The arc of current management thinking bends towards virtue. Co-operation is what makes teams purr. Low-ego empathy is the hallmark of a thoroughly modern boss. Purpose matters to employees as much as pay; society looms as large as shareholders. But appealing to people’s better nature, and ignoring their vices, is an incomplete approach. Nor is being good necessarily great for your own career.?

當前管理思想的弧線向美德傾斜。合作讓團隊充滿活力。低自我同理心是現(xiàn)代老板的標志。對員工來說，目標和薪酬一樣重要；社會和股東一樣重要。但訴諸于人們的善良本性，而忽視他們的惡習，是一種不完整的方法。做得好也不一定對你自己的職業(yè)生涯有好處。

Take a look at the seven capital virtues and the seven deadly sins laid out in Christian tradition. The virtues are chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience and humility; the vices are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath and pride.?

讓我們來看看基督教傳統(tǒng)中列出的七大美德和七宗罪。七大美德是貞潔、節(jié)制、仁愛、勤奮、善良、忍耐和謙卑；七宗罪則是色欲、貪食、貪婪、懶惰、嫉妒、憤怒和驕傲。

In aggregate the first set of qualities is the one for managers to emulate. Neither chaste charity nor lustful gluttony have much to recommend them as a management ethos; but only one is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Diligence clearly beats sloth. Greed is out of fashion. Aiyesha Dey of Harvard Business School and her co-authors have found that excessive materialism on the part of a chief executive can be a warning sign of fraudulent activity and out-of-control risk-taking. Pride is also increasingly seen as problematic: in a paper from 2018 academics identified narcissistic bosses by the size of their signatures and found a correlation with poor financial outcomes at the firms they ran.

總的來說，第一組品質(zhì)是管理者們要效仿的。無論是貞潔仁愛還是好色貪吃，都沒有什么值得推薦的管理精神；但只是要注意即將發(fā)生的訴訟。勤奮顯然能戰(zhàn)勝懶惰。貪婪已經(jīng)過時了。哈佛商學院的艾耶莎?戴伊和她的共同作者發(fā)現(xiàn)，首席執(zhí)行官過度的物質(zhì)主義可能是欺詐活動和失控的冒險行為的警告信號。驕傲也越來越被視為問題：在2018年的一篇論文中，學者們通過簽名的大小來識別自戀的老板，并發(fā)現(xiàn)自戀老板與他們所經(jīng)營的公司財務狀況不佳之間的相關性。

Yet saintliness is rare and sinfulness can be underrated. Take envy, for example. By design organisations rely on competition as well as co-operation. A kind person might well be content to applaud other people for their success. An envious one will see someone to catch up with.

然而，圣潔是罕見的，罪惡可能會被低估。以嫉妒為例。從設計上講，組織既依賴于競爭，也依賴于合作。一個善良的人很可能滿足于為別人的成功鼓掌。一個嫉妒的人會看到有人可以追趕。

Psychologists distinguish between malign and benign versions of envy. In one, people try to close gaps in status by bringing others down. In the other, they are motivated to improve their own performance. A recent paper by Danielle Tussing of the University at Buffalo and colleagues discovered a third type of behaviour: people who skipped work or even quit their jobs in order to avoid feelings of envy. Understanding such emotions is a step towards harnessing them.

心理學家區(qū)分了惡性嫉妒和良性嫉妒。一種是，人們試圖通過貶低他人來縮小地位差距。另一種是，他們有動力提高自己的表現(xiàn)。布法羅大學的丹妮爾·圖辛和他的同事在最近的一篇論文中發(fā)現(xiàn)了第三種行為:人們?yōu)榱吮苊饧刀矢卸鴷绻ど踔赁o職。理解這些情緒是駕馭它們的一步。

Pride can also lead to greater effort (as well as to gigantic signatures). In an elegant paper looking into the performance of German fighter pilots in the second world war, Philipp Ager of the University of Mannheim and other researchers found that personal rivalry fuelled risk-taking behaviour. When pilots received public recognition for their exploits in a daily bulletin to the German armed forces, peers with whom they had flown in the past redoubled their own efforts. Something propelled them to fly more missions, even though that meant a greater chance of being killed, and it wasn’t humility.

驕傲也會讓你付出更大的努力(以及巨大的簽名)。曼海姆大學的菲利普?阿格和其他研究人員在一篇研究二戰(zhàn)中德國戰(zhàn)斗機飛行員表現(xiàn)的簡明論文中發(fā)現(xiàn)，個人競爭助長了冒險行為。當飛行員的功績在德國武裝部隊的每日公報中得到公眾認可時，與他們一起飛行的同行們也加倍努力。某種東西推動他們執(zhí)行更多的任務，即使這意味著更大的死亡幾率，但這不是謙遜。

Patience may be a virtue, but it is not always the best quality in a leader. Research on the impact of managers’ moods on performance is pretty thin: one deeply unpersuasive paper from 2017 used facial-recognition software to analyse ceos’ TV appearances and concluded that expressions of anger and fear were associated with improved profitability in the following quarter. Yet forbearance can plainly go too far. Anyone who has worked in an office knows that the boss’s wrath can sometimes be the only thing that gets things moving.

忍耐可能是一種美德，但它并不總是領導者的最佳品質(zhì)。關于管理者情緒對業(yè)績影響的研究相當少：2017年的一篇非常缺乏說服力的論文使用面部識別軟件分析了首席執(zhí)行官在電視上的表現(xiàn)，得出的結論是，憤怒和恐懼的表情與下一個季度盈利能力的提高有關。然而，忍耐顯然會走得更遠。任何在辦公室工作過的人都知道，老板的憤怒有時可能是推動事情前進的唯一因素。

Greed is not something to admit to in polite society but acquisitiveness still motivates an awful lot of people. In their research into CEO behaviour Ms Dey and her co-authors defined excessive materialism as owning a private home worth twice as much as the median house in the area; owning a car worth more than $75,000; or owning a boat that was longer than 25 feet. Of her sample of CEOs, fully 58% ticked one or more of these boxes; only 42% counted as frugal.

在上流社會，人們不愿承認貪婪，但是貪婪仍然激勵著很多人。在對首席執(zhí)行官行為的研究中，戴伊和她的共同作者將過度物質(zhì)主義定義為擁有一套價值是當?shù)胤績r中位數(shù)兩倍的私人住宅；擁有一輛價值超過7.5萬美元的汽車；或者擁有一艘超過25英尺長的船。在她調(diào)查的CEO樣本中，有整整58%的人選擇了上述一個或多個選項；只有42%的人認為自己節(jié)儉。

Gluttony may not fuel ambition but it could well be a side-effect of the hierarchies that characterise companies. Research experiments in which strangers are assigned a high-status role and a low-status role and put in a room together have found that those placed in positions of authority help themselves to more biscuits than the others. Even people who mean well may end up behaving badly if they acquire power.?

貪吃可能不會激發(fā)野心，但它很可能是公司等級制度的一個副作用。在一些研究實驗中，把陌生人分別分到一個地位高的角色和一個地位低的角色，并把他們放在一個房間里。實驗發(fā)現(xiàn)，處于權威地位的人會比其他人享用更多的餅干。即使是那些本意良好的人，一旦獲得權力，也可能最終表現(xiàn)得很糟糕。

If management is about getting the best out of people, it helps to understand base behaviours as well as noble ones. Employees are humans and humans are complex. They seek to improve the world and would quite like their own swimming pool. They want to mentor the disadvantaged and see their rivals fail miserably. They grab the biscuits.

如果管理是為了讓人們發(fā)揮最大的作用，那么它有助于理解卑劣的行為和高尚的行為。員工是人，而人是復雜的。他們尋求改善世界，又很想擁有自己的游泳池。他們想要成為弱勢群體的導師，又想看著自己的對手慘敗。他們會搶走餅干。