Organizational morale is like a bank account

New joiners increase the account balance by huge amount. Spontaneously the balance decreases slowly. Some self-motivated engineers also add to the account continuously or atleast decrease the rate of decay. But the biggest withdrawal is by bad leaders. Many times it happens that bad leaders take charge for a short period of time, make a withdrawal causing some short-term organizational benefit like productivity increase and are pushed up the hierarchy. It takes lot of time for organization to know what the effect had been on the bank account, because organizations do not explicit measure them. In the knowledge industry if there is one number that managers have to manage, it is this bank account balance.

If you need to manage it, you need to measure it. Not only organizations should measure it as frequently as possible, but managers should know the effect of their individual actions on the account. If task demands an employee spending a late night at work, how much would be the withdrawal. If I give a movie ticket to employee, how much would be the deposit. And these amounts are not constant over time.