Managing the Game: How to make employees ‘choose’ their ‘already assigned’ roles?

This article is the text of a talk. I was asked to address a session to put amorphous minds of MBA students present there into a perspective before they embark on a learning drive. The audience is a group of future managers, who would carry the onus to build successful or failed organizations in coming times. 🙂

Let us talk about the experiment done by B.A. Baldwin and G.B Messe in 1979 titled ‘Social behavior in Pigs Studied by Operant Conditioning’. The experiment has two pigs inside a cage or a closed room, one is comparatively larger and is termed ‘dominant’ over the little pig or the ‘piglet’. The arrangement of the experiment is as follows:

1. There is a door in one corner of the room. A pig can open the door and have the food which is dispensed outside the door.
2. However, there is a lever at the diagonally opposite end of the enclosure.
3. To open the door, one needs to press the lever. Once the lever is pressed, the door remains open and food can be collected.

The quandary here is that as one pig runs to press the lever the other pig grabs the food. By the time the pig who has taken the effort to press the lever, who is the in-principle protagonist of the game, reaches the window to bag his deserving share, two developments dilute his returns:

1. The pig loafing around the window eats away a share of the food arrived leaving only a part of the dish available for the protagonist.
2. The pig running from the lever-end of the room expends some calories in running which adversely impacts the net return from consuming the left-over food. The utility cost negatively offsets the payoff.

These two reasons make the choice of pressing the lever least preferred. But this does not impact the desire of both the pigs in the room to consume food! In essence, the competitive dynamics of the game convert the participants into free-riders.

Game of Boxed Pigs:

Let us try to represent the situation in the form of a game. Each of the two pigs has two options: either PRESS the lever or WAIT for the other to press it. The one who doesn’t press the lever gets to the food first.

Units of food in the window-tray: 10 units.

• If both of them reach the dispenser at the same time, it is a 3,7 split: 3 for the small pig and 7 for the dominant one.
• If the piglet runs to press the lever and the large pig gets to food first, the split is 1,9: 1 for the small pig and 9 for the dominant one.
• If the small pig gets to food first while the bigger one has pushed the lever and is running back to the food dispenser, the split is 4,6.

A pig presses the panel at a utility cost of 2 units.

Offsetting the payoffs with this utility cost, we translate the situation into a 2 x 2 game.

Small Pig/Large Pig	Press	Wait
Press	1,5	-1,9
Wait	4,4	0,0

Keep yourself in shoes of the piglet and think:

• If the dominant pig chooses to press the lever, the piglet is better off waiting.
• If the dominant pig chooses to wait, the piglet is better off waiting.

Thus, in all circumstances, the piglet, if wise enough, would choose to wait. We assume that the large dominant animal sees this in advance and knows that the piglet has a ‘dominant strategy’ to wait. We will come back to it, in case it seems impractical. 🙂

Now, keep yourself in shoes of the dominant powerful pig and think:

• Given that the piglet chooses to wait, which is a better option for dominant animal?Hint: Focus only on the bottom row.

PRESS THE LEVER! He earns 4 units of as he presses the lever whereas he would earn 0 if he waited.

This is the game in numbers. Theoretically, two WISE players of the game are expected to co-operate such that the dominant of the two does more work while the little subdued one waits. Eventually both of them are happy with the result: not to miss that both are equally happy! (4 Utils each!).

Such a mutually settled outcome, when players have more than one choices in a game, is called Nash Equilibrium. Please note that Nash Equilibrium may not be the best solution!

But, of course, we do not expect pigs to do such calculations in advance. 🙂 I expect the dominant pig to make the poor piglet run around and reap majority of benefits.

Let us see what happens when this experiment is performed with real pigs.

When the set-up was introduced to one pig alone in the room, the following was the frequency (every fifteen minutes) of pressing the lever.

Alone	Frequency of pressing the lever per 15 minutes
Large Pig	75
Small Pig	70

However, when a large and a small pig were placed in the enclosure, there was a stark change observed in pigs’ behavior. The frequency of pushing the lever was different for different pigs now and was in tandem with the expected Nash Equilibrium.

Together	Frequency of pressing the lever per 15 minutes
Large Pig	105
Small Pig	5

There are some implications and some questions to be asked from this game of boxed pigs. We have tried to summarize these in points as under:

1. Is rationality so homogeneous?

A first glance at the situation with ‘pigs’ as players might have resulted into furrows on foreheads. It did, at least in our case. However, the results showed that it is: if not homogeneous, then at least not extremely rare.

1. Assuming rationality to be homogeneous, appreciate its magnitude and scope.

• ‘To press the lever’, ‘Run to have food’ and ‘Press the lever again’ was the sequence when a pig was alone.
• But, both pigs were judicious enough to know that the choices need a change when there are two in the cage. They were even capable to realize the disparities between their costs and payoffs.
• The ‘game in numbers’ was never visible or known to the players while they were playing it.
• Without being cognizant of comparative numerical advantages or disadvantages, pigs knew NOT to play a strictly dominated strategy and to play a strictly dominant strategy initially.
• They (at least the big pig) also were mindful to repeat the points above.

Thus, even in practice, two players of the game are WISE enough to co-operate such that the dominant of the two does more work while the little and subdued does less. Eventually both of them are happy with the result: not to miss that both are equally happy! (4 Utils each!).

Boxed Pigs in Organizations:

From an organization’s perspective, its expectations from employees are dressed as different roles. They often go in opposite directions.

• Some employees are expected to press the lever in a direction opposite to the food. This includes distribution of work and coordinating between members in the team, liaison with other teams in situations when cross-domain impact is substantial, document the progress, keep the work moving, identify gaps before the gaps become apparent and cause anomalies and the list goes on. You may see such roles being labelled as MANAGERS or SUPERVISORS.

• Some employees are expected to run towards the food. This includes the actuation of work heading towards completion, which is the tangible condition for your team to avail the food. Such people may be in initial stages of their careers or could be experienced and are in no way junior or senior to the former category.

Food is what the organization works for: the revenue, the reputation and the brand. It is the same food of which every employee gets a part: salary, reputation and the brand.

The two categories of employees, correspond to pigs in the cage, and they are expected to play a game similar to one described above and figure out Nash Equilibrium (or equilibria).

THE THIRD PLAYER: YOU

You, the company or the company’s CEO or the CEO’s cohort, are the third player and you are special to be so. I’ll tell you why.

It is because only the third player knows that there is a game like this is going on between the two. 🙂

But you are not knowing this just to be a spectator of the game. You have a job to do!

Understand the game. Though on the face of it, making someone move towards the food may appear an almost free lunch, it is actually not. The reality is that this arrangement fetches more returns to the company than a case where a single pig (employee) is handling both the tasks. In the experiment, this is symbolically indicated by difference in frequency (per fifteen minutes) of the entire task in the two tables. A single pig can do it 70 or 75 times whereas the team can make it happen 105 times. One may call this specialization of labor or the synergy in argots. 🙂

It is difficult for either of the two employees to understand

• the game
• the payoffs of the game, and most importantly
• things would go haywire if they do not choose their specific expected behavior.

Let’s go back to the experiment of pigs. Surprisingly, my anticipation that the dominant pig shall overpower the little subdued creature was proved wrong! Both animals were sensible as well as thoughtful.

I WONDER WHY DO THEY DO WHAT THEY DO? IS THERE A WAY TO MAKE THEM DO THAT?

What would you do if you were to ensure that the pigs do not choose the (WAIT, WAIT) option?

If I were you, I would design the cage with ‘dimensions’ which make both the pigs choose what I want them to. For example, if the dimensions are longer than they were, the bigger animal’s effort would have consumed more energy, making his payoff zero. In such a case he would have been indifferent between the two options! Or if I were to keep an extra pie of food only for the piglet near the lever, the piglet might have found pressing the lever a better option. The game might have been entirely different!

This is what you do as the third player and this is what many third players do not know that they should do it.

In organizations, both categories of employees may find sitting near the dispenser a better strategy just to have the food: for a disastrous game where the payoffs of the outcome are certain to be (0,0). In management argots, we may call it a free-rider problem. The employees as well as the company is sure to suffer in such a situation. It would something like this:

It is here that the management function of the company kicks in. You, as managers of present and the future, do not have to be, merely, the dominant large pigs of the game. That is not the reason for which you take up an MBA. Being that is too piggish. 🙂 But oh! Not even piggish: pigs are sensible.

 You have to be the third player designing the dimensions of this cage called ‘organization’. The dimensions may be in form of the power distance, extrinsic or intrinsic motivators, job characteristics of feedback, autonomy, task significance and skill variety, financial or non-financial incentives and much more which you shall learn with time and practice.

Good luck managers, and in case you happen to get allured by the easy choice of being the big dominant pig, do think and try answering the question: Would you have left your jobs to pursue management if your managers were good third players of this game? 🙂