Consider this. When the market was doing well in 2007, there was lot of attrition and IT professionals frequently jumped from one IT company to the other. If you had been a Project Manager during this time, you would have probably spent many hours trying to arrest the attrition or trying to figure out why your team members were quitting despite your best efforts. Similarly, around the same time engineering graduates from all streams were making a beeline for the IT industry. However, since the recession started the attrition had suddenly stopped and individuals are wary of taking up new jobs even if they are lucrative and so much so that fresh engineering graduates are not willing to touch the IT industry with a barge pole. Why does this happen?
Your Action
Behavioral psychologists call this as “Bandwagon Effect”. This is the tendency to do or not do things because many other people believe or do the same. Psychologists attribute Bandwagon effect to our fear that we might otherwise do poorly relative to our peers.
Your Action
As a
manager, you need to understand this Bandwagon Effect phenomenon and not
suspect your management skills. During the “attrition season”, you can be
selective in retaining your team members instead of trying to counsel and
convince every member to stay put.
