Why are there so many jerks outside the private sector ?

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When I unsuccessfully transitioned out of the private sector. I was shocked by the number of jerks I had to contend with in my new workplace that eventually led to the demise of my regular salaried career. I fully admit my failure, but it is only recently that I managed to get a glimpse of an idea as to what went wrong.

There is an academic term for a jerk in the workplace. A jerk is an "interpersonal deviant". The typical jerk will say things like "what kind of school did you come from" when they detect weakness in their colleagues.

At a more personal level, I have two experiences to share on this blog :

• A superior called me into room and hectored me over some "improvements" I made to a table column on a Power-point slide. Her focus was not the merits of amendment, but how my amendment proved that I looked down on her because she does not have a First Class Honours for her first degree. She spent the rest of the time reminding me of her advanced degree qualifications. 
• Another superior, after the Little India riots, asked an Indian IT vendor whether they participated in the riots the day before. 
• This behavior was not new to this superior - she even told another superior to be careful when admitting a potential new team member because she was newly married and may create a manpower vacuum if she got pregnant.

In my decade in the private sector, I made my share of mistakes but I never encountered this kind of egregious behavior in the workplace in an MNC.

I finally managed to get some insight from The Economist's Bartleby article this week that explains the difference between the private and government sectors.

Imagine putting a private sector CEO or 6 Sigma expert to screen travelers who were hit by the corona virus. As the numbers infected are low, perhaps there will be cost savings if we just sampled a few passengers from a plane and reject the entire load if one test turns out positive. That would save costs for the taxpayer.

But this would be ridiculous behavior in the government sector. Problems faced by the government cannot be reduced into bottom line. Every action has to consider optics, multiple stakeholders and a lot of different KPIs exist.

Studies in the private sector show that removing a high-performing jerk from the office will mean that the team may lose it's best performer, but the rest of the team will eventually improve their performance, calculated by bottom line, by around 30%.

The government cannot flush out their deadwood and jerks from the organization. 

They don't even know what resources and hidden domain knowledge these folks have. They can't measure what are the improvements when a jerk gets removed from an organization. So they live with it, and eventually the entire organization normalizes jerk-like behavior.

There is a lesson to learn from all this. 

The best way to transition out of the private sector is to target agencies that are very close to the private sector, where there is a semblance of  a bottom line. MAS and EDB comes into mind but these agencies will be highly selective. 

If you are one of those older workers forced to leave the private sector, then good luck to you. Endurance and resilience are more important than actual competence.

Or you can be like me, transition with dividend income more than take home pay.