made by the manager. As participating does not necessarily mean that they have power to change these decisions, it could be that a lot of employees who experience a high power distance do not see a reason for this. If the question would be if employees should have more influence in the decisions an manager makes the results might have

been different. When question 8 is deleted it leads to a higher Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.407. Though this makes the scale more reliable, an even higher number should be strived for if possible to increase the reliability.

Question 5 is the only question that increase the Cronbach’s Alpha even more and therefor seems to be a logical choice. The question itself is quite long (it has more than 3 sentences) compared to the other questions about power distance (mostly 1 short sentence). It could well be that participant did not read the question completely or correctly due to its length. By excluding question 5 we see a rise of the Cronbach’s Alpha again.

This leaves us with a Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.441. The Cronbach’s Alpha could be increased even further by removing question 7 also. However question 7 cannot easily be misinterpreted and gives a lot of inside in the relationship of the manager and the employee. The increase is also relatively seen, small compared to the other two question and because of this it is not removed.

Personal Initiative

The Cronbach’s Alpha of Personal initiative is extremely high (0.825) and only deleting question 5 would increase even further. However there is no need for this since the Cronbach’s Alpha is already extremely high.

4.4 Testing the hypotheses

In this paper a regression analyses is used to see if the hypotheses stated in chapter two could be true or not. Regression analysis is a statistical tool for the investigation of relationships between variables. Usually, the investigator seeks to ascertain the causal effect of one variable upon another (Skyses, 1992). To explore such issues the investigator assembles data on the underlying variables of interest and employs regressions to estimate the quantitative effect of the casual variables upon the variable that they influence (Skyses, 1992). The investigator also typically assesses the “statistical significance” of the estimated relationship, that is, the degree of confidence that the true relationship is close to the estimated relationship. (Skyses, 1992). However, before we can conduct an Ordinary Least-square regression certain requirement have to be met.

The ordinary least-square regression has a couple of assumption, which first need to be established. This method uses a single response variable (the overall mean of a scale) to explore the relation between two variables (Hutcheson & Moutinho, 2011). This is easily done for power distance and personal initiative, because they make use of only one scale which is already transformed. However laziness consist of two different scale with two different variables. It is possible to combine these two scales and take the average of them, but first the relation between the two variables perceived stress and procrastination needs to be established. When performing a correlation (as can be seen in figure 2), it can be clear seen that stress and procrastination have a significant relation with each other. However their correlation is negative.

Figure 2 * = p < 0.05

When a factor analysis is done for the questions, it is visible that two questions of the procrastination scale do not match with the stress scale test. For this reason it is not wise to create the variable laziness by combining the two scales. Instead we conduct the OLS regression two times. Ones for stress and ones for procrastination.

The other assumption that needs to be confirmed is that the mean of the four variables (perceived stress, procrastination, power distance and personal initiative) needs to follow the normal distribution. Both the skewness and the kurtosis of a variable need to be between -1 and 1 for this to be true. Though some variables are a bit skewed to either the right or the left they all follow the normal distribution as can be seen in the histograms below. A more detailed insight in these numbers can be found in appendix G or in figure 3.

Mean Standard Deviation Correlation Procrastination Correlation Perceived Stress Correlation Personal initiative Correlation Power Distance Procrastination 2.65 0.73186 1 Perceived Stress 3.5 0.40597 -,00395* 1 Personal initiative 3.76 0.60125 -0,98 -0,14 1 Power Distance 3.93 0.39561 0,33 0,055 0,211 1

Figure 3

As is explained earlier in this chapter, it is not possible to test the hypothesis with the laziness variable immediately, because certain questions in the scales of procrastination and perceived stress do not match. For that reason the model of table 1 in chapter 2 will be tested twice. Ones for stress and ones for procrastination. Because there are only 73 respondents an Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.1 is justified a being significant.

Procrastination has a P-value of 0.408 which is way higher than the 0.1 significance factor and is therefore not supported. The same goes for Perceived Stress. 0.905>0.1 thus this variable has no significant impact on personal initiative. Since both variable for laziness are not significant, hypothesis 1 is not supported. For hypothesis 2 the following results are relevant SPSS gives the following regression results for perceived stress and procrastination

Coefficient Standard Error Standardized Coefficient Standard Error Constant 2.62 0.903 7.955 7.527 Perceived Stress -0.38 0.173 -1.571 2.153 Power distance 0.323** 0.178 -1.02 1.89 Perceived stress x Power distance 0.386 0.54 R^2 0.213 0.229 Figure 4 ** = p < 0.1

Coefficient Standard Error Standardized Coefficient Standard Error Constant 2.703 0.734 0.839 3.057 Procrastination -0.087 0.095 0.608 1.11 Power distance 0.327** 0.177 0.781 0.745 Procrastination x Power distance -0.169 0.269 R^2 0.236 0.247 Figure 5 ** = p < 0.1

Power distance seems to have an significant effect on personal initiative as it is 0,073 with perceived stress and 0.069 with procrastination which are lower than 0.1. However Power distance does not seems to influence the relation of stress on personal initiative (0.478 > 0.1) or procrastination on personal initiative (0.532>0.1). Hypothesis 2 is also not supported.

5. Discussion

5.1 Interpreting the results

This paper tried to find evidence that supports the hypotheses that laziness motivates personal initiative and that low power distance enhance the relationship between these two variables. Although no significant evidence was found for this it is possible to conclude some other things from the results. This paper did not manage to find a significant connection between procrastination or perceived stress with personal initiative. For that same reason the moderation variable power distance did not change this relationship significantly, since there was no significant relation between procrastination/perceived stress and personal initiative to begin with. However the results do show that power distance has an significant effect on personal initiative. As a reminder to prevent confusion, a high score on power distance in the results means that an employee experiences low power distance at its company.

It seems that overall employees who work in a workplace with low power distance tend to take more personal initiative then those who work in high power distance companies. This might be because employees who feel high power distance might lack the courage to take personal initiative. Shultz-Gambard & Altshuh (1993) explain that some supervisors have been raised in the understanding that initiative is a bad that needs to be punished. A manager in a high power distance culture could interpreted the ideas of an employee as critic on his management. Another reason for this is that companies with high power distance cultures, mostly have structured and standardised jobs, leaving little room for an employee to take personal initiative.

The results in Figure 2 show that a high score on procrastination and a low score on perceived stress are negatively correlated with each other . Though it was assumed that these variables would be sufficient to conclude if someone is lazy or not, the results indicate that laziness is not composed of only the variables procrastination and perceived stress. A low score on perceived stress was used as an indicator that an employee could allow himself to procrastinate, since he was confident in his own ability to finish a job in time. Since a high score on procrastination and a low score on perceived stress are negatively correlated it seems that this is not the case.

This paper assumed that procrastinators would be adaptive copers and therefor score low on perceived stress, because adaptive coping strategy reduces stress over the long term (Sirois & Kitner, 2015). However, the output of Spss shows that a high score on perceived stress and procrastination are significantly correlated. This indicates that procrastinators actually perceived a lot of stress from procrastinating. So either procrastination is not a good variable to measure laziness or perceived stress.

5.2 Contribution to existing literature

As is already explained in chapter 2.1 laziness has never before been scientifically described or been researched in organizational settings. Although the attempt of this paper to unfold all the mysteries surrounding laziness did not leave any significant results, the effort was not fruitless.

Previous research as is described in chapter 2 gave the impression that lazy people procrastinate and that perceived stress could filter those who did it for other purposes then a lack of effort. However the results in figures 2,4 and 5 suggest that laziness is more than procrastinating without losing confidence in your abilities to finish your job in time. There could be other variables who could be included to describe laziness better. Kemme and Alonso (2000) propose workload.

Workload has been accounted for in this paper however it was part of the measurement scale of perceived stress and not as a standalone variable. In this paper workload was measured how much an employee was able to cope with day to day tasks (question 6 of the perceived stress scale). However it could also be that some people can afford to be lazy because their job demands are not that high instead of only being effective at their jobs.

Another variable could be motivation. The English dictionary described lazy people as “a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so”, in other words a lack of motivation. A lack of motivation could well be an indication of laziness. If an unmotivated employee is forced to do pointless tasks (from his point of view) we could see if he would take personal initiative in making these chores more enjoyable or easier/quicker to perform. More of this will be discussed in section 5.4.

Although it was not intended, this paper did establish the relation between power distance and personal initiative. Thereby confirming some previous thoughts on literature from for instance Frese et al. (1997) who said that personal initiative becomes more important when the surveillance function of a supervisor is decreased. Not only does it become more important, but following from the significant results, but personal initiative is also most likely to happen more in low power distance cultures. Though a significant relation was found this connection could be stronger supported if one were to find/create a power distance scale with an even higher Cronbach’s Alpha.

5.3 Limitations

Though this paper did not manage to find significant evidence that supports either the hypotheses that laziness motivates personal initiative or that a low power distance enhances this relation, it does not mean that these statements are not true. The only thing that is to say about this is that this paper was not able to find them in this amount of time. There are a couple of possible explanations why the results were different from what was expected.

It could have to do something with the sample. The sample of this paper consisted of only 73 participants, mostly between 20 and 30 years old and with an university degree. This is not completely representative of the Dutch population. This high group of most likely students could have intervened with the possible results. Most students do not have a full time job and since they do not have to cope with day to day business at a firm. Because of their part time status they might see less opportunity to take personal initiative, because they are not completely aware of everything that is going on in the organisation. Their less commitment at work could also be the reason why they might not experience

stress from work or see an opportunity to procrastinate, because they can leave whenever work is done due to their part-time status.

Some other reason why the results might be different from what was expected is that this survey is on a voluntarily base. It could be that the real lazy employees were lazy in such a way that they could not bring themselves to fill in the questionnaire. The fact that the survey was quite long could have demotivated those who mustered the courage to begin with it and it could be that at a certain point respondents just randomly filled in the questionnaire. The questions about stress management, power distance and procrastination were all almost at the end of the survey and it would explain why deleting a long questions like question 5 of power distance would increase the alpha’s Cronbach extremely, because people have not read the question right. Future investigation should try to do the investigation at one or multiple firms and make the questionnaire mandatory for its employees. Creating a shorter questionnaire, by only including questions that are needed for this research could surely help.

Another reason could be that respondents did not fill in the questionnaire truthfully. They could have been under the impression that the survey was not anonymous at all (although this was clearly stated multiple times) and feared for reprisals. Respondents also might not give truthful answers because they do not like the image they are given of themselves or they could be looking at certain things at a different perspective. Taking initiative by asking if someone wants to have coffee is completely different from taking personal initiative to organise a company trip. This paper tried to reduce this effect by letting an colleague fill in some of the questions, but a colleague might not have known the respondents thoughts completely and therefor gave misdirected answers.

A last option could be that a certain variable is missing in this model or that laziness has not been measured correctly in this paper. Chapter 5.2 suggest certain variables such as motivation and perceived workload, but there might be even more variables who influence the laziness of an employee.

5.4 Future Research

Though the theory suggested that procrastination and perceived stress seem to be the variables that can compound laziness, the results suggest otherwise. It could be that some other unknown scales represent laziness even better. Future research should aims to find out if these unknown scales exist and if one of these measures is indeed for instance perceived workload, motivation or another jet to be discovered variable. An exploratory qualitative research could provide more insight in this matter.

In an interview employee should be asked which of their co-workers they find lazy and why this is. The answers that the interviewed employees give should be coded into certain groups which might lead to some interesting results. Inductive qualitative research is better suited for the exploration of the variable laziness, because it could provide new insights as no major theory jet exist of what laziness is exactly to build from.

A way to get more insight in the relation between laziness and personal initiative a manager could purposely give some employees dull or pointless tasks to see if they take personal initiative in making the job easier or quicker to perform. A ethnographic study were the employee does not known that he is being observed would most likely give some helpful insights. However one could argue if it is ethical to purposely harass an employee with pointless tasks without him/her knowing that (s)he is being observed, just for the possibility of results.

6. Conclusion

This paper tried to grasp the concept of laziness and how it might motivate to take personal initiative in certain business environment. Though a significant connection was not found in this paper between laziness and personal initiative, it could still be true. However, as for now it means that managers should not automatically assign there laziest employees to solve the world biggest problems for practice, cause there is no evidence that it will turn out to be a winning strategy. An implication that can be used for practice is the fact that if an manager want his employees to show more initiative at work than he should look if she/he can lower the amount of control and supervision on his employees. Proof might not exist at the moment, but yours truly is convinced that the theory is rock solid, because from personal experience it becomes clear that “for a difficult paper, it takes a lazy author”.

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