For decades, companies would often claim to put their customers first, but HCL Technologies Vineet Nayar was one of the first to openly put his company’s employees first.  His rationale was that if he treated his employees exceptionally, then they would in turn treat customers exceptionally, and all would be well.

This general thesis, that you should be nice to your employees if you want to get the best out of them, sounds intuitive, but was nonetheless proven to be the case by a new study from Binghamton University, State University at New York.

“Being benevolent is important because it can change the perception your followers have of you,” the researchers say. “If you feel that your leader or boss actually cares about you, you may feel more serious about the work you do for them.”

Being kind

The researchers wanted to test how big an impact kindness had on the performance of employees.  They examined around 1,000 people from the Taiwanese military, and another 200 full-time employees in the United States.  They were looking specifically at performance levels under three distinct leadership styles:

• Authoritarian-dominant leadership, whereby leaders usually asserted complete control and authority over their subordinates.
• Benevolence-dominant leadership, whereby the leaders main concern is the wellbeing of their subordinates.
• Classical paternalistic leadership, whereby a combination of the two aforementioned styles is used.

When the data was crunched, the researchers found that the authoritarian-dominant leadership style was almost universally associated with negative job performance.  The flipside was that benevolence-dominant leadership was almost universally found to have a positive impact upon job performance.

Interestingly, this the classical paternalistic style also had a strong impact upon performance, with similar results achieved as the benevolent style.  The authors believe this stretches all the way back to our childhoods.

“The parent and child relationship is the first leader-follower relationship that people experience. It can become a bit of a prototype of what we expect out of leadership going forward, and the paternalistic leadership style kind of resembles that of a parent,” they propose.

The right leadership

They believe that the results clearly show that providing support for employees is a vital part of the leaders role, alongside providing structure and setting expectations.  By providing help and guidance towards those goals however, the leader develops the social ties and support networks to help their team thrive.  Interestingly, the results were consistent across both the American and Taiwanese groups, despite the very different cultures, both in national and organizational terms.

“The consistency in the results across different cultures and different job types is fascinating. It suggests that the effectiveness of paternalistic leadership may be more broad-based than previously thought, and it may be all about how people respond to leaders and not about where they live or the type of work they do,” the authors say.

The team believe that the biggest takeaway leaders can glean from the results is that they should put equal emphasis on the wellbeing of their team as they do on whether the team is achieving the goals and targets set of them.

“Subordinates and employees are not tools or machines that you can just use. They are human beings and deserve to be treated with respect,” they conclude. “Make sure you are focusing on their well-being and helping them find the support they need, while also being clear about what your expectations and priorities are. This is a work-based version of ‘tough love’ often seen in parent-child relationships.”