Bottom-Line Mentality.
The supervisor who insists you make yourself available by phone or text and read emails after hours on workdays, as well as your days off.
The supervisor with a persistent, pervasive “Whatever it takes” “No excuses” attitude at every meeting, completely oblivious to the eye rolls and sighs of resignation and frustration around the room.
The supervisor who routinely schedules several 2-4 hour long meetings during the work week, while simultaneously demanding project progress.
The supervisor who is completely okay with your sick child who needed to go to the emergency room laying on you during a Zoom meeting because you were told the meeting was mandatory. No excuses. (Yes, this was a real experience.)
This is Bottom-Line mentality, and it is devastating to team morale and productivity.
The insidious aspect of this mindset is that it comes across as the supervisor’s unbridled enthusiasm and drive for the organization’s goals. In reality, the supervisor is just driving the company’s primary objective: profit.
Bottom-line mentality refers to a “one-dimensional thinking that revolves around securing bottom-line outcomes to the neglect of competing priorities” (Lin et al., 2022).
Unfortunately for employees, this means that so-called “competing priorities” can include “moral and social norms, employee welfare, work quality, or justice concerns” (Lin et al., 2022).
In their study on bottom-line thinking, Lin, Yang, Quade and Chen (2022) put concept of this mindset very bluntly asking “How do supervisors who treat the bottom line as more important than anything else influence team success?” The fact that Lin et al. (2022) included moral and social norms, employee welfare and even justice concerns as elements that supervisors are willing to ignore or even entirely forego in pursuit of profit is extremely unsettling.
This suggests that the researchers have come across these issues so often in the workplace that they felt the need to include them in the study.
Is there any benefit at all to Bottom-Line Thinking?
Unsurprisingly, the study’s results found that supervisors with Bottom-Line Mentality drove their teams to actively avoid working toward goals, leading to lower team performance overall (Lin et al., 2022). The conclusion of the study insists that promoting team performance requires discouraging Bottom-Line Mentality in supervisors.
This is not the only study to record such results. The current body of organizational psychology research has begun to openly advise that prioritizing a company’s bottom line is detrimental to the life of a company, and despite best efforts, reflects poorly on the supervisors who insist on imposing this mindset.
What’s most remarkable feature about the Bottom-Line Mentality is how absolutely counterintuitive it really is. The most compelling reason for a supervisor, or company, to stop engaging in Bottom-Line Mentality is the very reason they do so in the first place: they think they’re protecting the company’s profits. But if Bottom-Line Mentality ultimately leads to mass quiet quitting among your employees, is it really worth it?
-The Penguins
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