Cold comfort firm: Lean organisation and the empirical mirage of the comfort zone

Abstract

This paper examines the provenance of the ‘comfort zone’ and argues that the claimed organisational and psychological benefits associated with moving outside this zone are illusory and unsupported by empirical evidence. Indeed, it will be suggested that such rhetoric, and the lean management practices it has informed, is based on a misreading of the theoretical models and findings from which it is derived. It is argued that this misreading reinforces a style of management based on the deliberate inducement of stress amongst employees in lean organisations. The paper concludes by considering if, how, and what employees might be able to recover from this double bind.

Keywords:

• comfort zone
• lean organisation
• stress
• eustress
• Yerkes–Dodson law
• workplace bullying

Notes

^†The title is a wordplay on Cold Comfort Farm a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932, which relates the attempts made by a level-headed urban woman to reorganise and modernise the badly managed farm owned by her relatives.

Winton (1987) and Teigen (1994) suggest that the publication of Broadhurst's paper elevating Yerkes and Dodson's tentative research findings to a ‘law’ served to bolster further the scientific status of behaviourist experimental psychology in the USA at a time when it was beginning to find support for its theoretical constructs (such as arousal) in neuroscientific research.

It is somewhat ironic in the context of this paper that ‘goodness of fit’ is a term used to describe how well statistical models (such as the inverted-U curve) are supported by empirical data. It also offers a further example of the way such models vacillate between description and normative/aesthetic prescription.