Two business professionals are given challenging new assignments, with the likelihood that successful performance will lead to better future opportunities. The employees’ experience and qualifications appear equal on paper, but the completed projects turn out to be dramatically different.

All aspects of one assignment -- project team morale, quality of work, speed of completion and overall project success -- are much higher than the other. The differences suggest that one leader is more adept at navigating the organization’s social and political environment, says Dr. Dwight Frink, chair of management at the University of Mississippi School of Business Administration.

“These social and political skills are basically a person’s set of abilities to read, understand and respond appropriately to the organization’s dynamics,” Frink says. “A professional who has these skills understands what kind of initiatives and agendas are important to the organization and how best to garner resources and direct activities for the benefit of the organization.”

Social and political skills can be both innate and learned, and organizations may benefit by teaching them, says Frink, a widely published scholar who focuses his research on the social influences in the workplace, including the subject of accountability.

“Having these skills means the business professional knows how to get things done and how to motivate other people. To say a person is savvy socially and politically sounds like a self-centered kind of thing. These skills can make the person more successful but they also make the organization more successful,” says the UM associate professor of management and holder of the PMB and William King Self Chair of Free Enterprise.

“One thing we find through studies conducted in this area is a large percentage of an employee’s performance evaluation is related to how politically skilled he or she is, and that doesn’t necessarily mean playing games with the system. This employee simply knows how to be effective within the system,” Frink says.

One study Frink cites focused on managers with high social and political skills who, in turn, had the most productive work groups.

“A better ability to understand the social and political landscape meant a stronger ability to work with the individual features and characteristics of their subordinates,” the UM professor says.

Frink is developing an instrument to measure political and social skills and plans to test it in terms of what other things might be related to a person’s success. Some individuals are naturally better at the social and political aspects, but the researcher believes people also can be taught to be more responsive to others.

“People can learn some of things to watch for in the workplace environment. For example, who are the natural leaders in the workgroup? If you develop relationships with those individuals, there’s a better chance that you can have some mutual support from them on projects. Through research it would be very useful to understand how much of these things can be learned, at what level do we teach this behavior, and at what level do we say, ‘You’re on your own,’” he says.

Frink also is investigating how accountability works and how accountability systems can be structured to best perform in the workplace. Somewhat surprisingly, accountability -- which is typically considered a necessary component of organizational activity -- is an underrepresented area in research.

“Accountability can take on a host of different forms with a host of different outcomes,” he says. “Accountability can lead to worse problems than an organization had without it.”

Accountability essentially is the idea that people have to answer for what they do and for decisions they make. There may be a number of people to whom they answer: supervisors, managers, external constituents, governmental agencies, customers who are purchasing the company’s products and society at large.

“Accountability can lead to different kinds of decision processes. Interestingly, we find that most of the things people do on a regular basis are done in terms of their assessments about the people who will be asking for answers. For example, if we (as employees) think we know what management is looking for and we can find an easy way to do that, then many times that’s the choice we’ll make. However, the easy solution is not always the best way to handle a project or decision for the organization. On the other hand, if we have a boss who is a strong, in-charge, go-getter-kind of leader, then as employees we’ll make decisions that are more along that line.”

Working to provide a better understanding of these social influences on the workplace, Frink is another leader in the UM School of Business Administration firmly connected to commerce.