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Introducing the BPS Occupational Digest

2011-12-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is a place for news, reviews and reports on how psychology matters in the workplace. It's intended for HR professionals, occupational psychologists, managers, consultants, students or anyone who is curious about how people operate at work and ideas on how to improve that.

This blog is produced by the British Psychological Society to promote psychology and make it more accessible. It builds on the successes of its inspiration the BPS Research Digest and magazine The Psychologist. The Occupational Digest is funded by the Division of Occupational Psychology, the part of the Society that looks after that profession in the UK.

We have a lot of ideas on how to make this site valuable, accessible, and distinctive. Our initial priority will be summary reports of research findings, following the format that made the Research Digest such a success. Over the coming months, we will be looking to you to help us understand what is most useful - so we can do more of it! One way to do this is to use the comments function for this, or any post: acess this by clicking where it says 0 comments (or 1, or 14) at the bottom of the post. Alternatively you may contact me directly by email on alex [dot] fradera [at] gmail [dot] com.

I'm your editor, Alex Fradera, and I look forward to the conversation we're about to start.

Formal mentoring relationships gain momentum over time

2011-12-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

Thesupport that mentors offer can have considerable benefits, for boththeir proteges and the organisation at large. Recognising this, manydevelop formal mentoring programs to encourage and manage thisprocess. However, such a managed system provides different conditionsto an informal one, where parties identify an alignment of person andcircumstance. Frankie Weinberg and Melenie Lankau at the Universityof Georgia decided to explore what this means for mentorcontributions within formal mentoring relationships.

Weinbergand Lankau worked with a voluntary nine month mentoring program wherementor-protege pairs were formed by the organisation's executivecommittee; 110 such pairs joined their research. Questionnaires wereused to understand how much time mentors dedicated to therelationship, and how much they felt they were fulfilling variousmentoring functions: providing career guidance, psychosocial support,and role modelling good behaviours.

Mentoringrelationships are understood to move through phases, so the authorssampled mentors views twice: two months into the program and onemonth after its end. This allowed study of the initiation phase,where each party gets the feel of the other, and the followingcultivation phase, which insight and the relationship deepens.Mentoring activity is expected to be optimised during the cultivationphase, so Weinberg and Lankau investigated the relationship betweenthe time spent on mentoring, and the mentoring functions on offer.Time spent on mentoring increased all three mentoring functions duringinitiation (time one), but by the cultivation phase, time expendedwas even more strongly associated with enhanced mentoring function,suggesting an hour of mentoring is worth more during cultivation thanduring initiation.

Weinbergand Lankau were concerned that mixed-sex pairs may suffer in aformalised context, as weaker resemblance can lead mentors to investless effort than when working with a 'younger version of me'. Indeed,during the initiation period, mentors paired with proteges of theother sex overall reported providing lower levels of all threementoring functions. However, once they had reached the cultivationstage, these mixed-sex penalties disappeared for psychosocial supportand role-modelling, suggesting that increased familiarity managed toerode some of these barriers.

Thisstudy clearly evidences how formal mentoring relationships gainmomentum: after the initiation phase, investments into therelationship yield greater dividends and impediments to therelationship tend to be shucked off. So organisations consideringformal mentoring should ensure that the relationships they cultivatehave the time that they need to blossom.

Weinberg, F., & Lankau, M. (2010). Formal Mentoring Programs: A Mentor-Centric and Longitudinal Analysis Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1527-1557 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309349310

What makes a great programmer?

2011-11-28T07:52:00.000-08:00

Experience and brutebrainpower enhance programming skill by helping programming knowledgeto build over time, rather than by directly boosting currentperformance, according to a new article in the Journal of IndividualDifferences.

Authors Gunnar RyeBergersen and Jan-Eric Gustafsson put 65 professional programmersthrough their paces for two straight days, tackling twelve meatytasks in the Java language to prove their programming skill; this waswhat the study ultimately wanted to better understand.

Participants all filledin an extensive questionnaire on Java programming knowledge. Someparticipants also completed a suite of tasks involving memorisingitems (e.g. letters) while simultaneously handling another task suchas checking sentences for errors. These measure working memory, thecomponent of mind that keeps things available for consciousprocessing, and related to 'g', our proposed fundamental level ofmental ability. Unfortunately working memory scores for over half theparticipants weren't taken due to logistical issues.

The authors modelledthe relationships between all variables, including years of workexperience, and found the best predictor of programming skill wasprogramming knowledge: it loaded onto skill with a value of .77, where one would meanperfect prediction. Once knowledge was taken into account, aprogrammer's skill didn't benefit from better working memory orlonger experience. Rather, these variables seem to matter earlier inthe process by building better knowledge: working memory to help theprogrammer make sense of complex concepts, experience to provide thetime for this to happen.

You can't get by in theprogramming industry with a static knowledge base, so working memoryand a sharp mind will always be in demand in the profession. Indeed,observing that their data found an association between working memoryand programming experience, the authors speculate that wannabes withpoor working memory are more likely to leave the profession entirely.But this study asks us to recognise that a whizzprogrammer's competence is thanks to applying that brainpower tolearning their trade.

Bergersen, G., & Gustafsson, J. (2011). Programming Skill, Knowledge, and Working Memory Among Professional Software Developers from an Investment Theory Perspective. Journal of Individual Differences, 32 (4), 201-209 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000052

Cynicism is bad for business

2011-11-25T05:14:00.000-08:00

When someone we trust takes us for a ride, the bump back to earth is something we're unlikely to forget. But when we suspiciously reject an offer from someone else, we may never know what we've missed out on due to too little trust. Over time, such asymmetries in feedback can tip us toward an unwarranted cynical stance. It's clear that cynicism is as unhelpful a bias as naivety: it leads to guarded communication, reduced sharing, and more self-serving biases, all of which may cause interactions to nosedive. A recent review by Chia-Jung Tsay and his team from Harvard Business School may help us understand cynicism and how it develops.

The review identifies some key triggers that enhance cynicism, including:

Being new to negotiation - novices are more likely to believe that negotiation is always competitive;
Thinking about the power of influence; for instance, knowledge that another party is a sales expert leads negotiators to suspect their offers more;
Inclusion of a shady character - negotiating groups take the least trustworthy individual in the other group as the best indicator of group trustworthiness;
Clear power asymmetries - people expect more misrepresentations from authorities with access to hidden information.

The authors point to a range of studies where participants reject offers that are in their rational best interest because of lurking cynicism that puts them off the whole venture. They warn us that the consequence is that "cynicism regarding others' motivations may become a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves both sides worse off than would otherwise be the case." Happily, the review concludes with some advice we might take on to chart a better course:

perspective-taking to recognise your 'opponent' is an active party in negotiations, cultivating a "healthy skepticism" that considers a full range of motives on their part;
act with integrity - it increases the likelihood the other party will;
encourage a level playing field that minimises hidden information;
foster repeated exposure to specific negotiators to build a history of trust that is costly to undermine.

Try the techniques out, you won't regret it. Trust me.

Tsay, C., Shu, L., & Bazerman, M. (2011). Naïveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts The Academy of Management Annals, 5 (1), 495-518 DOI: 10.1080/19416520.2011.587283

Provoking behaviour: training roleplayers at assessment centres

2011-11-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

Assessment days for evaluating work-relevant behaviours ofapplicants or job incumbents often draw on actors to perform as difficultteam-members or curious clients in meeting simulations. A recent study hasshown that these role-playing actors can be trained to effectively weave pre-writtendialogue prompts into the improvised simulations. However, whether this helpsmeasurement of participant behaviours is less clear.

The study authors Eveline Schollaert and Filip Lievens gave19 role-players training, which in one condition included explicit guidance onusing behaviour-eliciting prompts during assessment exercises; for example,"Mention that you feel bad about it" in order to provoke behavioursrelating to a dimension of interpersonal sensitivity. Such prompts are often provided in prep material, but actual usage was unknown. The authors wondered whetherrole-players could realistically increase their prompt usage through training, or whether this istoo much to ask an actor in the thick of a dynamic interaction.

At a subsequent assessment centre, the role-playersinteracted in simulations with 233 students from Ghent University. Role-playerswith prompt training were able to incorporate four to five times more promptsthan those without such training, an increase from about two prompts perexercise to 10-12.

More prompts ought to elicit more relevant behaviours, so theauthors expected observers to get a better picture of true 'candidate'performance. But this isn't clear. In the high-prompt condition, pairs ofraters watching the same role-play didn't agree any more on their ratings,suggesting the behaviours remained just as obscured as without prompts. Thatsaid, there was better correspondence of some of the ratings to other measurementsyou would expect to be related - for instance, interpersonal sensitivitycorrelated better with an Agreeableness personality score acquired pre-centre.But half of the predicted increases in correlation weren't observed.

Regarding their unsupported hypotheses, the authors wonderwhether the rating assessors should also have been trained on prompt use toencourage sensitivity to candidate reactions. I have additional concerns on thenature of the assessors -minimally trained masters students - used to drawconclusions about a professionalised domain. Nonetheless, this rare examinationof role-player impact on face to face assessments suggests training cangenerate more dimension-focused contributions, which in turn may result inmeasurements with more predictive power.

Schollaert, E., & Lievens, F. (2011). The Use of Role-Player Prompts in Assessment Center Exercises International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 19 (2), 190-197 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2011.00546.x

MBA early career challenges: handling others and reconceiving yourself

2011-11-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

MBA courses are meant to prepare their students to become effective business leaders, and give a lot of attention to that goal. This mid-late career focus makes it reasonable to wonder how MBA graduates are equipped for their earlier career, when they take their classroom knowledge to a managerial role with significant responsibilities. Beth Benjamin and Charles O'Reilly of Stanford University conducted a qualitative investigation into early-career challenges for 55 such “manager-graduates”, to understand the near-term needs of a newly minted MBA, and hence how their course could leave them better prepared.

Their interviews, exploring especially challenging episodes in the early career of these manager-graduates, illustrated how an educational experience emphasising analytical problem solving, graft, and individual success, inevitably shapes a more task-oriented approach. Often knowing 'what' to do, the manager-graduate is less sure on 'how to do it', notably in the social dimension.

Aggressively outdoing his peers to wind up with a promotion, one interviewee entered his role only to have several team members - once his peers - walk out. His learning from this was to “treat your peers as though they might someday be your boss or direct reports.” Another trap was assuming that others share your approach, motivation and skills towards work issues; this can lead to overly relaxed expectation-setting or misjudging how to motivate others for a new direction. One interviewee baldly stated "[Business School] doesn’t prepare you to manage a wide swatch of people", such as those whose life doesn’t revolve around business excellence.

Another theme of the research was the need for manager-graduates to shift mind-set. They needed to flourish when their role didn't provide opportunity for direct personal achievements, by embracing being a "caretaker for something larger than myself". They also needed to cope with, and learn from, personal disappointments, which can be a real challenge for a perennial straight-A student unused to such situations.

All the challenges represented some form of transition point, where the manager-graduate had to drop old assumptions, turn to different skills, renegotiate relationships or take a new approach. Such transitions are vital times for spurring learning forward, but can be problematic if they come before the individual is ready for them.

Benjamin and O'Reilly fear the MBA system doesn't accomplish this preparation, as "teaching leadership principles without sufficient application opportunities runs the risk of making complex leadership concepts appear simple and obvious"; for instance, we should be empathic leaders - but how do we manage that? Although applied learning does occur in MBAs, they feel there is a need for better integration, to understand the how in the context of the what, to provide their students well-practiced strategies to carry them through the situations of stress that will undoubtedly define their early career.

Benjamin, B., & O'Reilly, C. (2011). Becoming a Leader: Early Career Challenges Faced by MBA Graduates The Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10 (3), 452-472 DOI: 10.5465/amle.2011.0002

Extreme numbers influence initial salary offers

2011-11-08T01:30:00.000-08:00

Despite some schools of thought, it's generally to your advantage to name a price first in negotiations. This is thanks to the anchoring effect, where presenting a value skews later judgments towards it. There is plenty of evidence that setting salary for a new role is influenced by relevant anchors, such as the applicant stating their previous pay or expectations for this job. But decision-making research suggests that estimates and attributions can be influenced by even arbitrary and extreme anchors. Todd Thorsteinson at the University of Idaho set about seeing how crazy numbers might also shape take-home pay.

206 psychology students were asked to make a salary suggestion for a desirable job applicant question. Participants were presented with the applicant's description including two anchors: a realistic one of the applicant's previous salary ($29,000), and an unusual one of either $100k or $1, embedded within a joking statement they made about their salary expectations. The joking context was considered necessary to allow the unusual anchor to be presented without triggering other effects, like being considered overly arrogant or having poor judgment. Participants given the high unusual anchor awarded a higher salary than both those given the low unusual anchor and a control condition with just the realistic anchor.

A second experiment asked its 150 participants to additionally record their perceptions when reading about the applicant, and introduced an even more extreme anchor: one million dollars. Participants were not put off by the extreme anchor, perceiving it as just as plausible and influential as the $100k reference, and in both cases ended up offering the applicant a higher salary than when these high anchors were absent. So, just as in the literature on estimation, even radically inappropriate anchors can sway decisions. It's worth noting too that the unusual anchors had their effect despite being presented alongside realistic ones, as some studies have suggested that in such situations we may simply defer to the more plausible. That wasn't the case here.

There are risks to naming a salary first, such as underselling yourself or pricking the sensibilities of the hirer. So using a joke to introduce an anchoring value may be a safer bet. Organisations may of course respond: using clearly defined pay ranges and clear criteria to shape a fair financial offer for a desired candidate. Both parties should take seriously the power of framing the financial borders of a negotiation.

THORSTEINSON, T. (2011). Initiating Salary Discussions With an Extreme Request: Anchoring Effects on Initial Salary Offers1 Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41 (7), 1774-1792 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00779.x

Stuck on your ideas: fixation in group brainstorms

2011-10-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

Brainstorming, when people gather to generate ideas together, is great in theory: many perspectives mesh to generate diverse outputs. In practice, evidence shows that brainstorming groups often perform more poorly than an equivalent number of soloists (often called a 'nominal' group). Some reasons are social, such as a pressure not to offer wild ideas in public; these can be mitigated by changing norms or tweaking process, e.g. sharing ideas anonymously using computers. A recent article focuses on the other side of the equation: the mental or cognitive narrowing that happens when you hear others' ideas.

Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith ran a series of studies with undergraduate students, who spent twenty minutes on a computer responding to the challenge "List ways in which to improve Texas A&M University." Half the participants were in brainstorming groups, accessing the ideas of three other group members in a chat window, whereas the others worked independently with their outputs combined after the fact to make nominal groups. The first experiment affirmed that nominal groups did better – they accessed more categories of idea, and had more ideas overall.

Kohn and Smith suspected something called cognitive fixation, where being exposed to another's idea makes it more salient in your mind and blocks ideas of other types. They examined this in experiment two, where each participant was grouped with a single partner who was actually a confederate of the experimenters. This allowed them to systematically manipulate the number of ideas a participant saw in their chat window, presenting between one and twenty typical ideas from the most common categories generated in experiment one, such as Transportation or Food.

As expected, a high number of cues led to less novel ideas within fewer categories, which were rarely the uncued, uncommon ones. However, the overall number of ideas was not significantly affected, meaning candidates went more deeply into those fewer categories that they did consider. This suggests fixation: inspired by – but stuck on – the concepts presented to them.

A final experiment suggested that fixation can be shaken by taking a break. Participants who had been fed typical cues during just the first half of the study generated 86% more ideas and explored 57% more categories in the second half if they were put to work on an unrelated five-minute task in between. The break had no effect when participants were not exposed to fixation cues in the first half.

Although brainstorming didn't outperform a nominal group, the study suggests instances where it might be preferred: "if the goal is to explore a few categories in depth, then interaction among the members should be encouraged", preferably with a break and time to work more independently. Conversely, when you are after variety and uniqueness of ideas, cognitive fixation on obvious topics may be a risk. One solutions is to elicit opportunities for solo free thinking, and have these outputs brought to the table instead; another might be to use techniques to guide thinking towards the fringes rather than gravitating back to our common concerns.

Kohn, N., & Smith, S. (2011). Collaborative fixation: Effects of others' ideas on brainstorming Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (3), 359-371 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1699

Black and white applicants more engaged by diversity-friendly recruitment websites

2011-10-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

Organisations don't make recruitment websites for their own gratification, but to attract applicants. Ideally, they want informed ones who've gathered a realistic sense of whether the organisation is for them. So recruiters should take note: a recent study has shown that sites that present cues of racial diversity encourage both black and white applicants to browse for longer and encode more information about the organisation.

H. Jack Walker and colleagues had expected that racial diversity cues such as images and testimonials would appeal to black applicants, by indicating that the organisation was sympathetic to their identity. Rather than just surveying attitudes, the team went beyond previous studies by looking at what applicants did during and remembered following site browsing.

In a first study, 141 students evaluated a website of a fictional website, which under one condition included a diversity cue - two of four company representatives on the "Meet Our People" page were black - whereas under the other condition all four reps were white. A second study increased real-world validity by asking 73 students to make judgements about two genuine company sites with high or low diversity cues.

In both studies, the black students (around a third of each sample) were able to recall more details about the organisation when tested two to three weeks after when they had been browsing a website containing strong diversity cues. The first study measured browsing time too, and found the black students spent more time on those websites. But all this was also true of the white students: the effects were slightly less pronounced - there was an interaction between presence of cue and applicant race - but they were there nonetheless.

Straight off, I should emphasise that use of diversity cues needs to be sincere: misselling an organisation as diversity friendly is a clear recipe for disaster for applicant and employer alike. With that in mind, there would be ample reason to put sincere diversity cues in recruitment websites even if the effect had been limited to black applicants. Even neglecting the wider social effects, increasing diversity in an organisation widens its talent pool, can improve its performance and makes it more attractive to a broader customer base. But the current study suggests that for black and white applicants, sites containing such cues "are more likely to maintain applicant interest so that website viewers evaluate and retain more website information". In a world of short attention spans, that's got to be worth a lot.

Walker, H., Feild, H., Bernerth, J., & Becton, J. (2011). Diversity cues on recruitment websites: Investigating the effects on job seekers' information processing. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0025847

Charisma involves teachable behaviours

2011-10-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

Is charisma innate or can we acquire it? This question has preoccupied scholars of leadership certainly since Max Weber proposed it was a gift "not accessible to everybody" over a century ago. Research suggests charismatic leadership - the use of ideology and emotion to rouse feeling and motivations - involves explicit behaviours, such as body language techniques, showing moral conviction and using metaphor. Is it possible to teach these so-called charismatic leader tactics (CLTs), and does this lead to higher attributions of charisma? There have been promising studies, but to date there hasn't been a study that investigated mature working adults and used a control group.

Enter a team from the University of Lausanne, headed by John Antonakis. Their first study recruited 34 managers who underwent a 360-degree process, each receiving ratings of charisma and leadership prototypicality (how much they resemble a leader) from themselves and around ten other co-workers. One month later, half the managers experienced a charisma training intervention, which included presentation of the various CLTs and practical sessions. Three months after the intervention, all managers again received 360 ratings using an altered rating scale to avoid undue influence from the last process. Managers who underwent training saw their charisma ratings significantly grow, relative to those who didn't.

There remained a possibility that these effects weren't the result of CLTs but due to raised confidence or self-awareness due to the training. So a second, study looked directly at the effects of CLTs in a controlled laboratory setting. 41 participants from an MBA course made speeches as part of their course requirements. After a bout of charisma training, they were asked to give the speech again, making changes in light of the training but preserving its core content. Films of every speech were given to trained coders who determined how many of the CLTs were present in a given speech, confirming they were more frequent after the training. Speeches with more CLTs - determined by the coder group - received higher ratings from a separate rater group on trust, competence, influence, affect (emotion) and leader prototypicality.

The authors emphasise there are no quick fixes - the training involved a real commitment of time - and that inexperienced overuse of CLTs can lead to self-parody, with pantomime hand gesture and excruciating metaphor. But as the study demonstrates, charisma is at least partly the result of adopting tactics that are transferable and learnable.

Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). Can Charisma Be Taught? Tests of Two Interventions The Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10 (3), 374-396 DOI: 10.5465/amle.2010.0012

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For those interested, here are the Charismatic Leader Tactics: the verbal techniques

framing through metaphor
stories and anecdotes
demonstrating moral conviction
sharing the sentiments of the collective
setting high expectations
communicating confidence
using rhetorical devices such as contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions

together with non-verbal tactics such as body gesture, facial expression, and animated voice tone.

Offering pseudo opportunities for expression to employees leads to conflict and withdrawal of voice

2011-10-20T03:44:00.000-07:00

Giving organisational members a say on work-related issues is well understood to heighten a sense of trust, respect and fairness. But a manager who invites opinions may not be planning to consider them. They may want to increase employee engagement through paying lip service to 'dialogue'; they may be an autocrat who feels obliged to appear consistent with the organisation's ethos; they may be reflexively doing something they were told to do at business school. So what happens when the opportunity to express is a case of 'pseudo voice' ... and the employees know it?

Gerdien de Vries, Baren Jehn and Bart Terwel investigated this issue by collecting survey data from 137 workers in a Dutch healthcare institution. Each participant rated the presence of two facets necessary for pseudo voice: did they have opportunity to express their voice? and did they believe their manager would disregard it? When the interaction between these was high, employees tended to give low scores to another measure, the extent to which they took opportunities to voice their opinions. In other words, perceiving deceit led to employees keeping their perspectives on issues to themselves.

The participants also rated the amount of intragroup conflict they experienced. De Vreis and colleagues suspected that when employees withdraw voice because they perceive the opportunity as a sham, conflict may increase: employees respond to this 'organisational illegitimacy' by refusing to play by the rules themselves, or squabble with colleagues in a displaced attempt to reclaim some kind of control. The data duly demonstrated this: participants who perceived pseudo voice experienced more team conflict than those who believed their managers were sincere.

Providing employees with voice is important; as well as its cohesive effects, it provides the organisation with a diversity of perspectives. As its authors note, this study is useful as it "provides a better understanding of the conditions under which offering voice opportunity to employees is likely to backfire" - namely, when they are seen as insincere and deceptive. It's notable that in this study, managers indicated a disregard for voice higher than employees suspected, suggesting if anything the employees were credulous rather than cynical towards management contempt for their opinions. But Machiavellian managers who think an unread suggestion box is a worthwhile gamble should beware; as this study shows, the costs to organisational functioning can be substantial.

(Thanks to reader Chris Woock for bringing this article to the Digest's attention.)

Vries, G., Jehn, K., & Terwel, B. (2011). When Employees Stop Talking and Start Fighting: The Detrimental Effects of Pseudo Voice in Organizations Journal of Business Ethics DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-0960-4

When work and home collide, your take on time matters

2011-10-14T03:24:00.000-07:00

Tension between work and family life is an understandable concern for organisations. As research on how it affects organisational commitment has been equivocal, many researchers are looking for individual differences that may mediate these relationships. A recent article suggests one such difference may relate to how you answer the question: what does the future hold?

A research team led by Darren Treadwell drew on the sociological theory of socioemotional selectivity, proposing that a person's motivations are partly guided by their take on the future. If you regard time in your position as expansive or limitless, you possess a deep time perspective, and are more likely to use your time instrumentally to build for the future. A shallow time perspective means you see the end of your tenure as imminent, and are keener to get those rewards you can in the here and now. The team reasoned that these different perspectives may mediate how we feel when work and home collide.

The researchers constructed a survey that looked at two facets of organisational commitment. Questions like "This organisation has a great deal of personal meaning for me" covered the affective facet, whereas the more pragmatic one, called 'continuance commitment', established whether for example "Too much in my life would be disrupted if I decided I wanted to leave my organisation". They also included items on time perspective and degree of inter-role conflict - both work-family conflict (WFC) where work clashes with family responsibilities, and its mirror, FWC.

Survey data was collected from a sample of 291 staff from a retail firm. For participants with a shallow time perspective, continuance commitment was eroded by higher WFC - they were sensitive to disruptions of their out-of-hours 'good life', and more likely to consider the costs and benefits of shipping out. But the attitude of their deep-time colleagues didn't waver under the same conditions.

Affective commitment suffered when WFC was prominent, with participants falling out of love with the job when it hurt their home life. But participants with a deep time perspective also disengaged when family duties impacted work. This seems to reflect a frustration that work ambitions have become difficult to accomplish, leading to disenchantment and a shift to treating the workplace even more instrumentally.

This type of research is crucial in revealing the complex shape of important phenomena like inter-role conflict: why it may lead some employees to withdraw into a transactional relationship, and others to question their very presence in the organisation. As workplace engagement remains high on the agenda so these questions will continue to be front of mind.

Darren C. Treadwell, Allison B. Duke, Pamela L. Perrewe, Jacob W. Breland, & Joseph M. Goodman (2011). Time May Change Me: The Impact of Future Time Perspective on the Relationship Between Work–Family Demands and Employee Commitment Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41 (7), 1659-1679 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00777.x

Managers in the middle shape change their own way

2011-10-07T07:34:00.000-07:00

The middle child can be an awkward position in a family, and this is just as true in the workplace. Middle management juggle responsibilities to their reports and their managers, a feat trickiest when leadership decide that the organisation needs to change. Do they dutifully implement the bosses' plans, or cling to the manageable status quo? A recent qualitative study suggests this group take a third role, of ambivalent change agents.

Edel Conway and Kathy Monks of Dublin City University conducted interviews in the Irish Health Service, a 93,000-strong organisation, then undergoing a large top-down change. They asked 23 middle managers to talk about a major change event that they had experienced recently; around half chose the top-down strategic initiative while the others recounted a change they themselves had initiated.

The strategic initiative came in for criticism, with middle managers quick to point out issues like increases in workload, uncertainty about direction of travel, and a lack of ownership. Yet the same cohort were enthusiastic when discussing their own change ideas. They revealed a set of pragmatic tactics, such as beginning with a small number of enthusiastic staff as a catalyst within their department. They understood the importance of communications, reflecting the frustrations they felt when they were left in the dark. The general philosophy was noted by one participant:

I think the difference was that we said "we have an idea, can we talk to you about how it might work" Whereas with the other [top-down] one, it is: “we have an idea and this is how it is going to work.”

Some of this may simply reflect a tendency to prefer our own ideas to those imposed on us. But it certainly contests the idea that middle management are simply resistant to change. Through the nature of their in-between position in the organisation, Conway and Monks see them as ambivalent agents, able to see the many facets of a process of change, critiquing problematic ones and finding concrete ways to realise others.

The authors note that middle manager initiatives “were in many cases providing the solutions that the top-down change was intended to enforce: reductions in waiting lists, improvements in patient care.” And they warn that though the middle manager layer is a tempting target for reducing salary costs in pinched public services “wholesale elimination of such positions may have negative repercussions for the success of change initiatives.”

Conway, E., & Monks, K. (2011). Change from below: the role of middle managers in mediating paradoxical change Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (2), 190-203 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00135.x

Noise and music are more distracting to introverts at work

2011-10-03T03:12:00.000-07:00

Many workplaces allow the playing of radio or recorded music during working hours, providing a chance to personalise and brighten the working climate. But how does music affect our ability to perform tasks at work? And does this depend on the kind of person we are? A recent study by a team from University College London sheds more light on this topic.

Stacey Dobbs, Adrian Furnham and Alastair McClelland worked with 118 female schoolchildren (aged 11-18) to investigate how tasks that demand focus are influenced by different kinds of auditory distraction administered over headphones. They developed two soundtracks, one composed of samples of environmental sound like children playing and laughter, and the other a mix of UK garage music. (I'll spare you the embarrassment of reading me trying to describe that.) They also wanted to know whether extraversion had any influence, following previous findings that suggest more introverted people suffer more from auditory distraction, as they are more easily overwhelmed by strong stimuli.

The participants attempted different tasks under the various conditions, and slightly different effects emerged. On a test of abstract reasoning, the participants did best under conditions of silence, and scores suffered less due to music than experiencing noise, when performance was lowest. But the penalties from auditory distraction diminished as extraversion increased, and the most extraverted students performed just as strongly in all conditions. On a test of general cognitive ability, and another of verbal reasoning, the silence and music conditions were comparable, with noise again leading to worst performance. Again, higher extraversion eliminated the penalty from noise.

We should always be careful generalising from a narrow sample (children) to another, although the extraversion effect has been observed before in adult groups (and it's also true that children do form part of our workforce). That said, it's interesting that noise was more disruptive than music across all tasks. The authors suggest that may be partly due to it lacking the positive emotional influence that music can provide; noise isn't designed to delight. They also draw attention to earlier work by the first author, which suggests that the most distracting music is that very familiar to the user. This suggests that an eclectic radio station, or a large and varied play-list, may be a viable alternative to wrestling with background chatter, or slapping that well-worn U2 record on. Again.

Dobbs, S., Furnham, A., & McClelland, A. (2011). The effect of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (2), 307-313 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1692

CEOs weather personal problems better by turning to each other than to friends and family

2011-09-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

Who can the boss, the person at the very top, turn to when personal problems arise? A recent article alerts us that the answer is often 'other leaders', examining what prompts a CEO to support another, and how this matters for the organisation.

It's understandable that people from similar circumstances may provide each other valuable support, through advice, validation or needed perspective. But what impels busy, driven people to offer it? Researchers Michael McDonald and James Westphal took an observation from social identification theory: we like to help other members of a group we identify with. They decided to explore whether CEOs help peers when they perceive themselves as members of a shared social category: the “leadership cadre”. Their study used surveys year-on-year to investigate CEO personal circumstances, their attitudes towards identity, and a range of behaviours – both towards other CEOs and within their organisation.

Because of the study's fairly complex recruitment methodology, which used their initial 300 respondent CEOs to identify informal CEO support groups to further recruit from, we should be aware that the sample is more focused on CEOs disposed to offer help. With that in mind, the average participant offered support eight times in a year, either to another member of their company board over a round of golf, or through the informal groups. And, as predicted, participants who identified themselves as part of a leadership group were more likely to then offer their fellows support: if their identification grew by a standard deviation, this would lead them to provide social support on an extra eight occasions.

The study shows how such support matters. Each CEO reported any personal problems such as strained marital relations, things that are likely to distract and deplete the energy available for work. These problems, especially when severe, led to a reduction of non-obligatory but vital leadership behaviours, such as mentoring subordinates, over the twelve months that followed them. However, availability of social support from other CEOs substantially mitigated this. In fact, their support had beyond double the impact of that of support from family and friend networks.

Given the amount of research on leadership, it's surprising how little focuses on the person within the suit. This research outlines how home-life can take a toll on leadership effectiveness – especially those activities that can be put off to tomorrow – and how sometimes the solution is for leaders to turn to each other.

Michael L. McDonald, & James D. Westphal (2011). My Brother's Keeper? CEO Identification with the Corporate Elite, Social Support Among CEOs, and Leader Effectiveness Academy of Management Journal, 54 (4), 661-693

Why do subgroups emerge? And how do groups stay productive if they do?

2011-09-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

Group working can be sociable, fulfilling and effective, yet there are many ways for it to fall short of the ideal. A mass of similar opinions can lead to groupthink, rushing to agreement without questioning a line of thinking. But a group splintering into subgroups can also lead to problems. Subgrouping doesn't take much, as minimal group research has revealed, and it creates barriers across which information struggles to flow, due to confusion or outright hostility. A new study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior explains how two kinds of group integration – cognition and emotion – influence the impact of subgroups in rather different ways.

A team of researchers lead by Matthew Cronin looked at performance of MBA students in teams of five or six participating in a 14-week business simulation exercise. They surveyed the 321 participants twice, once about three weeks before the end and again at the close of the exercise, determining the extent to which the team had formed subgroups and how satisfied individuals felt about being part of the team.

The researchers also took two measures of integration: affective integration, probing how much they liked and trusted the rest of the team, and cognitive integration, how much common ground members share in terms of how they look at the world. They were interested in how these variables ultimately affected the group' satisfaction, measured in the final survey, and its performance, determined by the final company earnings it achieved.

The data revealed a vicious circle: less affective integration made it more likely that subgroups would emerge later, and more definite subgroups led to subsequent lower integration. Falling into this pattern meant team members felt less satisfied about being part of the team at the end of the event. Moreover, as subgroups emerged, team performance also suffered. But this effect was dampened when there was good cognitive integration. That is, when members are divided, possess diverging agendas and may not particularly like each other, they can still get the job done if they share a framework for looking at the world.

This study is valuable in untangling some of the distinct processes that contribute to healthy team working. In the words of the authors, cognitive integration can “prevent the harm that subgroups can potentially create”. But to stop the subgroups forming in the first place, it comes down to preventing that slide into us-vs-them and the lack of trust that it feeds and is fed by. Stakeholders who want a group to succeed should consider interventions, and make them early to avoid the rot setting in.

Cronin, M., Bezrukova, K., Weingart, L., & Tinsley, C. (2011). Subgroups within a team: The role of cognitive and affective integration Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 831-849 DOI: 10.1002/job.707

Can we get away with using lo-fi assessment to recruit advanced positions?

2011-09-16T04:50:00.000-07:00

In recruitment, the promise of comparable results for less effort is understandably tempting. It's offered by the offsetting of costly assessments with alternative measures that use pencils, screens and standardised questions instead of expert assessors. However, as some sources suggest a bad hire can cost twice or more that position's annual salary, the stakes are high. A new study kicks some assessment tyres to see whether that bargain is actually a banger.

Researchers Filip Lievens and Fiona Patterson looked at recruitment into advanced roles which typically seek the skills and knowledge to hit the ground running. They took their sample of 196 successful candidates from the UK selection process for General Practitioners in medicine (GPs). To get here, you've completed two years of basic training and up to six years of prior education, by which stage you're after someone ready to go, not a future 'bright star'. Lievens and Patterson were specifically interested in how much assessment fidelity matters, meaning the extent to which assessment task and context mirror that in the actual job.

Three types of assessment were involved, all designed by experienced doctors with assistance from assessment psychologists. Written tests assessed declarative knowledge through diagnostic dilemmas such as “a 75-year-old man, who is a heavy smoker, with a blood pressure of 170/105, complains of floaters in the left eye”. Assessment centre (AC) simulations meanwhile probe skills and behaviours in an open-ended, live situation such as emulating a patient consultation; these tend to be more powerful predictors of job performance, but are costly.

The third was the situational judgement test (SJT), a pencil and paper assessment where candidates select actions in response to situations, such as a senior colleague making a non-ideal prescription. SJTs are considered by many to be “low-fidelity simulations”, losing their open-endedness and embodied qualities, but hanging on to the what-would-you-do-if? focus. The authors were interested in whether its predictive power would be in the same class as the AC simulations, or mirror the more modest validity of its pencil and paper counterpart.

The data showed that all assessments were useful predictors of job performance, as measured by supervisors after a year spent in role. Both types of simulation - AC and SJT - provided additional insight over and above that given by the rather disembodied knowledge test – each explaining about a further 6% of the variance. But in comparison with each other, the simulations were difficult to tell apart, with no significant difference in how well they predicted performance.

It should be noted that the AC simulations did capture some variance over and above the SJT, notably relating to non-cognitive aspects of job performance, such as empathy, which is important as such areas are less trainable than clinical expertise. However, this extra insight was fairly modest, just a few percentage points of variance. More expensive AC assessments can provide additional value, but the study suggests that at least in this specific recruitment domain, you can get away with a loss of fidelity if the assessments are appropriately designed.

Lievens, F., & Patterson, F. (2011). The validity and incremental validity of knowledge tests, low-fidelity simulations, and high-fidelity simulations for predicting job performance in advanced-level high-stakes selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (5), 927-940 DOI: 10.1037/a0023496

Positive pollyannas more frustrated by unmet expectations

2011-09-14T03:11:00.000-07:00

A tendency to view the world positively yields many benefits, such as higher wellbeing and a sense of personal effectiveness that gets you ahead in life. However, according to a recent article in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, this sunny view of life brings with it certain workplace expectations – and when they aren't fulfilled, it can spell trouble. Behold the “disaffected pollyannas”.

Researchers Olivia O'Neill, Laura Stanley, and Charles O'Reilly were interested in the career expectations and choices made by individuals with high “trait positive affect” (PA). They recruited 132 participants from a full-time MBA course, who sat an assessment centre where they completed a Positive and Negative Affect Scale and reported what they expected their highest lifetime salary to be. The data showed that PA results in confidence about salary, with every one-unit increase in PA associated with a $100,000 increase in expected earnings. High hopes, but what if they aren't met?

Four years later, 105 of the participants responded to a follow-up survey probing salary levels and frequency of moving organisation. High PA individuals turned out to be far more responsive to low salary; at a standard deviation below average, they shifted through an average of four jobs, compared to two for their low-PA counterparts. This higher turnover was expected, as frustration of their higher salary expectations is more likely to lead to doubting their fit at the organisation. Moreover, they are more willing to believe the grass is greener elsewhere, and more able to make that step successfully, due to better social networks and an interview advantage due to infectious positive affect at interview (similar to the rapport advantage described here).

Measures of job and life satisfaction at a final follow-up eight years on showed that for low PA individuals, more frequent job shifts led to more satisfaction. The notion is that shopping around means that over time you get a sense of what is realistic and make your peace with what a reasonable job constitutes. But for high PA, the reverse was true, with more job shifts making them more frustrated, bemoaning the absence of the perfect job they are destined for.

High PA individuals can be a positive feature in organisations, but this research shows that they can be open to disappointment, affecting their prospects in the organisation and their feelings on life. The authors conclude that “the key to finding long-term satisfaction, then, may be managing expectations, rather than pursuing unrealistic ideals.”

O'Neill, O., Stanley, L., & O'Reilly, C. (2011). Disaffected Pollyannas: The influence of positive affect on salary expectations, turnover, and long-term satisfaction Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (3), 599-617 DOI: 10.1348/096317910X500801

How much should we trust job applicant ratings of their own emotional intelligence?

2011-09-05T04:41:00.000-07:00

Self-rating is a popular way to measure emotional intelligence in the workplace. Under lab conditions it's been shown that these ratings vary depending on what your (imaginary) objective is: to give a 'true' picture or to successfully win a job. A new study translates this lab finding to the workplace, finding that applicants for jobs really do rate themselves higher on EI than counterparts already working in that organisation.

The study compared scores for 109 job applicants with 239 volunteers, matched by department and managerial level. They rated themselves on four classic components of EI: self emotion appraisal, others emotion appraisal, use of emotion, and regulation of emotion. Applicants significantly outscored incumbents in all areas, on average rating themselves more than a standard deviation better. The areas of greatest divergence were in use of emotions and regulation of emotions, which have much in common with the Big Five personality traits conscientiousness and emotional stability, which we know job applicants have a higher tendency to inflate.

On all but one of the components, applicant scores were significantly more bunched together than incumbent scores, which could be seen as additional support that they were manufactured, with candidates homing in on scores that were solidly good, avoiding suspicious high or unhelpful low scores.

The study is important because in other areas of research, score discrepancies can be found in the lab, due to different explicit instructions, that don't seem to surface in the real world, suggesting the overt nature of lab conditions can exaggerate or even manufacture differences. Yet here the effect is found again, suggesting that if we do want to rely on self-report to assess EI we should recognise that this inflation may take place, and that relying on the normative data that accompanies these tests may lead us to unrealistically high appraisals of candidates.

Lievens, F., Klehe, U., & Libbrecht, N. (2011). Applicant Versus Employee Scores on Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Measures Journal of Personnel Psychology, 10 (2), 89-95 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000036

Are job selection methods actually measuring 'ability to identify criteria'?

2011-08-29T03:54:00.000-07:00

While we know that modern selection procedures such as ability tests and structured interviews are successful in predicting job performance, it's much less clear how they pull off those predictions. The occupational psychology process – and thus our belief system of how things work - is essentially a) identify what the job needs b) distil this to measurable dimensions c) assess performance on your dimensions. But a recent review article by Martin Kleinman and colleagues suggests that in some cases, we may largely be assessing something else: the “ability to identify criteria”.

The review unpacks a field of research that recognises that people aren't passive when being assessed. Candidates try to squirrel out what they are being asked to do, or even who they are being asked to be, and funnel their energies towards that. When the situation is ambiguous, a so-called “weak” situation, those better at squirrelling – those with high “ability to identify criteria” (ATIC) - will put on the right performance, and those that are worse will put on Peer Gynt for the panto crowd.

Some people are better at guessing what an assessment is measuring than others, so in itself ATIC is a real phenomenon. And the research shows that higher ATIC scores are associated with higher overall assessment performance, and better scores specifically on the dimensions they correctly guess. ATIC clearly has a 'figuring-out' element, so we might suspect its effects are an artefact of it being strongly associated with cognitive ability, itself associated with better performance in many types of assessment. But if anything the evidence works the other way. ATIC has an effect over and above cognitive ability, and it seems possible that cognitive ability buffs assessment scores mainly due to its contribution to the ATIC effect.

In a recent study, ATIC, assessment performance, and candidate job performance were examined within a single selection scenario. Remarkably it found that job performance correlated better with ATIC than it did with the assessment scores themselves. In fact, the relationship between assessment scores and job performance became insignificant after controlling for ATIC. This offers the provocative possibility that the main reason assessments are useful is as a window into ATIC, which the authors consider “the cognitive component of social competence in selection situations”. After all, many modern jobs, particularly managerial ones, depend upon figuring out what a social situation demands of you.

So what to make of this, especially if you are an assessment practitioner? We must be realistic about what we are really assessing, which in no small part is 'figuring out the rules of the game'. If you're unhappy about that, there's a simple way to wipe out the ATIC effect: making the assessed dimensions transparent, turning the weak situation into a strong, unambiguous one. Losing the contamination of ATIC leads to more accurate measures of the individual dimensions you decided were important. But overall your prediction of job performance measures will be weaker, because you've lost the ATIC factor which does genuinely seem to matter. And while no-one is suggesting that it is all that matters in the job, it may be the aspect of work that assessments are best positioned to pick up.

Kleinmann, M., Ingold, P., Lievens, F., Jansen, A., Melchers, K., & Konig, C. (2011). A different look at why selection procedures work: The role of candidates' ability to identify criteria Organizational Psychology Review, 1 (2), 128-146 DOI: 10.1177/2041386610387000

Using work technology at home hinders our ability to detach from work

2011-08-25T02:49:00.000-07:00

We know that psychologically detaching from work is important, leading to less fatigue, more positive working-week experiences, and higher overall life satisfaction. How you fill your leisure time has a big impact on psychological detachment - for instance, we've reported on the beneficial effects of volunteering on detachment. A recent study confirms what many suspect – it's harder to switch off when technology keeps you plugged in.

In their study, YoungAh Park, Charlotte Fritz and Steve Jex looked at work-home segmentation: how much we partition our domains of leisure and work. Some of this is preference – for example, you might choose not to take a job likely to intrude into your home life. And some is about surrounding norms: if it's typical to take work home, or to call a colleague on a work issue in an evening, it's difficult not to be drawn into these activities.

But the authors suspected that a major factor was technology use at home, and investigated this through a survey completed by 431 university alumni now in full-time employment. As well as measures of detachment from work, segmentation preference eg “I prefer to keep work life at work”; and perceived segmentation norm, they also looked at frequency of use of different technologies (email, internet, phone, pda) for workplace purposes when at home.

As expected, both a preference for and a culture of less segmentation led to less psychological detachment. People who used technologies for work purposes while at home struggled to detach from work, and the analysis showed that this was a major route through which weak segmentation had its effect on detachment. In part, weak segmentation manifests as work-technology behaviours at home.

It's important to note that technology did not explain all of the variance, which means that setting strict rules about technology use is not the only way to help psychological detachment, nor necessarily sufficient; you may want to develop habits that deal with ruminations, develop end-of-day rituals, or establish clearer boundaries with colleagues. But technology certainly plays a part, and so it's worth considering the practices of your own workplace: for instance,are the trends towards shedding work desktops for laptops, and “bring your own computer” programs, helping or hurting us?

Park, Y., Fritz, C., & Jex, S. (2011). Relationships between work-home segmentation and psychological detachment from work: The role of communication technology use at home. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0023594

Some of us experience bigger 'emotional hangovers', whether from fun activities or hurricanes

2011-08-16T02:45:00.000-07:00

While some of us may be generally happier than others, all of us experience different emotions from day to day. A fascinating new study suggests that these fluctuations are due to two factors: a cycling of emotion levels across the working week, and our unique personal sensitivity to both good and bad daily events. The study even has hurricanes.

Daniel J. Beal and Louma Ghandour from Rice University set out to track the daily affect patterns of participants from an IT services company. They were particularly interested in how intrinsic task motivation – how fulfilling the participants found their work that day – influenced emotion or affect. Ten days in, Hurricane Ike struck the region. Recommencing some weeks later, the study also took the chance to examine how this negative one-off event influenced matters.

The 65 participants completed 21 end-of-day surveys (prompted by an email reminder), rating intrinsic task motivation, together with how much they felt emotional states like frustrated, discouraged, happy and proud. As per other recent research, the negative emotions showed a cyclical pattern, peaking at Wednesday with a projected bottoming out on Saturday; positive emotions showed the inverse pattern. There were also individual differences in average scores: some people are generally more frustrated than others.

The authors also calculated each participant’s ‘affect spin’, a measure of day-to-day emotional volatility, a high score meaning that person experienced a wide range of different affect states from day to day. The authors found that having a motivating day's work affected that day’s positive mood for everyone, but individuals with high affect spin saw a kind of positive hangover into the next day as well.

After Hurricane Ike, everyone experienced lower levels of positive affect. This began to recover as the event receded into the past, but not for those with high affect spin, who seemed to be suffering a longer hangover again, but this time with negative consequences.

Individual differences in emotional state matter, and this study reminds us that we don't just differ on average, but also in how dynamically our mood responds to events. It's possible that offering a fascinating problem to your reactive employee on a Monday will generate benefits that carry forward, and battle the mid-week dip. The authors conclude that “mapping the terrain of positive and negative affective events and their implications for worker well-being can help to ground the field of organizational psychology in a truly experiential understanding of work life.”

Beal, D., & Ghandour, L. (2011). Stability, change, and the stability of change in daily workplace affect Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (4), 526-546 DOI: 10.1002/job.713

Buying into the idea of 'free choice' makes us less likely to see discrimination

2011-08-12T08:31:00.000-07:00

Illustration: Emily Wilkinson, www.mindfulmaps.com

To all our women readers: it's great to be living in a post-discrimination world, right? Right? Is this thing on?

Whatever your view – and regardless of facts such as woman's earnings standing at under 80% of men's - many people seem to feel that way, such as the 53% of Americans in a recent Gallup poll. Nicole Stephens and Cynthia Levine of Northwestern University identify one reason for this: the 'choice framework', a view of the world particularly popular in the US that treats all actions as freely chosen based on our preferences. Seeing life purely in terms of choices can empower individuals, and studies show we can benefit psychologically. But in a new paper to be published in Psychological Science, these researchers explore how it can make us reluctant to see discrimination as a cause of mothers leaving the workforce.

In a first study, 171 stay-at-home mothers revealed through questionnaire ratings that they saw their departure from the workforces as a choice rather than something imposed on them. The more they endorsed the choice explanation, the less likely they were to interpret genuine gender inequality in a range of industries as due to discrimination or structural challenges to women working (such as a default model of work that doesn't adequately account for childcare).

The second study adopted experimental methods to manipulate exposure to the choice framework. While waiting to begin the experiment, 46 undergraduates were unwittingly exposed to a poster on the wall about “women's experiences in the workforce”; in one condition, the title began with the phrase “Choosing to leave”. Participants then completed a questionnaire, and those who had had this slight level of exposure to the choice framework were somewhat more likely to rate gender discrimination as non-existent.

Stephens and Levine note that culture propagates such messages at higher frequencies than those manipulated in their study, thus the baseline influence might be substantial. The consequences are twofold: although people feel happier when they see themselves as an active agent in their own life, this can turn against them when they meet genuine structural challenges, where it “could undermine their sense of competence or deter them from seeking help”. And on a societal level, this tendency may prevent the correction of genuine inequity. We may need cultural and political actors to reframe the debate. And an individual level, it might be enlightening to reflect once in a while on the limits to choice.

Stephens, Nicole, & Levine, Cynthia (2011). Opting Out or Denying Discrimination? How the Framework of Free Choice in American Society Influences Perceptions of Gender Equality Psychological Science

Social networks of extraverts are bigger but no more intimate

2011-08-04T03:41:00.000-07:00

Do extraverts have more numerous and deeper social relationships? Organisations are increasingly interested in social capital, the networks accessed through individuals, so this is no idle question. Thomas Pollet from the University of Groningen, investigated this with University of Oxford collaborators Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar, and their answer is yes, and no.

Recognising that our relationships aren't monolithic, the researchers treated social networks as a set of three layers. The inner support group contains those people (typically around five) that you would turn to in a crisis. Around this are a further ten-odd people, a sympathy group who would be deeply affected by your death. Finally there is an outer layer of more variable size, containing people connected to you by weak ties.

Pollet recruited 117 Dutch adults, who were asked to list their family, friends and acquaintances, and for each one, state the recency of communication and how emotionally close they were. Each network was grouped into layers, the innermost comprising those with past-week contact and over seven out of ten on the emotion measure; the sympathy layer those with past-month contact; and the outer layer receiving the rest. Each participant also completed a measure of extraversion.

The researchers found extraverts had more people in every layer – more weak ties, but also more individuals they contacted frequently. Although larger social networks have been reported before, this study finds the effect after controlling for age, a potential confound in other studies. However, extraversion didn't affect emotional closeness to their network: weak ties with occasional contacts don't appear stronger in extraverts.

The authors scrutinised every layer of the network, finding this same lack of effect throughout, but I'm cautious about interpretation at the inner layers, given that the emotional closeness score is both the variable of interest and the criteria used to determine membership. On my understanding, if introverts had a support group of contacts that they met frequently but gave low emotional closeness scores - fives or sixes - the methodology would never identify this.

It's worth noting the data suggests that regardless of extraversion, it's somewhat harder to keep close to all the members of a very large outer layer, which suggests a practical constraint that extraverts may be more liable to hit up against.

This study suggests extraverts have larger networks that are not simply populated by weak ties, but contain larger sets of close relationships. An organisation trying to tap into its social capital might start by talking to its most extraverted members. However, they shouldn't forget that introverts have equally deep relationships, nor that valuable networks contain the right people, not the most.

Pollet, T., Roberts, S., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Extraverts Have Larger Social Network Layers Journal of Individual Differences, 32 (3), 161-169 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000048

Continually juggling stakeholders can lead to doubting the value of your mission

2011-08-04T03:20:00.000-07:00

If your work has taken you into meetings with a partnering company, a cross-institutional committee, or any situation working together with another organisation, you've taken the role of a boundary spanner. Organisations do well out of boundary spanners, who deliver them information about external conditions and increase their reach to broader stakeholders. But Lakshmi Ramarajan and colleagues have demonstrated that there are costs for the boundary spanner, particularly in challenging, multi-party situations.

Social psychology suggests that contact across group boundaries is problematic outside of ideal circumstances. Disparate goals may fuel conflict; unfamiliar patterns of behaviour can be hard to adjust to; outside perspective may cast your own organisation in an unfavourable light. To investigate this, Ramarajan's team surveyed 833 Dutch military personnel, who spent time between 1995 and 1999 engaged in peacekeeping missions. Such missions occur against a backdrop of heavy conflict, and are made more problematic by status and resource differences between the peacekeepers and their non-military counterparts: NGO's, governmental bodies and local authorities.

Each participant detailed their frequency of personal contact with each type of party, and the degree of seriousness of work-specific problems that emerged with that party – a combination of objective severity and their personal involvement. Their responses confirmed that peacekeepers with more frequent contact with other parties had greater experiences of work-specific problems.

Previous research has suggested an inverse relationship between conditions 'home' and 'away', as if a spat with an external partner makes you more grateful for your colleagues. But in the current study, more work-specific problems with other parties led to more negative attitudes towards their own job and doubting the value of their mission. This resembles spillover from one domain to another, due to ruminations or drained psychological resources. The authors attribute the difference to the high demands on peacekeepers, juggling many parties on non-facilitated, difficult issues without the option to walk away, a situation increasingly common for more and more 21st Century organisations.

Boundary spanning activities are certainly useful to the organisation, and can benefit the individual, who tends to be more trusted and gain reputation with other organisations. But we should be concerned with its costs, eroding engagement with the work and faith in the organisation, which are especially likely in complex situations with soft organisational boundaries. As the authors conclude, those in this position may want to weigh these issues up “when thinking about the costs of alliances, joint ventures, or other cooperative mechanisms.”

Ramarajan, L., Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K., & Euwema, M. (2011). From the outside in: The negative spillover effects of boundary spanners' relations with members of other organizations Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 886-905 DOI: 10.1002/job.723

Higher education is burning out its employees

2011-07-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

It's a tumultuous period for higher education in the UK, with many of the givens of university existence being chipped away. It feels like a good time to take the temperature of those who work in that sector. One indicator is the extent to which employees feel they are burned out – when everyday work activities become a struggle, leaving them weary, fed up and performing less effectively. Jenny Watts and Noelle Robertson at the University of Leicester have reviewed the literature to provide us a current account of burnout in university teaching staff.

Searching research databases using terms such as 'burnout' and 'faculty', Watts and Robertson pruned the results using strict criteria to arrive at just 12 English-language papers that tackled burnout in university staff, mainly dealing with Western institutions alongside papers from Turkey and South Africa. The review suggests levels of burnout in universities are similar to those found in professions like school teachers and hospital workers that are generally recognised as challenging; a far cry from the traditional conception of universities as a home for lower-stress work.

What seems to be driving these levels of burnout? Certain groups are more vulnerable, with younger staff more susceptible, possibly due to less developed coping mechanisms.
Consistent with the general burnout literature work, women were more prone to emotional exhaustion, whereas men were more likely to become depersonalised and distanced from their work.

Burnout was reduced when staff felt that their contact with students was valued, and was higher when staff faced negative student evaluations or direct conflict. However, non-student factors such as intensive time pressure appear to have greater effects, suggesting that the stressors are less about unbearable students than changes in work patterns, which may include mounting bureaucracy and more frequent classes. Several of the papers do indeed suggest that simply being responsible for more students leads to more burnout.

There is some evidence that social support protects individuals from burnout, although this was not found in all studies. Type of teaching also mattered, with teachers of postgraduates more likely to hang on to work satisfaction on the one hand, but on the other experience more exhaustion and distancing.

The authors are clear that this is a worrying picture, especially as university staff are responsible for pastoral care of students; hard to be a sympathetic ear when you can't wait to get out of the building. They call for more research into this area in order to form “strategies to enhance wellbeing, student success and teaching quality, particularly during a time of retrenchment in the university sector.”

Watts, J., & Robertson, N. (2011). Burnout in university teaching staff: a systematic literature review Educational Research, 53 (1), 33-50 DOI: 10.1080/00131881.2011.552235

Creativity dampened by observing anger, but enhanced by sarcasm

2011-07-28T02:46:00.000-07:00

Bearing the brunt of someone's anger can focus the mind wonderfully. This can help us to knuckle down on well-defined tasks, but can hinder activities that depend on open, lateral thinking. In the Journal of Applied Psychology, Ella Miron-Spektor and colleagues demonstrate how simply observing an angry outburst in a work context can reproduce these effects. They also explore what happens when angry messages are delivered with a twist of sarcasm.

The researchers ran three studies asking 375 engineering students to imagine being a customer service agent. The primary task, a written problem, was preceded by an observation stage where they listened to a recorded conversation between another service agent and a customer who was either neutral or overtly hostile. Participants in the angry condition performed better at the assessed problem when it was analytic and closed in scope but worse at insight problems requiring lateral thinking and discovery, akin to the classic 'make a functioning wall-mounted light from only a candle, tin tack and box of matches'*.

One of the studies collected ratings of the emotional sense of threat that participants felt, which partly mediated the influence of anger on the two different types of tasks. This suggests that observed anger causes participants to adopt more of a prevention orientation, a state in which you adopt a narrow focus on immediate concerns in the hope of avoiding suffering and gaining security.

Another study added a further condition that presented a recorded exchange that was sarcastic rather than overtly hostile, using withering phrases like “Your service is 'fast as a turtle'”. Participants in this condition actually performed the best on the creative problem. The researchers suspected that the humour of sarcasm makes it less overtly threatening, hence less likely to trigger prevention orientation. This was borne out by the more moderate anger ratings given by participants in the condition.

Additionally, sarcastic comments need to be actively made sense of, as they stand at odds with the true situation, such as giving high praise to mediocrity. Parsing such paradoxes by looking at them in different ways might kick us into a mental gear ready for complex thinking. To examine this, participants worked through the classic Kelly repertory grid technique, in which you repeatedly select trios of people from a list and articulate how one is different from the other two, revealing the range of different dimensions you are able to apply to multifaceted reality. Those exposed to sarcasm generated more dimensions, suggesting they could deal with more cognitive complexity, looking at issues from more than one angle.

In the workplace, measured, appropriate anger may remind people of priorities and provide needed focus. But by sending individuals into fire-fighting mode it's also likely to hamper insight and the chances of recognising deeper issues. Miron-Spektor's team demonstrate that merely observing anger directed at another in a work-relevant exchange can deliver these effects. This means that enforcing demands and directives through anger may generate risk-averse work climates. Yet there is a possible solution: to leaven harder messages with humour. And if you think I'm talking about sarcasm... way to go, reader!

Miron-Spektor, E., Efrat-Treister, D., Rafaeli, A., & Schwarz-Cohen, O. (2011). Others' anger makes people work harder not smarter: The effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0023593

*The trick is to recognise the match box itself, rather than just its contents, can be part of the solution. Pin the match tray to the wall, melt wax off the candle into the tray and use this to firmly affix the candle. Once lit, the stable candle will produce light without creating any dripping mess on the floor.

How mixing work incentives put us on the horns of a dilemma

2011-07-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

To encourage collaboration, many organisations structure incentives so that whole groups are rewarded – or not - based on their collective output. However, the groups-eye view allows for social loafing, where people shirk duties and assume team-mates will carry their load, so it's tempting to keep everyone accountable by adding incentives to individual performance too. Christopher Barnes and his colleagues set out to see just how these mixed incentives turn out in practice.

The researchers used a computer warfare simulation that examines behaviour in tight, demanding circumstances, where teams of four protect their territories by correctly identifying enemy intruders and then quickly destroying them. Team-mates used separate monitors, but shared a room and could freely converse. They recruited 304 management undergraduates, half of whom were given straightforward group incentives: $10 each if their group outperformed a specified rival group.

The other teams were given mixed incentives: group performance could lead to $5 each , and individually outdoing a specified member of another team garnered another $5. Participants who were individually incentivised were hungrier for scores, being significantly faster at destroying intruders. However, heavily penalised illegitimate attacks ('friendly fire') were more common in these teams. This slump in quality suggests a drop-off in the flow of information typical in close teams, making it harder to detect and ward off errors as attention was turned towards delivering immediate personal objectives.

The study also examined direct helping behaviour, in terms of the efforts made to destroy intruders in team-mate territory rather than your own. This mattered, as each team had a high workload member who was constantly swarmed with as many radar blips as the others had put together. Participants with pure group-level incentives showed more helping behaviours than their mixed incentive counterparts.

Barnes and his colleagues suggest that mixed incentives present a conflict between maximising individual interests and that of the collective, and the temptation is to focus on your own priorities, letting others hold the fort for you. Moreover, if you doubt that they will, you'd be even more of a sucker to vainly do so yourself. This amounts to a social dilemma akin to the prisoner's dilemma, which pressurises players towards self-serving behaviours.

I felt - and the authors do note - that the experimental paradigm relates best to 'task forces' whose urgent tasks necessitate trade-offs between different behaviours. I'm skeptical about generalising to workplaces which are more elastic: I may forgo reading my book over lunch in order to help you out, feel rewarded by this, and spend the afternoon contributing just as much or more to my own goals. Nevertheless, by plugging social dilemmas in to the research on incentives, this article highlights that tweaking incentives can result in tradeoffs, not simply the best of both worlds.

Barnes, C., Hollenbeck, J., Jundt, D., DeRue, D., & Harmon, S. (2010). Mixing Individual Incentives and Group Incentives: Best of Both Worlds or Social Dilemma? Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1611-1635 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309360845

Dirty work jobs call for low expectations

2011-07-21T04:13:00.000-07:00

You may have a job that you sometimes personally resent; maybe your work draws hostility from others from time to time. But how about a job that automatically earns you the animosity of your entire society? That's the reality for those employed in dirty work occupations, defined as work that is seen as physically, socially or morally tainted: think sewer workers or morticians. The stigma of this work threatens identity, pushing notions like ‘sick’ or ‘creepy’ where we would prefer nice and desirable. A recent article explores how this affects incoming workers, and what makes some of them stick at dirty work.

Erika Lopina and her team from the University of North Carolina spent two years collecting survey data from 102 people starting animal care roles that involved some contact with the dirty work task of euthanasia. After two months, 28% of these individuals had left their organisation – contrast this with the better retention in mainstream jobs, where turnover within two months sits at somewhere under 10%. Lopina's team were most interested in the remaining 72%: what factors encouraged them to stay?

Firstly, those who remained had initially received more information about the type of work they were getting themselves into, which would lessen any unexpected shocks to identity. Secondly, higher turnover was associated with maladaptive coping strategies such as blaming yourself for problems, denial, or substance use as a support or escape. Clearly, the demands of these sorts of jobs require you to effectively maintain your own well-being, or be overwhelmed by their negative features.

Thirdly – and a little bleakly – those who began with generally poor expectations for life tended to stay longer in their role. This was measured in the survey using a construct called negative affectivity (NA), rating the general level of states like afraid, distressed, and upset; it seems that if these labels already apply to your life then the adjustment to the negative perceptions and reality of dirty work isn't such a wrench.

Two further factors appear to have some influence: turnover was lower when the new hire expressed a commitment to the career (of animal care worker) and emphasised their belief in the value of the job. However, it turns out they don't significantly contribute anything beyond the influence of the previous three variables when the data was combined into a predictive model. As the authors comment, the differentiator is less about pride or drive, but open eyes coming into the job, pragmatism within it, and a fairly low bar for what life offers.

Lopina, E., Rogelberg, S., & Howell, B. (2011). Turnover in dirty work occupations: A focus on pre-entry individual characteristics Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02037.x

Interview decisions are influenced by initial rapport

2011-07-19T05:46:00.000-07:00

Research last year demonstrated that interviewees are judged according to their early rapport with the interviewer, even when a highly structured interview format is followed. The same team have now put this finding to the replication test and dug deeper into its causes.

Murray Barrick and colleagues gathered 135 student volunteers keen to improve their interview skill, and put each through two interviews with different interviewers from a pool of business professionals. Each interview proper was firmly structured with predefined questions on competency areas, but commenced with a few minutes of unstructured rapport building. Each interviewee was rated in terms of initial impressions just after the rapport stage, and their interview responses evaluated at the end of the interview. Just as in the 2010 study, the early impressions and final interview ratings strongly correlated.

The judgements we form from first impressions are rarely arbitrary but capture information about the other person, so it's possible the influence of pre-interview rapport isn't sheer bias. Through personality testing, Barrick's team found that first impressions were strongly related to interviewee extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is generally associated with better job performance, and tied into several of the study competencies such as 'work ethic' and 'drive for results'. The other traits, while not necessarily desirable in all roles, can appear attractive qualities in a prospective organisational member.

Initial impressions also correlated with volunteers' self-perception of how qualified they were for the job, and also with an independent measure of verbal skill. The latter was assessed through a separate task where the volunteers interacted face-to-face with a series of peers who rated features such as articulacy of speech. These findings suggest that the rapport-building stage was giving early insight into some sense of perceived fit to the specific role, as well as genuine candidate ability, in addition to personality factors. By careful analysis, the researchers found that all of these factors influenced the final interview ratings, and that this was due to the way they shaped first impressions: after those first few minutes, there was little extra influence of these qualities across the rest of the interview.

As social animals we're reluctant to do away with rapport altogether, and impressions can form even in snatches of seconds. The researchers suggest – with the caveat of more research - that interviewers may as well embrace the first impression, explicitly evaluating some relevant criteria, such as those identified in this study, once the rapport stage is over. And candidates shouldn't unduly panic: this study reveals that the first impression is partly down to an accurate appraisal of some of your true qualities, things you can't do very much about.

Barrick, M., Dustin, S., Giluk, T., Stewart, G., Shaffer, J., & Swider, B. (2011). Candidate characteristics driving initial impressions during rapport building: Implications for employment interview validity Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02036.x

Help on tasks boosts creativity for the seeker but impedes it for the giver

2011-07-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Seeking help from others gets us to more creative solutions, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology. However, there's a rub: being a help-giver may impede creatively solving your own problems, and seeking and helping turn out to be intimately related.

In a collaboration between the Indian School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania, Jennifer Mueller and Dishan Kamdar surveyed engineers at a refinery in central India, who work in teams that try to find creative ways to improve operations. The 291 mainly male participants assessed themselves on help-seeking by rating items like “I frequently ask team-mates for assistance in creative problem solving”. They also completed a complementary measure of help-giving, together with measures of motivation and a control measure of 'creative personality'.

The study found that individuals who sought more help were rated as more creative by their team leaders. The investigators suggest two reasons for this. Firstly, help-seekers receive new information to form a broader base to construct solutions from. Perhaps more importantly, seeking help requires you accept that you don't have all the answers, making you more open to new perspectives. As such, it wards off that major obstacle to creativity: locking into a 'perceptual set' that obscures any alternative view.

The authors felt that help seeking might shed some light on an issue in creativity research: whether being intrinsically motivated to solve a problem leads to more creative solutions. They felt that rather than firing up some creative centre, motivation might operate by making you do something you wouldn't otherwise: admit your limitations by seeking some help. And the data corroborates this, suggesting creativity is enhanced by motivation partly through an increase in help-seeking.

So far, so good. But the research found that people who received help tended to reciprocate it back on other occasions, and, crucially, that giving more help was associated with a cost to creativity. Why? Well, working on others' problems may restrict the time available for your own, and we know that creativity suffers under high time pressure. The authors also suspect an attitude shift: just as the help seeker humbly surrenders their suppositions, the help provider can be flattered into believing their perspective is objectively better, reinforcing fixed ways of thinking.

On balance, help-seeking did lead to more creativity, even when the reciprocal demands were high; a culture of help is ultimately superior to a lone-wolf one. Organisations may want to think about ways to inoculate their members against putting their viewpoint on a pedestal, even when others seem to value it. And help-seekers may want to ensure that their requests don't swamp an accommodating help-giver. Yet we have to face facts: for creative help-seeking to flourish, that help needs to come from someone prepared to pay the cost.

Mueller, J., & Kamdar, D. (2011). Why seeking help from teammates is a blessing and a curse: A theory of help seeking and individual creativity in team contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (2), 263-276 DOI: 10.1037/a0021574

When self-promoting won't help you get a job offer

2011-07-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Impression management is a tactic often used by interviewees hoping to boost their chances of getting the job. One common tack is self-promotion: emphasising your successes and attributing them to your personal qualities rather than to context or good luck. Research shows this is generally a sound strategy. But not always; a team from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland has shown this is conditional on the culture that your recruiter comes from.

Marianne Schmid Mast and her team gathered 84 recruiters - HR directors, assistants, and recruitment experts – to review a video interview and express how likely they would be to take on the candidate. Half of the recruiters saw a video where the actor used self-promotion heavily: he attributed successes to internal factors and failures to external ones, and used a quick fluent speech style, with plenty of eye contact and relaxed posture. As an example, he used statements like “I think that I am excellent in everything I do”, which makes me think I saw him on The Apprentice a while back.

The other participants saw the actor in modest mode, making the opposite type of attributions, peppering their speech with pauses and disclaimers like “I'm not sure”, and sitting tensely while fidgeting. Unsurprisingly, the participants rated the actor significantly differently in each condition on measures of modesty and self-promotion – the latter pleasingly including a component of 'pretentiousness'. The bare facts of the situation remained unchanged in each script, making the candidate equally prepared for the technical demands of the job in both cases.

Overall, the self-promoting candidate received higher ratings of likelihood of hiring, in line with previous work. But there was a further layer to the study: participants had been gathered from two different countries, Switzerland, which is characterised by features such as diplomacy and modesty, and Canada, which is an 'Anglo' culture composed of people likely to consider themselves as unique, proactive, and forceful. The Canadians were enthusiastic for the self-promoter, on average showing a 54% likelihood of hiring him, compared to 21% for the modest candidate. But the Swiss, generally less eager to hire, were only 29% likely to hire the self-promoter, similar to their 24% ratings for the modest candidate.

The recruiters may have shared a language (French) but were divided by their culture in how they responded to self-promotion, valuing it less if it was discordant with their own norms. This has relevance for two groups: firstly, candidates should consider cultural context before committing to specific impression management tactics. Secondly, organisations that recruit globally should consider that recruitment in one country may be driven by culturally-desired qualities that don't translate to the country where the applicant may end up. The study videos used recommended 'behavioural interview' questioning, yet still these discrepancies were found, suggesting that organisations should ensure a shared sense of what 'good' looks like in candidate style.

Schmid Mast, M., Frauendorfer, D., & Popovic, L. (2011). Self-Promoting and Modest Job Applicants in Different Cultures Journal of Personnel Psychology, 10 (2), 70-77 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000034

Best practices may not be best for your organisation

2011-06-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

If your organisation puts time and effort into implementing best practise HR methods, such as ability testing, it must be reassuring to to know it all pays off in the end. Or does it? A recent study involving US financial organisations casts doubt on this belief.

Oksana Drogan and George Yancey were interested in six recruitment technologies generally considered as 'best practice': job analysis to see what a candidate needs to perform well; monitoring the effectiveness of recruitment sources; using ability tests; structuring interviews; using validation studies to establish whether recruitment performance translates to job performance; and using BIB/WABs, different forms of scoreable application forms (SAFs in the UK).

There is already much research on these areas at an individual level. For example, it's well-evidenced that when ability tests are well-designed and appropriate to the job they can predict aspects of individual job performance. But Drogan and Yancey were curious about organisational outcomes: in their case, financial success. Evidence is thinner and equivocal in this domain, so they decided to conduct a fresh investigation to see how these individual promises fare at the organisational level – do they cash out, or do the cheques bounce?

The researchers contacted HR executives from various credit unions across the US and surveyed the 122 respondents on whether they used each of the six practices, giving each organisation an 0-6 overall score. They also gathered publicly available financial data on each credit union, rendered into different measures such as market share growth; a quick review confirms a fair variety in financial performance across the organisations.

However, that variety was not down to the practices used. Firstly, the overall score did not correlate with any of the financial measures. Secondly, on any given measure, the financial success of companies that employed it was no better than that of those who did not. Neither was there any sense of a bedding-in period, with practices becoming more effective over years of use: such an effect was found for only one practice (validation) with just a single financial measure.

The authors conclude that “increasing the technical sophistication of selection procedures alone is not sufﬁcient to inﬂuence bottom line results.” They point to other priorities that HR can take: aligning procedures to the unique features of the organisation, or taking an integral approach that recognises that investment in recruitment may be ineffective if this doesn't tie in with how you train new employees. In other words, use a procedure because it's useful here, now, for you, not because it's trumpeted as Best Practice.

Drogan, O., & Yancey, G. (2011). Financial Utility of Best Employee Selection Practices at Organizational Level of Performance The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 14 (1), 52-69 DOI: 10.1080/10887156.2011.546194

Onlookers see people who break rules as more powerful

2011-06-22T05:05:00.000-07:00

Power relations are a feature of every workplace, particularly those with formal ranks and explicit hierarchies. Holding power means greater freedom to act, and this can have consequences on behaviour such as ignoring societal norms. As an example, one wonderful experiment revealed that powerful people are more likely than others to take more biscuits from a plate, eat with their mouths open and spread crumbs. Gerban van Kleef and colleagues from two Amsterdam universities set out to explore something with implications for how individuals gain positions of power: are people who break the rules considered more powerful by onlookers?

Across four studies, the evidence suggests that they are. The first two studies involved reading about scenarios, one where someone in a waiting room helped themselves to the staff coffee urn, another where a book-keeper overruled a trainee's concerns about a financial anomaly. In each case, a control group were given a matching scenario that lacked the norm violation, and in each case, the transgressing individuals were rated as both more norm violating and more powerful.

A further study showed identical effects in a real situation, where of two confederates sharing a waiting room, the one who violated more norms (arrived late, threw his bag on the table) was perceived as more powerful. This and the book-keeper study also demonstrated that ratings of 'volitional capacity' – the freedom to act as you please – were higher in the unethical condition, and appeared to be the route by which transgression lead to perceptions of power. That is, we consider transgressors powerful because they show more capacity to act freely.

One further study employed video and added an indirect measure of power, based on the observation that powerful people tend to respond with anger, not sadness, to negative events. A film shows a person making an order in a café, either civilly or (in the transgression condition) treating the waiter and café environment brusquely, for example by tapping ash onto the floor. Participants rated the transgressing person as more powerful, and when they were then told that the food that arrived was not what he ordered, were more likely to expect him to react angrily.

I have a quibble with the video study: it's possible that in the transgression condition the actor employed micro-expressions or tone of voice to convey impatience, sternness or other markers that might imply latent anger. The article doesn't provide ratings of emotion prior to the revelation of the wrong order, so this remains a possibility.

Nonetheless the strong evidence amassed here is sobering. In the authors' words: “as individuals gain power, they experience increased freedom to violate prevailing norms. Paradoxically, these norm violations may not undermine the actor's power but instead augment it, thus fuelling a self-perpetuating cycle of power and immorality”. Workplaces might consider how to foster environments where it is safe to call out abuses of power, both major and petty, in order to interrupt these cycles and stop the sour cream rising to the top.

(A freely available copy of the article is available here.)

Van Kleef, G., Homan, A., Finkenauer, C., Gundemir, S., & Stamkou, E. (2011). Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611398416

Measuring happiness: a view from management science

2011-06-20T02:36:00.000-07:00

This year's BPS Annual Conference was visited by Stephen Hicks of the Office of National Statistics, to present the latest on the new measurement of national well-being. Still in final development, the content presented seemed well-considered and balanced – capturing elements of hedonic feelings of current happiness as well as a sense of meaning. A recent review in the Academy of Management Perspective looks at the history of the measurement of happiness and provides some of the more consistent findings.

Authors David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald present data from several large surveys – 48,000 and 300,000 – conducted in the United States. Their approach is to report how variables such as age, income, or marital status contribute to equations that predict measures of happiness, in terms of their strength and direction. These suggest, for instance, that in America being black is associated with lower average happiness, as is (to a smaller extent) being male. The variable most relevant for this blog is joblessness; while it's impact has been well-communicated (for instance by Richard Layard) the striking size of the effect – twice the impact of being black or five times being male– is illuminating. However, the authors point out that less than 10% of the variance of the happiness measure is explained by the variables covered: we haven't come close to bottoming out a comprehensive happiness equation.

The authors point to a consistent association between income and happiness in the cross-sectional samples – in their view, “money buys happiness”. However, they also point to the phenomena, identified by Richard Easterlin in the 1970s, that a country's economic growth tends not to be tracked by happiness. It's currently certainly a useful buffer, with the have-nots experiencing a subjectively less happy life vs those secured by money, but whether wealth is intrinsically linked to happiness still seems unclear.

Blanchflower and Oswald also present data on job satisfaction from the US. Overall, this has trended slightly downwards since the beginning of that data set in 1972, suggesting that we are struggling to deliver the working conditions that people desire. Higher levels of satisfaction were associated with being white, highly educated, older, in part time employment, and, to a substantial degree, self employed. Additionally, workers who feel secure in their jobs show a large premium to their ratings of satisfaction.

The authors point out a 2008 paper they authored which demonstrated that happiness levels are tracked by healthy blood pressure from country to country, with citizens of Denmark and the Netherlands thriving by both measures. They argue that the future of this field will be of convergence, where “the social science literature on happiness will slowly join up with a medical and biological literature on physical well-being.”

David G. Blanchflower, & Andrew J. Oswald (2011).
International Happiness:
A New View on the Measure of Performance Academy of Management Perspectives, 25 (1), 6-22

Psychologically safe teams can incubate bad behaviour

2011-06-15T00:45:00.000-07:00

When impropriety or corruption emerges in an organisation, some cry “bad apple!” where others reply “more like bad barrel!” Yet between individuals and organisations we have teams, the context in which decisions are increasingly made. A new study in the Journal of Applied Psychology sheds some light on what it takes for teams to behave badly.

Researchers Matthew Pearsall and Aleksander Ellis recruited 378 undergraduate management studies students (about 1/3 female), already organised into study groups of three who had collaborated for months. Participants were asked to rate themselves on items relating to different philosophical outlooks, the pertinent one being utilitarianism, where the focus is on outcomes. Previous research suggests individuals who highly value utilitarianism tend to behave more unethically, as they are more prepared to bend rules or mislead if they perceive the ends to justify the means. Pearsall and Ellis suspected the same to be true in groups.

Each team was given a real opportunity to behave unethically, by cheating in the self-evaluation of a piece of coursework. Buried within the scoring criteria was an issue that could not possibly have been covered in the assignment, meaning any team that ticked this off was faking it. As expected, teams with a higher average utilitarianism score were more likely to cheat, mirroring the effect found for individuals.

However, there is an protective buffer against acting unethically in a team. You may be willing to bend the rules, and even suspect others share your view... but do you really want to be the first to say so out loud? Pearsall and Ellis predicted that making this step requires a strong feeling of psychological safety, the sense that others will not judge or report you for speaking out or taking risks. It turns out that the cheating behaviour observed in teams with high utilitarianism scores was almost entirely dependent on a psychologically safe environment, as measured using items like “It is safe to take a risk on this team”. Lacking that safe environment, the highly utilitarian teams were almost as well-behaved as their lower-scoring counterparts.

The researchers note that academic cheating involves relatively low stakes, so this may be a constraint on how far we should generalise to other situations. They also emphasise that psychological safety is generally something we prize in teams, and rightly so: through facilitating open communication and consideration of alternate views it can enhance performance, learning and adaptation to change. However, this evidence suggests that it can also incubate unethical behaviour, and the researchers urge that the field continues to look beyond the traits of individual miscreants to consider state factors such as psychological safety, that allow bad behaviour to take root.

Pearsall, M., & Ellis, A. (2011). Thick as thieves: The effects of ethical orientation and psychological safety on unethical team behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (2), 401-411 DOI: 10.1037/a0021503

Are we wrong to treat overqualified employees as 'too much of a good thing'?

2011-06-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

Rises in unemployment have led many to become less picky, applying for positions that do not require the skills, knowledge or experience they have acquired. They meet with a problem: the stigma of overqualification, which can make recruiters reluctant to take on such applicants, an attitude reported by 80% of a sample canvassed in an earlier study. Yet our understanding of overqualification is gappy: is it really such a problem? A new review in Industrial and Organizational Psychology seeks to lay out what we know and identify the missing pieces.

Bergin Erdogan's team lay out the folk wisdom on the matter: overqualified people are easily bored, restless and tend to leave jobs quickly. Some evidence supports this: objective measures - such as a discrepancy between a role-holder's educational levels and the national average in the role - have been used to demonstrate lower job satisfaction and higher turnover for the overqualified. This is in line with the general findings in the person-job fit literature that good fit leads to better outcomes.

However, these past findings favour objective measures over psychological perceptions of overqualification, which may be very different. Attributions of overqualification by recruiters my be made when the applicant seems threateningly capable; they may be influenced by the applicant's age. On the other side of the coin, applicants may be technically overqualified but not think that way about the job at all. The authors argue that this is the ground research needs to cover more comprehensively.

Moreover, overqualification could bring benefits. This is theoretically grounded in equity theory, which argues that an imbalance between what you bring to a situation and what it yields can impel you to action. This predicts the higher turnover observed, but is also consistent with evidence that the overqualified make extra contributions beyond their role, putting their surplus skills to work. And contrary to the image of these individuals disrupting tasks and acting out because they are “better than this”, the overqualified may also excel at what they are hired for; a range of studies suggest that peers and managers rated overqualified role-holders as higher performers.

Other advantages the overqualified can bring include motivation or a good base for work-life balance, when they target the role deliberately as a shift from a career path that didn't suit them. Finally, these individuals constitute talent to feed into more challenging positions within the organisation.

The authors recommend that employers and employees go into situations “with their eyes open”, establishing a clear psychological contract, and that organisations provide opportunities to make use of surplus skills. They conclude “although overqualiﬁcation can clearly have serious, negative outcomes, we believe that there are times and circumstances when overqualiﬁed employees may provide a valuable resource to organizations”.

ERDOGAN, B., BAUER, T., PEIRÓ, J., & TRUXILLO, D. (2011). Overqualified Employees: Making the Best of a Potentially Bad Situation for Individuals and Organizations Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 4 (2), 215-232 DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-9434.2011.01330.x

Switching, empathising and staying neutral: the emotional labour of GP receptionists

2011-05-31T05:52:00.000-07:00

When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room, your mind, like mine, may wander toward the reception desk, with its trilling phones and flow of patients. But our idle observations pale in comparison to those of Jenna Ward and Robert McMurray, who spent over 300 hours observing GP receptionists within three practices. They´ve published their findings in a new study in the journal Social Science and Medicine, which raises the lid on the emotional labour conducted in this role.

The process of managing your emotions to achieve paid work outcomes was termed emotional labour by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her seminal The Managed Heart. First explored within the ever-cheery flight attendant role, it’s now been explored in a range of jobs including health professionals such as nurses. Given the increasingly crucial role of the GP receptionist as the gatekeeper of health services, it’s clearly worthwhile to understand what kind of emotional labour they are involved with.

The investigators noted that the receptionists have to balance their transactional activities, such as checking-in or filing, with the need to deal with the unique features of a patient. For instance, they observed receptionists pausing to relate to and warmly converse with a patient with mental disabilities regarding the children´s book they had brought in. Through interviews taken opportunistically across the study the investigators clarified that these emotional moments are to some extent a performance, not an effortless reaction: ”you can't keep up a level of empathy that maybe you would like to do all of the time because it would be emotionally draining". This is emotional labour in action.

The research uncovered two forms of emotional labour that have previously been undefined. The first was neutrality: under pressure or faced with abuse, receptionists must present themselves as calm, professional, and willing to allow access to services in a disinterested manner. The other, emotional switching, is a consequence of the constant flow of situations the receptionist must deal with: when a joyful phone call is followed by a anxious or sorrowful encounter, the receptionist´s emotions must keep step.

The authors conclude that the research offers insight into the role, and also asks questions about the nature of emotional labour more broadly. In their words, "it is not just the emotional style of offering that is part of the service provided by GP receptionists, but also the ability to tailor that offering to the needs of individual clients." They suggest that this may be a feature of many more roles that demand emotional labour, and call for more research to investigate how our working lives require us to be the keeper of our feelings.

Ward, J., & McMurray, R. (2011). The unspoken work of general practitioner receptionists: A re-examination of emotion management in primary care Social Science & Medicine, 72 (10), 1583-1587 DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.03.019

What's the best way to deal with flare-ups of anger at work?

2011-05-30T07:11:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had someone flare up at you at work, or witnessed a colleague slam down the phone and reel off expletives? Traditionally, expressing anger in the workplace is seen as unprofessional, as sheer aggression. A model developed by Deanna Geddes takes a different tack, and receives empirical backing in a recent study in the journal Human Relations.

Geddes and co-author Lisa Stickney point out than rather than being uniformly toxic, anger is often provoked by a sense of mistreatment, and can point to problems in the workplace. Geddes has suggested a Dual-Threshold Model of workplace anger where the organisation can be harmed in two ways: when expressions of anger are so extreme and deviant that they break an 'impropriety threshold', or when anger fails to ever reach the expression threshold, meaning the feelings are unvoiced and the underlying issues fester. When the thresholds are too tightly stacked together in an organisation, any expression of anger is automatically considered deviant and muted by the threat of punishment.

In the present study, 194 participants completed a questionnaire that asked them to reflect and comment on an occasion when someone at work went 'too far' in expressing their anger. As well as the type of expression – verbal outburst, inappropriate communication or a physical act, participants recorded how the event was responded to, both formally and informally, and how the situation changed following the event. This last feature was critical: did the handling of the situation lead to resolution of the root problem or leave it hanging?

The authors predicted that outcomes should be most positive when the responses to anger are more supportive, rather than punitive, and indeed neither management sanctions (such as a written warning) nor coworker sanctions (distancing themselves from the individual or responding in kind) were more effective than doing nothing at all. Conversely, speaking to the individual and understanding their situation led to more situations taking a turn for the better.

It's worth noting that when the original event involved some physical acting-out of the anger, the underlying issue tended to be resolved better. This is surprising, seeing as physical expression often triggered sanctions due to their perceived high deviance. The authors speculate that the pure visibility of physical actions make it impossible to duck that there is an issue: sanctions may be applied, but the conversations that accompany it go deep enough to gain a full understanding and act.

Geddes and Stickney suggest that “anger expressions may be better viewed – conceptually and practically – as focused forms of employee dissent or voice by which the employee confronts inefficient, unjust, and/or offensive workplace situations.“ So when we witness anger, we should consider whether there may be just cause for the reaction. We should also be cautious of zero-tolerance approaches that automatically apply sanctions; if an employee already feels wronged, introducing further punishment can compound the strain on their relationship with coworkers and the organisation. Instead, we should train ourselves out of treating all charged expressions as aggressive behaviour. Anger can be a gift, if we choose to see it that way.

Geddes, D., & Stickney, L. (2010). The trouble with sanctions: Organizational responses to deviant anger displays at work Human Relations, 64 (2), 201-230 DOI: 10.1177/0018726710375482

What mix of information sources attracts highly educated graduates?

2011-05-27T01:37:00.000-07:00

Despite challenges in the global economy, organisations continue to rely on top-quality graduate hires to maintain capability and feed a long-term talent pool. So they're likely to appreciate a recent piece of research that investigates how potential applicants are influenced by the information they find about an organisation.

Yasmina Jaidi and colleagues contacted 221 masters students at a French business school on two occasions, six months apart. At the first contact, just after a jobs fair, the participants were each asked to identify three organisations that they were currently considering applying to, and how they felt about their prospects for each. They also recounted how much exposure they had to the organisation via a range of information sources, and their current level of intention to pursue a job there. Then at graduation the 141 students who remained in the study were asked what behaviours they actually exhibited in pursuing these three jobs.

In terms of the information sources, the study found that organisations benefited from investment in recruitment advertising and cultivating a good word-of-mouth reputation: both of these increased participants' intention to apply to that organisation, relative to less advertising or bad word-of-mouth. However, having an on-campus presence, often seen as a powerful way to expose the company and brand to a potential workforce, actually showed a negative relationship with intention to pursue a job at the organisation, suggesting that this mechanism can have perverse deterrent effects.

When it came to publicity, neither good nor bad news influenced intentions to apply, but when it came to actually buckling down and doing it, participants put in somewhat less effort when they had heard bad news. A similar effect was found with jobs that the students felt they had little leverage in acquiring: they were undaunted in their intentions to apply but their actual actions trailed off. These findings remind us that an individual's intentions do not always translate into behaviour.

The authors note that recruiting organizations “should be careful with their on-campus activities as to avoid negative reactions among job-seeking students” - for example, “when a company is very present on-campus it may evoke a feeling of distrust and lowered credibility”. In addition, they stress the need to “be aware of the fact that investments made in recruitment communication can be neutralized by negative publicity or word of mouth”.

Jaidi, Y., Van Hooft, E., & Arends, L. (2011). Recruiting Highly Educated Graduates: A Study on the Relationship Between Recruitment Information Sources, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and Actual Job Pursuit Human Performance, 24 (2), 135-157 DOI: 10.1080/08959285.2011.554468

Hiring by online profile: perils and challenges for the networked recruiter

2011-05-20T01:56:00.000-07:00

(This post forms part of this month's focus on younger people in the workforce.)

Whether it's holiday snaps, opinions, or your work history, it's likely that you use a social network site (SNS) to express some things about you. This is especially true for the young; membership of Facebook, the largest SNS, continues to show a skew towards ages twenty and under. It's unsurprising that recruiters might use these sites to find out more about job applicants; a 2009 poll indicates 45% of 2600 hiring managers polled had done just that. Now, a new paper by Victoria Brown and E. Daly Vaughn surveys the risks and consequences of allowing online discoveries to influence hiring decisions.

The attractions are clear: recruiters get free, quickly accessible, and otherwise hidden information about applicants. The 2009 poll suggests that 35% of the managers rejected candidates due to SNS evidence, such as unwanted habits or information that contradicts their resume. The evidence can also support candidates by corroborating resumes; employment-centred sites such as LinkedIn exist partly to perform that function.

The first issue Brown and Vaughn raise is perceived invasiveness: trawling through individual's profiles (and those of their friends, just a few clicks away) can feel like snooping. By harming the candidate's recruitment experience, now recognised as a valuable 'pre-onboarding' phase, this can undermine relations once in post.

Secondly, is it fair? An SNS user who shares freely may be sifted out in favour of a counterpart who is cannier at selecting settings, but no better at the job. Moreover, many SNS's detail non-work behaviour, and generalising from here to the workplace may be unwarranted. We can also fall prey to drawing conclusions on the bases of a small sample of 'recent activity'.

Most importantly, the observed behaviours must relate to job criteria to be justifiable for use in employment decisions. An appropriate case would be assessing uploaded images created by a graphic designer, to establish the breadth and quality of their output. But in other cases, information has to be tied to some higher-order construct.

The good news is that some evidence exists that we can construe personality reasonably well on the basis of SNS profiles. But for areas such as verbal communication, we don't have that evidence. (Personally I'm happy to lapse into Facebook patois when I'm on-site. Sincerely sharing communication conventions, or ironically playing at it? Like the Simpsons, I don't even know any more.) The authors also worry that SNS screening may be very prone to biases, given that SNS data gives ready indication of race, age, disability and other factors that shouldn't be considerations in screening decisions.

The authors suggest organisations should develop policies on SNS use in hiring. They recommend forbidding opportunistic online reviewing of some candidates but not others, and listing appropriate criteria, with standardised rubrics that can be used to evaluate candidates. Even then, where there is no clear validity evidence legitimising decisions, the authors suggest it may be better for organisations to ban the practice entirely.

Brown, V., & Vaughn, E. (2011). The Writing on the (Facebook) Wall: The Use of Social Networking Sites in Hiring Decisions Journal of Business and Psychology DOI: 10.1007/s10869-011-9221-x

An interview with Jim McKechnie on child employment

2011-05-18T05:42:00.000-07:00

(Jim McKechnie is a professor in the Social Sciences department at the University of the West of Scotland. Following his presentation on child employment at the BPS Annual Conference, he was gracious enough to spare some time to explore the issues further; my questions are in bold. This forms part of this month's focus on younger people in the workforce.)

You've spoken of how jobs can have good and bad effects on young people who take them. What's a good example of that?

Well, take the number of hours worked: our research suggests a complex relationship with educational attainment. Students working excessive hours – more than 15 hours/week - have negative consequences in academic attainment. But those working five to six hours a week do better educationally than students who have never worked. Of course, we have to establish the causality, but it's clear that working isn't necessarily a bad thing for schooling.

Beyond the hours worked, are there types of jobs that are less worthwhile – too menial, perhaps?

We need to be cautious and not look at these jobs through adult eyes. The least demanding jobs are those in delivery: not a lot of contact with individuals, not much decision-making. But at the same time, those jobs tend to be taken by people who've never worked before as a first way in to having a full-time job.

As an early experience, it might be demanding to them, as they've never had to get up early before, they've never had to be reliable. And typically, people who start part-time in delivery work go through a sort of career path of part-time jobs, with an 'arc of demand' increasing as they move forward.

Could you talk about how employers are involved?

Well, they tend to seek child employees on the basis of flexibility, rather than cheapness – wages are typically standard, especially for post-16s. Some recognise “a breath of fresh air” that a young person brings into a workplace. For example, they see them as less pedantic than the adult part-time employees they have.

Employers are very variable in how they treat schoolchildren. One response to this would be to recognise good employers in some way. For instance, training provided is very variable. Those employers who do train see the young people as an investment for the future: “I get a good quality employee for a relatively low cost.”

In this sense, it resembles the impetus for many graduate programs.

Yes – and moreover, when these employees move on typically they introduce their friends as a 'next generation' for the business; a free screening process for the employee.

There is a growing recognition among employers that this young group of people are a valuable support system for their business, but it would pay for employers to pay more attention in some cases. It would be worthwhile for the better, more organised employers to introduce contracts when workers hit 16 to ensure they get time off for exam prep, to restrict hours so it doesn't clash with education; to say 'we acknowledge we get the flexibility, so we give something back'.

I was fascinated by your finding that around 20% of your young sample had some supervisory responsibilities.

One example we have is of an individual entering work in a shoe shop at the age of 14. who gained sufficient expertise in technology and methods that by 16 they were used to deal with and on-board new employees.

Now, we know the value of peer to peer tutoring in education, so why not take that model and apply it to business situations? You could imagine having a young person showing others the ropes may be better than a more managerial approach, and avoids potential culture clash.

How about the young people themselves – how can they get more from these early work experiences?

There's a major challenge for young workers themselves, as they tend to undervalue the experience, and don't see the full scope of what they're doing. In education, we use personal development planning to foster self-reflection on academic work. Should we extend this to work experience too?

There is a tension, however. When you talk to young people, one of the major benefits they see in paid work is a growth in their independence and autonomy – a consistent finding in the evidence base. If you try to educationalise that experience, you may be undermining one of its most valuable benefits! If you have to justify to the teacher what you've learned from work, it becomes just another kind of coursework. So we advise treading cautiously, as an opt-in opportunity for those who wish to try it.

How would you like to see the world of psychology participating in this discussion?

From an Occupational Psychology perspective, to ask whether or not we can look at this age group of workers in terms of well-researched features such as job satisfaction, quality of employment experiences, engagement, even issues like stress. There are an array of tools out there but they've been designed for adult populations. Given that an estimated 1.1-1.7m under-sixteens contribute to the economy through part-time jobs, and given we're talking about our future workforce here, this group needs some time under the spotlight.

The invisible workforce: schoolchildren in paid roles that are complex, rich and often ignored

2011-05-16T02:53:00.000-07:00

Schoolchildren in jobs: that just amounts to the odd kid on a paper round, doesn't it? Not according to Jim McKechnie's research team from the University of the West of Scotland, who presented earlier this month at the Annual BPS Conference. McKechnie revealed that part-time paid employment was a majority experience for schoolchildren. From his own survey data – around 10% of those in secondary education in Scotland, 18500 students in all – once students move beyond their last year of compulsory education, more of them are in paid work than not.

It may be common, but does it matter? From one perspective it's a problem: given finite time, any non-school activities supplant time that should be spent on education. For some, it's a blessing, providing opportunities and learning experiences unavailable in the education system. And for those such as McKechnie's group, it's a balance: any adult job has a mixture of positive and negative aspects, and the same is bound to be true for children as well.

The team surveyed the types of roles taken by children to explore the charge that they are generally menial and unstretching,. They found that, rather than paper routes, the sample worked substantive jobs in service industries, including retail, (28%), catering (28%) and delivery (18%), with smaller numbers in other domains such as care work and cleaning. Moreover, participants reported a range of activities within roles, with 70% dealing with customers and surprisingly, over 20% engaged in some kind of supervisory activities.

To look closer at this, each candidate was given a 'demandingness' score based on the activities within their job. Demanding jobs were more likely to be taken by those in higher school years, and by females rather than males, but features such as socio-economic status, academic attainment, and truancy didn't have any influence. As McKechnie puts it, there is “nothing atypical about taking a demanding job”.

McKechnie observed that taking survey data from youngsters may pose additional methodological challenges, a theme picked up by his colleague Amanda Simpson. Her study used multiple methods to gather information from 32 working youngsters, combining observation with interviews and also asking participants to record the activities they were involved in at various points in the day, prompted by mobile phone notifications.

The study suggested that the jobs, even many seemingly basic ones, involved a range of activities and opportunities to gain and develop both soft and technical skills. However, the children often initially showed limited awareness of these, though they gained more insight through the event recording procedure. To some extent, the 'invisible workforce' are only partially visible even to themselves.

In the next post, we spend some time with Jim McKechnie to discuss the significance of this research for the workplace.

What ingredients sweeten Sunday working?

2011-05-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

I hope you're having a relaxing weekend. If so, spare a thought for those busy at their jobs, serving in shops, making our meals, or mending wounds. Lacking a sacrosanct day of rest – in much of the West at least – we expect this work to get done... but are reluctant to be the ones doing it. Sunday is the day most workers avoid if they can help it; now, a new study suggests ways to sweeten this bitter pill.

James Martin and colleagues contacted union members working in a retail food chain that often requires Sunday shift-work, using a survey to gather responses from 2000 employees. The researchers were interested in how an employee's satisfaction with their current work schedule relates to other factors, after taking into account considerations such as base pay rate and hours worked.

They found that unsurprisingly people were happier to work Sundays when this came with a salary premium; however, the premium needed to be at least moderate in scale ($2/hour extra, rather than $1/hour). In addition, Sunday workers with more control over their overall schedule were more acceptant of their schedules, as were workers with longer organizational tenure. The latter probably reflects the fact that time in a job offers more opportunities to get out of, negotiate, or make peace with schedules that pose inconveniences.

Martin's team also explored what future benefits could entice Sunday workers into taking further Sunday shifts, and found that this depended on how the workers currently felt. For those already satisfied with their working pattern, the notion of a raise in the Sunday premium was attractive; those currently fed up with their current schedule were much harder to please financially. These individuals thawed towards future Sunday shifts when it came with the prospect of more power over the rest of their schedule: to flex and amend it to fit circumstances, or simply to have more say over it in the first place. It's worth noting that these analyses give insight into how to handle incremental change – working more or fewer Sundays – but have less to say about the introduction of wholly new working schedules, as they did not assess attitudes in non-Sunday workers.

Organisations that depend on work completed in non-standard schedules have to account for the fact that we prefer to do other things with our nights, evenings, and weekends. This research reminds us that although financial incentives do still appeal, we would do better to provide employees more say in when they work. And if you're working today, I hope you have some time off soon when it suits you.

Martin, J., Wittmer, J., & Lelchook, A. (2011). Attitudes towards days worked where Sundays are scheduled Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726710396248

Leaders considered more ethical when their moral horizons are wider than their followers

2011-04-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

Ethical leadership is defined through its actions, by communicating ethical messages, applying sanctions to wrong-doers, and role-modelling appropriate conduct. Employees who perceive their leaders as ethical put in more effort and are more prepared to speak up and report issues at work. Now, some fascinating research suggests that judgements of ethical leadership themselves depend upon the level of cognitive moral development: not only in the leaders, but the employees as well.

Cognitive moral development is a concept originally devised by Lawrence Kohlberg that concerns our moral horizons: is 'right and wrong' merely about how we fare in life, or can it mean more? Kohlberg suggested our moral cognition begins at a 'pre-conventional' stage where all we value is self-interest, then potentially develops to a law- and norm-centred 'conventional' stage, and finally can climb to a 'post-conventional' perspective, that is driven by universal principles of right and wrong. In a recent article, Jennifer Jordan and colleagues recognised that this quality could have something to say about perceptions of ethical leadership.

Their research recruited 28 executives and 129 of their direct reports, who all completed a standard test of moral development. The direct report also gave their opinion of the executive's ethical leadership. The data was then combined into all possible pairs, where each pair comprised an executive and one of their reports.

How did those executives seen as ethical do on the moral reasoning test? They scored highly; specifically they scored higher than their direct reports. That is, when leaders thought with somewhat bigger moral horizons than their followers, they were seen as most ethical. Jordan's team had predicted just this, based on an observation from social learning theory that the best way to model behaviours to others is to stand out from the crowd: sophisticated, novel moral reasoning can grab attention in a way that dutiful consistency will not.

How do the followers appreciate these perspectives if they don't make sense to them? Well, the leader has to find a way to make them sensible. Luckily, post-Kohlberg researchers agree that individuals at higher levels can choose to speak 'the same ethical language' as others when necessary, offering a bridge between the two ways of thinking.

So should leaders be distinct from their employees to be effective? It depends what outcomes you are after. If you want employees to have higher job satisfaction, evidence suggests it's actually better for the leader to closely share their values, meaning everyone is comfortably on the same page. Yet as the authors note, “divergence leads to better outcomes when it is important for leaders to stand out and be noticed”.

To close, here's a telling detail from the study: in over half the pairs, the executive actually had the lower score in moral development. While we can debate whether it's better for a leader to be part of the moral mainstream or forging ahead, either is surely preferable to bringing up the rear.

Jordan, J., Brown, M., Trevino, L., & Finkelstein, S. (2011). Someone to Look Up To: Executive-Follower Ethical Reasoning and Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206311398136

Drinking habits of freelance musicians are a response to job demands

2011-04-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

When we pore over biographies of Cobain, Mozart, or Shakur, are we getting a true insight into the psychology of musicians? Doubtful; dealing with rare figures whose musicianship is confounded with celebrity, the psychological autopsy is inadequate for understanding this ancient and valued profession. The stereotypes it can reinforce, such as the 'mad genius', are often dispelled by more rigorous investigation: a study of psychopathology in a sample including artists, writers and scientists revealed that composers had almost the lowest rate.

And how about the other stereotype, that musicians love to get trashed? It's true that jazz greats often got high, but their reasons were more varied than simply hedonism; many used drugs to deal with pressure from the job and from peers. A recent study suggests our current jazz and string musicians, in a similar spot, find themselves deep in the drink.

Melissa Dobson from the University of Sheffield conducted interviews with eighteen freelance musicians, half string players and half jazz musicians. Reviewing these reveals that a key professional capability for these musicians is social expertise with peers. If looking to draft in a cellist for an event, differences in talent between candidates may be too minor to matter for the audience, so the job may swing to whoever's a better laugh to hang with during the breaks. In their informal economy, musicians know the power of these fickle decisions and do what needs to be done to maintain a reputation that they “get on with people”.

Typically, that involves drinking. Partly a generational legacy, as hard drinking is tied into the subcultural furniture, it's also a fact of the environment, as venues for live music typically serve alcohol. It fills dull gaps between sets in unfamiliar places, and after the show offers a form of psychological detachment from work. Ultimately, it's socially self-perpetuating: if everyone drinks, then you need to develop a habit too. Some interviewees had mixed feelings about this: “lots of players that haven't been offered jobs.... [are those who] won't really go out for the whole sort of socializing thing... a bit sad, but that's sort of the way it works”.

As well as alcohol, the interviews revealed the highly political nature of the freelance music world, where musicians both compete against and depend upon each other for work, and can find themselves trading disparaging judgements on absent peers to shore up their in-crowd position - another form of social currency.

Melissa Dobson concludes that the professional training that musicians undertake focuses on technical development over the challenges of navigating a freelance career, leaving them to figure out how to maintain reputation through a 'hidden curriculum' that operates out of sight of the convervatoire. Is this the only form of professional training that this critique applies to?

Dobson, M. (2010). Insecurity, professional sociability, and alcohol: Young freelance musicians' perspectives on work and life in the music profession Psychology of Music, 39 (2), 240-260 DOI: 10.1177/0305735610373562

Organisations, are your citizens impulsive and your deviants emotionally intelligent?

2011-04-12T00:55:00.000-07:00

How would you feel about having someone impulsive join your team? It's possible you'd be concerned: all reckless decisions and blurting out sensitive information, they'll hardly help. How about someone high in emotional intelligence (EI)? A better prospect, surely: mindful of others and pretty decent all round.

In a recent study, Doan Winkel of Illinois State University and his collaborators found a different picture. Impulsivity, the degree to which we act spontaneously, was found to lead to more organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs), discretionary behaviours that promote the organisation. Meanwhile emotional intelligence, as measured using an ability-based assessment (a credible research strategy we've noted before), was associated with deviant behaviours that harm the organisation. These findings are based on 234 participants who rated themselves on a series of questionnaire instruments; the participants came from a range of industries, suggesting the effect may be fairly generalisable.

The findings actually aren't so surprising. EI is a useful resource that helps develop networks, figure out hierarchy, and influence others. But the capacity for action that this provides can be put to many uses. The emotionally intelligent may figure out that they can get away with self-interested behaviours such as falsifying receipts, or calculate when a well-timed put-down will serve their interests. By rating items on these and other deviant behaviours, participants with higher EI reported more of these activities.

How can we make sense of the impulsivity finding? Well, OCBs are discretionary and can take time away from assigned responsibilities. “In an ideal world, sure I'd keep on top of organisational developments and help out my struggling colleagues, but now, with this deadline?” reasons the cautious employee. Meanwhile, the rating data suggests that their impulsive colleagues jump in to help more often, less mindful of downsides to doing the right thing. In a sense, impulsivity reflects a 'can-do' spirit, full of motivational energy to act.

The researchers expected to also find more intuitive effects of impulsivity being associated with deviant behaviours and EI relating to organisational citizenship. Surprisingly, these previously reported effects weren't found here, leading the authors to call for a greater understanding of what is needed for them to arise.

This study is not the first to find these kinds of incongruous effects. There's evidence that optimism and cognitive ability, both sought by employers everywhere, also predict deviant behaviour. These counter-intuitive findings are useful; they caution us against viewing individual qualities as forever good or bad, turning organisational people strategy into a game of Top Trumps where we try to collect the 'best'. It's clear instead that a characteristic represents both benefit and risk, is a potential rather than given, and that potential depends on many factors, including the workplace situation itself.

Winkel, D., Wyland, R., Shaffer, M., & Clason, P. (2011). A new perspective on psychological resources: Unanticipated consequences of impulsivity and emotional intelligence Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (1), 78-94 DOI: 10.1348/2044-8325.002001

Modest, conventional and prepared to lead: Older adults in the workplace

2011-04-08T05:48:00.000-07:00

Since 1983, the median age in the UK has increased from thirty-five to forty. The sun is setting on a fixed retirement age. So it's more important than ever for workplaces to understand how personality differs in older adults.

Previous research has reported a range of ways that ageing influences personality, such as declines in the Big Five factors of neuroticism, extraversion and openness.

James Bywater and Mathijs Affourtit of psychometric firm SHL wanted to extend this work using another instrument – their personality questionnaire, the OPQ - and to redress the age sampling bias common in occupational testing, where data on those over sixty is hard to come by.

They dug into a massive sample of 235,407 people who had sat the tool against a managerial/ professional benchmark, and categorised the data into four age brackets: 16-24, 25-44, 45-64, and 65+. It's worth noting that only 158 of the sample were in the oldest bracket, and of these, only thirty-six were women.

Focusing on notable findings rather than previous effects, moving from the younger to the older brackets the study found the following trends:

A preference for more conventional ways of working
A stronger desire to take charge of others that levels out over the last two brackets
Higher levels of modesty
Lower focus on career progression

For the last two findings, the trend did not hold for women in the 65+ bracket, who were not significantly more modest nor less ambitious than women in the 45-64 bracket; this may be due to the size of that sample.

As is common in this research, this was a cross-sectional study. We're still waiting for the holy grail: a comprehensive longitudinal study that revisits people over time. This would allow us to untangle a person's age from their birth cohort, such as the personality differences of being a baby boomer versus a millennial.

As the authors remind us, these differences are small, and dwarfed by individual differences; we would certainly never use them to inform selection decisions, for instance. However, given that many companies focus heavily on attracting Generation Y employees, it's important that changes to the workplace are in the context of understanding, rather than ostracising, older adults who will be a core part of our future economies.

Bywater, J., & Affourtit, M. (2011). Work personality in later life: An exploratory study. Assessment and Development Matters, 3 (1), 14-17

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The wages of sin: Envy in the workplace

2011-04-06T01:16:00.000-07:00

(This post is inspired by the Research Digest's Sin Week, bringing psychological understanding to the seven sins. Sin Week also featured in February's The Psychologist magazine.)

Have you ever felt that tight, uncharitable feeling in your belly when a colleague gets a raise, or commendation, and all you can think is “why wasn't that me?” Especially common when the colleague is like you – same role, similar tenure? That's envy, my friend. As you may recognise, it often contains a sour seam of hostility, full of ill-will towards the successful party. Clearly, this is not ideal for workplace relationships.

We might think it better to admire another's success instead, and this feeling of delighted approval is commonly thought of as a good workplace motivator. But recent research by Niels van de Ven and colleagues (covered in a sin week follow-up) suggests that feeling admiration doesn't increase motivation or performance toward our own goals.

Rather, the researchers found that motivation was most enhanced by what they call 'benign envy', a state where you don't actively wish misfortune to the person but still twinge with the recognition that their success could be yours. Of course, once in the envy zone, it's possible to tip into the more toxic kind.

The lessons here aren't simple. As the van de Ven paper notes, 'whether to admire or to be envious might depend on what matters most: feeling better or performing better' – or as we might put it, a collaborative working culture or increases in effectiveness. Still, here are a few thoughts to navigate this.

When envy is an issue in the workplace, employees can

Combat this by engaging more deeply with their own goals. Detailed goal and career planning can turn others' success from a vague threat into valuable information: 'They've got early promotion. What can I learn from them to make Section Head next year?'

Form tighter working relationships. As psychologist Alex Haslam points out, this can iron out the uglier features of envy by transforming 'their achievement' into 'our achievement'.

To maximise the 'better yourself' impact of envy, managers can

Ensure success is seen as deserved. Otherwise, malicious envy is more likely to arise. Organisational justice and fair reward of performance are likely to be crucial here.

Help people believe they can self-improve. The van de Ven study showed this was key to achieving benign envy. A mistake when celebrating success, is to focus on the unique: “nobody thinks like Dinesh does”, or one-off factors. Emphasise the attainable.

Finally, watch out for the flipside of envy: scorn for those we consider lower than us. Given that we tend not to think about the inner world of those we scorn, this is a recipe for being blindsided by really nasty conflict. I wouldn't envy you that.

van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., and Pieters, R. (2011). Why Envy Outperforms Admiration. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: 10.1177/0146167211400421

Consumers behave differently when they suspect staff will stereotype them

2011-03-31T07:11:00.000-07:00

Organisations recognise that people respond to stereotypes, and make merry use of them in their marketing strategies and advertising schemes. But we also respond to being stereotyped by others, an experience called ‘stereotype threat’ which can affect our feelings and behaviour. Do organisations recognise this too?

If not, they’d be advised to check out an upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, where Kyoungmi Lee and colleagues explore the phenomenon. Their series of experiments asked male and female participants to evaluate hypothetical purchases of technical services and goods, reasoning that these purchases could be influenced by the stereotype that women fare poorly in the so-called STEM domains: science, technology, engineering and maths.

In their first two experiments, half the participants were cued for stereotype threat. The first experiment involved a financial service product, and cued the STEM threat using mathematical symbols inserted into the promotional materials they were asked to evaluate. At the start of the second experiment, meanwhile, participants were simply asked to record their gender, an act shown previously to be sufficient to alert the risk of stereotype threat.

The promotional materials depicted the service providers as either male or female, using photographs or more elegantly in the second study - evaluating car repair services - by amending the hairdo on an otherwise identical cartoon mechanic. The investigators found that in both experiments female participants were significantly less prepared to purchase when the service providers were male, but only when the stereotype threat was cued.

In experiments one and two, female participants in the stereotype threat conditions had rated their anxiety as slightly higher, and accounting for anxiety levels seemed to explain the change in purchasing behaviour. If so, then lowering anxiety should erode the effect. The investigators employed vanilla scent as their means of chilling consumers out.

In this study all participants were cued for the threat through recording their gender before evaluating a potential car purchase. Under normal conditions, the threat effect duly emerged, but for those female participants whose study materials were infused with vanilla scent, no difference in purchasing emerged: they were just as happy to buy a car from a man.

Gender discrimination really does happen in the marketplace, so it makes sense for people to be wary. Organisations ought to be mindful of unnecessarily triggering stereotype threat, whether by unbalanced promotional material or clumsy service providers. We can also see another good reason for diversity in workforces: it gives customers more opportunities to avoid any perceived stereotyping. Your organisation really may be a stereotype-free zone, but you can hardly blame a customer for wondering.

Lee K, Kim H, & Vohs KD (2011). Stereotype Threat in the Marketplace: Consumer Anxiety and Purchase Intentions. Journal of Consumer Research (38) : 10.1086/659315

Be yourself, or else: how fun is used in high-control workplaces

2011-03-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

Call centres are a world of call stats, cubicles, and scripted encounters, yet in recent years some companies have promoted a credo of fun and individuality. A new article investigates one company to see how deep these currents run. It portrays a darker side to the fun workplace.

Peter Fleming and Andrew Sturdy conducted their qualitative study with an embodiment of the new trend, an Australian call centre they dub ‘Sunray’. Its telephone agents, age averaging at a youthful twenty-three, are expected to live by the 3Fs: Focus, Fun, and Fulfilment, and are continually encouraged to “be yourself”. The company strongly promotes diversity, notably regarding sexual orientation, and dyed hair, piercings and sexy clothing are encouraged. The company promotes itself akin to a permanent party, running training events that involve drinking and scoping out sexual conquests, and extends this atmosphere into working hours, via fancy dress events and a culture of dating and flirting.

So far, so fabulous. But Fleming and Sturdy went underneath the exterior through group and one-to-one interviews with thirty-three telephone agents and managers. Though some were positive, with around half endorsing the 3Fs and a be yourself policy that let them feel “free to be who we are”, a dissenting picture also emerged.

The chief complaints were that the freedoms could be limiting, and the authenticity...inauthentic. According to employees “you have to be able to see the lighter side of things… you have to be bouncy and willing to try anything”; failing to make it to the fun away days could result in penalties. Others felt that claims for a lack of hierarchy simply didn't hold up, and wished managers would “simply tell me the truth”.

According to the authors, these tensions emerge because the claims don't line up with the reality of how call centres operate. Like many industries, their roots are squarely in the command-and-control structure of the military. Sunray exemplifies this through its technological controls like call monitoring, bureaucracies such as strictly defined targets, and cultural edicts that specify “how we do work here”.

As Fleming and Sturdy see it, these stringent controls work to alienate and sap employees, which can lead to them disengaging or even resisting. The solution for these workplaces has been to divert attention from these controls with a parade of exciting things: cleavage, piercings, the chance to bring your surfboard into work. As the authors put it, “employees enjoyed liberties mostly around the work task...rather than so much in the task itself”. Indeed, one HR manager made the telling admission that “we need to make up for the kind of work that is done here”.

By this account, the company does alright, having their monotonous, wearing work completed, and escaping any real backlash by buying the employees off with a facsimile of social life. The young employees do less well. As we see, some are disillusioned that the promises don't line up with reality. Others may be drawn into dependency, as they've been encouraged to draw their social world from the same well as their pay-check. Work equals friends, romance, even identity; for the company, it's ultimately 'just business'. And overall, the individuality culture discourages ways of thinking that cultivate solidarity across the workforce.

It would be interesting to see follow-up work to evaluate some of these claims, such as to look at burnout rates and the consequences of overlapping work/leisure social networks. As it is, the authors suggest that organisations should tackle the root issues of alienating work, by reducing controls, introducing some practical freedoms and making the work more intrinsically rewarding. Until then, they conclude, “the 'humanized' call centre remains some way off.”

Fleming, P., & Sturdy, A. (2010). 'Being yourself ' in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control Human Relations, 64 (2), 177-200 DOI: 10.1177/0018726710375481

Volunteering supports workplace wellbeing

2011-03-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

In Britain nowadays we're all voluntary workers in the making. The government has branded us a Big Society, where voluntary schemes take on traditional state activities, strengthening community and making us feel useful. Research from Germany suggests another reason to run the jumble sale: it can increase well-being in our paid place of work.

Eva Mojza and colleagues from the University of Konstanz identified a number of features of voluntary work they propose could give psychological benefits. By immersing us in non-employment activities, it helps us to switch off from the grind, a valuable recovery process called psychological detachment. It's freely chosen, makes us feel useful, and often involves additional social contact, satisfying core needs of having autonomy over what we do, feeling competent, and connecting to others. And it provides mastery experiences: opportunities to learn and take on challenges.

To test these hypotheses, the research used a survey technique where people recorded their activities and states on a daily basis. The sample was composed of 105 German people who between them surveyed 476 days; participants were all in at least half-time employment and volunteered for at least a day a week. The bulk of the survey was completed at bedtime, when participants recorded how much of their day they spent on voluntary work or other activities such as exercise or childcare, and provided ratings on the psychological variables of detachment, needs satisfaction and mastery experiences.

Usefully, the participants also filled out a one-off survey to look at overall 'trait' levels of the same psychological variables. This allowed the researchers to determine whether volunteering work had any distinct effect on needs satisfaction, once overall need satisfaction and any effects due to activities like exercising were factored in. Just such an effect was found, meaning people felt more connected to others, competent, and in control of their lives after volunteering. Equivalent effects were found for psychological detachment and mastery experiences: volunteering helped to shrug off workplace concerns and gave opportunities to meet challenges.

Did this influence how participants were at work the following day? To answer this, the survey included a section that was completed immediately after work, with participants rating adjectives such as “enthusiastic” or “tense” to report positive and negative mood across the day, and rating how much they actively listened to their colleagues. These reflected aspects of wellbeing the researchers were interested in.

The authors looked for relationships between these and volunteering time and the psychological variables from the previous day. They found that active listening was influenced by yesterday's levels of psychological detachment from work and need satisfaction. Moreover, volunteering reduced negative mood at work the following day, operating through the benefit volunteering has for need satisfaction.

Positive mood wasn't directly influenced by any variable, suggesting that yesterday's volunteering can cushion against today's unhappiness but is less able to provoke happiness (maybe that's down to having cake in the office). As all participants were existing volunteers, we don't know if the observed benefits extend to someone less inclined to volunteering. And these benefits could vanish should voluntary work become mandatory, as some have suggested, or otherwise stripped of its valued features.

Nevertheless, this research suggests that volunteering gives back in many ways. Far-sighted organisations would do well to encourage and support volunteering within their workforce, as it gives back to them, too.

Mojza, E., Sonnentag, S., & Bornemann, C. (2011). Volunteer work as a valuable leisure-time activity: A day-level study on volunteer work, non-work experiences, and well-being at work Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (1), 123-152 DOI: 10.1348/096317910X485737

Two month review: how are you finding the Occupational Digest?

2011-03-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

It's coming up to two months since the Occupational Digest was born, which still makes us a young pup in the blogosphere. But it's time enough to have given you a flavour of what it's about, and the perfect time for us to hear what you think about it.

To date we've covered emotional abilities, how arrogant people perform, wellbeing breaks at work, weight and pay, and much more - check the archives in the right-hand sidebar for more. How have you found our coverage, in terms of detail, breadth, style, or any other consideration?

Are there new findings in the psychology of work that you'd like to see covered in the Digest?

If you're a subscriber to the email digest, how have you enjoyed that service?

Later in the year we will start to roll out features to complement our focus on reporting evidence based insights in the psychology of the workplace. What would you be keen to see arriving on the blog?

As always, please feel free to post comments in this post or email me directly at alex dot fradera at gmail dot com. We'd love to get your views.

Emotional Intelligence: What can it really tell us about leadership?

2011-03-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

On the heels of last month's post on a possible further component of emotional intelligence (EI), the Academy of Management Perspectives has just published a review of how EI relates to leadership. Is EI the primary driver of effective leadership? Or is evidence of its relevance to leadership “non-existent”?

A team of authors led by Frank Walter of the University of Groningen step in to arbitrate, reviewing past research as three distinct streams, an idea introduced by Catherine Ashkanasy and Neal Daus in 2005. The first stream contains research using standardised tests to measure employee's emotional such as emotion perception. Research within the second uses a rating method to make its measurements, trusting that we can accurately judge these abilities in ourselves or others. The third uses a broader definition, popular due to its power to predict work outcomes, but criticised as “including almost everything except cognitive ability”, which is less useful when we're trying to differentiate components of leadership.

The authors argue that by differentiating the streams we better detect when a case for a particular phenomena is supported by converging evidence – agreement across different streams. And such converging evidence exists for leadership effectiveness, examined through outcomes including higher effort, satisfaction, performance and profit creation within the team managed; all three streams agree on a role for EI. Similarly, there is a general consensus that EI relates to leadership emergence, the degree to which someone can manifest as a leader in situations where they lack formal authority.

The three-streams view also helps expose where evidence is gappy, as it is for specific leadership behaviours and styles. Can EI predict transformational leadership, a charismatic, visionary style that stimulates its followers? Definitely, if we consider streams two and three. But the stream one, hard ability EI evidence is thinner on the ground. For other leadership styles, such as the laissez-faire leader, the evidence is also unclear. For Walter and his colleagues, the jury is definitely out, as they believe that data from stream one is the best foundation for understanding what incremental value EI gives over and above other factors like personality.

The authors conclude that there is encouraging evidence that EI is a useful construct for understanding leadership, but warn that “the pattern of findings reported in the published literature suggests that EI does not unequivocally benefit leadership across all work situations.” They call for more stream one evidence, and insist there is a need to consistently control for both personality and cognitive ability, a step taken in only a single study reviewed.

Finally, the Digest HQ welcome their entreaty that “incorporating EI in leadership education, training, and development should proceed on strictly evidence-based grounds, and it should not come at the expense of other equally or even more important leadership antecedents.”

Happily, the review is freely available to access from the site of Michael Cole, one of its authors.

Frank H. Walter, Michael S. Cole, & Ronald H. Humphrey (2011). Article: Emotional Intelligence: Sine Qua Non of Leadership or Folderol? Academy of Management Perspectives, 25 (1), 45-59

When it pays to weigh: different effects of weight gain on income for men and women

2011-03-14T02:00:00.000-07:00

Weight matters to boxers, jockeys and gymnasts, but for the rest of us it's not high on our radar during work hours. However, increasing evidence suggests that consideration of body size affects how employees are evaluated in the workplace. A study from late last year tells us more about the troubling relationship between weight and pay – and how it works differently for men and women.

While much previous research on the “wage penalty” of obesity has been in the economics literature, Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable take a psychological approach. They acknowledge that the stereotyping literature provides some plausible psychological mechanisms: for instance, people who are obese are judged as less agreeable, less emotionally stable, less extraverted, and less conscientious than their lighter peers, despite this being untrue.

However, they point out that how these stereotypes come in to play may be different for men and women. Cultivation theory – the idea that what we see as desirable is shaped by media images – suggests that we may be relaxed about larger men, because being robust and solid is an image depicted more attractively than that of being thin. In contrast, 'average media woman' weighs much less than average real woman. Therefore, what we deem as overweight may be wildly different across sex.

Judge and Cable took these insights to two data sets taken from census studies: a German one of around 11,000 people, and 8,000 in a US sample involving data from fifteen reporting occasions, taken biannually. In both cases, participants were from a variety of jobs, and a ream of control variables were accounted for - from height to having kids to self-esteem. The US data had the additional advantage of allowing within-individual analysis: by looking at how losses and gains of weight affect a person's pay, we avoid the issues of whether both weight and financial destiny were determined by a birth variable that wasn't accounted for.

In line with hypotheses, the study found that for women the penalty of being heavier was twice as great when moving from very thin to average weight, compared to a move from average to heavy. The researchers see this as cultivation theory in action: women are punished if they deviate from the media ideal of skinniness, and even average weight represents betrayal. Any further deviations are almost academic. Meanwhile for men, the opposite was found: more weight actually means more pay, until a certain point where the weight finally begins to exact a cost, but one much smaller than that of being underweight.

The findings generalised across both sample groups, suggesting that this relationship isn't specific to a single national culture. Part of it could be that ideal-sized people have a genuine edge in some work situations (eg being judged as reliable or persuasive by their clients) but the broadness of the effect suggests an influencing factor common to most jobs: being recruited by and working alongside others who favour you more or less.

The authors conclude by acknowledging the troubling nature of their finding, but suggest that “it may be possible and competitively advantageous for employers to try and recognize – and then reduce – the role that weight plays in their employment decisions.”

You will be delighted to know that the paper is freely available on Timothy Judge's homepage.

Judge, T., & Cable, D. (2011). When it comes to pay, do the thin win? The effect of weight on pay for men and women. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (1), 95-112 DOI: 10.1037/a0020860

Considering how others can help with goals leads us to plan less effort towards reaching them

2011-03-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

We can't achieve our goals without making some effort. Summoning the willpower to put things in place and see them through can be tough. A recent study suggests that under certain conditions, we're willing to surrender motivational responsibility in the hope that our support networks will pick up the slack.

Gráine Fitzsimons and Eli Finkel looked at planned health behaviours across several experiments. Female participants were firstly asked to provide an example of their life partner helping them to fulfil a goal, either related to their health or, as a control condition, their career. They then rated how much time and effort they intended to put toward their future health goals. Those that recalled their partner helping with health goals slacked off, committing to less effort for the future. (We could think of this as the Jiminy Cricket gambit.)

To better understand the effect, the investigators evaluated depletion theory, which proposes that our capacity to self-regulate is a resource that is eaten up by use. In one of the experiments, participants completed an easy or tricky typing task before giving their examples and ratings; the tasks were designed to deplete a little or a lot of regulation effort. The slacking-off effect was greater and more significant for those in the tricky task condition, suggesting that being short on resources makes you more willing to let another shoulder the strain.

Another experiment examining academic goals found that considering partner support leads us to throw cautious willpower conservation strategies out of the window. Here, students of both sexes were given a fun puzzle to play before a valuable but taxing task that researchers claimed would benefit future test-taking. Half the participants were warned the puzzle would soak up effort needed for the taxing task, and they strategically spent less time on the puzzle, hoarding their efforts for later – unless, that is, they’d been asked at the experiment start to think about their life partner helping them in academic situations.

Personal goal-setting at work commonly involves identifying others who can support your goal. This is intended to enable and encourage, but this research demonstrates the possibility of perverse effects. However, it doesn't differentiate between support for activities that were possible anyway ( getting up for a 6am run) from support that provides a platform for further progress (sign-off for a work shadowing exercise). I suspect the latter, enabling support is genuinely motivating as it decreases, rather than increases, excuses for inaction.

Regardless, it’s clear that under some conditions we let others act as our conscience while we decrease our motivational efforts. We can resist this, by making it clear from the outset that we alone are responsible for success. Or, like Fitzsimons and Finkel, we could take a more celebratory view, seeing that “partners may develop shared self-regulatory systems” that allow them “to best make use of their limited self-control resources over time.” But we should definitely keep an eye on this tendency. Preferably you, if you have a minute.

Fitzsimons, G., & Finkel, E. (2011). Outsourcing Self-Regulation Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797610397955

Division of Occupational Psychology conference report

2011-02-28T01:38:00.000-08:00

I'll close up our first full month here at the Occupational Digest with the first of a few reports on the Division's annual conference which ran 12-14^th of January this year.

I was engaged and provoked by Timothy Judge's Myers Lecture, challenging “The illusions under which we labour”. His sights were on the “situational premise”: the idea that environment and context matter in explaining human behaviour, thus allowing occupational psychology to fixate on culture, recommend interventions, and believe in change. Judge examined this assumption via a wide-ranging tour of findings from behavioural genetics, such as the heritability of altruism, together with evidence of how humans quickly adapt to a new status quo; key examples here included how both marriage and lottery wins have only a transient impact on your levels of life satisfaction.

Judge ended by suggesting that because people are difficult to change, we should place more focus on recruiting the right type of people, redesigning jobs to fit people and leveraging strengths rather than trying to fix weakness; all laudable activities, I feel, and each of them currently practised in the profession (the first of those frankly dominates the industry!). The conclusion itself was less convincing, and I think he would have to be armed with a more systematic argument, based on evidence that tied directly to the methods and objectives in question, in order for organisational psychologists (and educators, therapists, army trainers...) to abandon their belief that individuals can change to become more effective at accomplishing goals.

A later talk by Steve Woods looked at ethnic differences in ability test scores. Occupational test users are sensitive to 'adverse impact' - disproportionately favouring people from one group over another – so this topic has been well researched, including using meta-analysis, which looks for patterns over a set of studies. Woods cites Roth et al’s (2001) meta-analysis which suggests a difference in means between black and white test-takers of up to 1D: loosely, this means a squarely average white candidate would score similarly to a black candidate who was sharper than nearly 85% of the black population. Evidence suggests the difference genuinely reflects group differences in ability, rather than issues with testing, with researchers disputing whether the effect reflects innate differences or cultural ones such as access to education.

Meta-analyses tend to collapse all the available data to ensure their overview is as authoritative as possible. Woods points out that by separating out the data instead, we can see whether the difference alters over time. This would give credence to the cultural cause, as genetic changes at that scale would be negligible, but cultural changes, especially for disadvantaged communities often targeted by public policy, can be more substantial. Woods and colleagues were interested in scores that reflected ‘g’, the general factor of intelligence, and considered only scores from tests that measured two or more of its subcomponents (eg numerical and verbal ability). The samples included were healthy Americans over the age of sixteen from ninety-one different samples, resulting in 1.1 million test scores, grouped into four decades from the 60s to 90s.

One unexpected finding was a spike in D, the black-white difference, when you move from the 60s to 70s. This isn't predicted by either distributional or cultural accounts, but makes sense if you think of the period before civil rights as one of limited opportunity for black people. Consequently, test taking would only be available to fairly exceptional individuals, ‘restricting the range’ to those likely to score better. Putting this decade aside, the overall trend was for a shrinking of D, closing down to around .3. Woods argues that this data changes the question from 'if' to 'how much' of the variance is due to cultural and developmental factors.

The talk was interesting especially in the light of Tim Judge’s keynote; here we saw evidence on fixed vs mutable differences in an organisational context, and, here at least, the score was culture one, genes nil.

Details about the 2011 DOP conference: http://www.bps.org.uk/dop2011/

Booster breaks at work enhance health and energy, and could ripple through organisations

2011-02-21T06:43:00.000-08:00

Many of us in developed countries know that our lifestyle gets in the way of achieving a level of health in line with our level of wealth. With around half our waking hours spent in work settings, Wendell C. Taylor recommends an evidence-based workplace policy aimed to boost our health, with follow-on benefits for the organisation.

Taylor's paper, an eclectic review of research and practises including US federal recommendations, yogic techniques and sports science, points out that the modern workplace is laced with health hazards. These include a lack of strenuous physical activity, prolonged bouts of sitting still, weight gain (often due to unhealthy consumption), and of course stress. His solution is to take fifteen minute 'booster breaks' that involve health-promoting behaviours such as physical activity, meditation and breath training.

Fifteen minutes may seem like small beer, but Taylor lays out the evidence that these small efforts may have big effects. The US Department of Health and Humans Services, through a review of hundreds of studies, concluded that having some moderate-to-heavy physical activity in your routine improves health, even when the doses are small; indeed, no minimum level has been identified for producing health benefits.

Sedentary behaviour has serious effects on health - the risk of obesity increases by five percent for every two hours spent sitting at work - and the effects are worse when not interrupted; luckily, that's just what taking a booster break will do. Snacking and smoking, both common ways to use or even to justify work breaks, are suppressed when alternatives are promoted to fill our time. Given that on average we can prevent weight gain by tipping our energy intake-outtake by 100 kilocalories, these small effects matter.

We can also put in time to change our state of mind. Meditation can reduce anxiety and increase clarity of thought, and it can be hacked to fit even the short times of work breaks. Taylor asserts that rhythmic breathing can affect stress and immune function as well as reduce depression, and cites evidence for decreases in blood pressure from three months of practice of a few daily fifteen-minute sessions. Of course, all these types of break can increase blood flow and energy levels, which are both important for work effectiveness.

Taylor recommends sanctioning and promoting these health-enhancing practises in the workplace as booster breaks where employees get together to breathe, work out, or experience Big Mind together. He argues that such a policy can have multiple effects in a ripple-like fashion: the primary impact is at the centre, on individual behaviours; a smaller but profound effect takes place for individual outcomes like health, stress, energy, fun; then increasingly smaller effects occur for organisational morale, productivity, healthcare costs, and even for the organisation's image.

Taylor argues that breaks can enhance daily productivity even if they reduce the total time working, citing research conducted with data entry workers. This might seem strange if we see the capacity for work purely in terms of 'time available', but once we see energy as a major limiting factor this makes a lot of sense. Organisational morale is boosted partly by the group design, which encourages worker cohesiveness and a sense of collective fun.

We all want to stay well at work - the challenge is to know what we can do within our busy schedules. This article argues that even as little as fifteen minutes from our day can make a personal difference, and by taking our colleagues along we can multiply that impact, for ourselves and for the organisation. The full Booster Break methodology is currently being assessed using an ongoing randomised control trial - rest assured we'll bring you a follow-up once it's completed.

Taylor, W. (2011). Booster Breaks: An Easy-to-Implement Workplace Policy Designed to Improve Employee Health, Increase Productivity, and Lower Health Care Costs Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 26 (1), 70-84 DOI: 10.1080/15555240.2011.540991

Organizational Psychology Review and open access to articles

2011-02-15T04:56:00.000-08:00

In the last post we looked at a study from a brand new journal, Organizational Psychology Review. I've read the opening sally from the editorial team and it gives a good picture of the purpose of the journal. The intent is to open a space for articles that attempt to synthesise specific findings to get a bigger picture. They hope this will allow practice "to move beyond an ill-understood ‘bag of tricks’ to better informed actions". This is firmly in line with what the Occupational Digest is all about, so I'm very happy to be adding this to my list of journals to follow.

It's worth emphasising that the journal will be accessible without charge for the next three years (until December 2013). To gain access you need to register but this is fairly straightforward.

I should also thank the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology for opening access to their article on Job Demands - this is a really useful way to raise awareness of the good work being published, and I encourage others to do likewise (and tell me!). If you are a publisher and you would like your articles featured on the Occupational Digest, do get in touch as enthusiasm is contagious.

Influencing others by showing emotion: a new emotional ability?

2011-02-15T02:51:00.000-08:00

Many workplaces recognise that besides more cognitive notions of intelligence – our capability to solve problems, use logic, process and judge factual information – they also need Emotional Intelligence (EI): the capability to recognise, make the most of and manage emotion. Now a new theoretical paper makes the case that we should be expanding this concept of EI to include the ability to influence others through emotional displays.

EI currently focuses on spotting, dealing with and making sense of emotions. Can I figure out why I was feeling increasingly uneasy through the meeting? Spot how you are feeling right now? Guess what might cheer you up? Authors Côté and Hideg focus their attention on another feature of emotions: that we display them physically to others in emotion displays. This insight goes back to Darwin, and has since been extensively researched notably by Paul Ekman (whose work is popularised in the TV series Lie to Me) with the field now recognising that the face, voice and touch are all used for this purpose. Emotional displays, even subtle ones, can cause our heart rate to rise, our skin to sweat, and our emotions to swell, often to then be displayed onwards in ripples of emotional contagion, such as when laughter gathers any within earshot.

Côté and Hideg draw attention to the workplace consequences of these displays. Anger at those who have neglected their duties can provoke them to redouble their efforts, guilt displays increase the likelihood of forgiveness, and positive emotions can result in more pro-social behaviour. Clearly there is an advantage to being adept at these displays, and the authors point out at least two ways in which one can be better. One is displaying the right emotion for the situation; considerations include the communication medium, as some emotions, such as anger, are displayed more strongly via the voice than the face (and the reverse can be true). Another is displaying that emotion effectively, facilitated by approaches such as 'deep acting' which tries to change the emotion itself, contrasting surface acting, which just acts on behaviour and can be perceived as inauthentic. (You can decide for yourself what's going on in the photo above.)

Côté and Hideg amass research showing genuine variety in how well people can influence others through displays, for instance the ability of bill collectors to communicate urgency to debtors. They argue that all this evidence suggests a real human capability that shows individual differences, concerns emotions, and can result in better or worse outcomes. On this basis, they call for it to be considered as a new emotional ability within the Emotional Intelligence framework.

In an illuminating section the paper explores how influencing others through emotional displays also relies on another: the intended recipient. They may fail to recognise the display if they come from a different culture with different cues. They may be unmotivated to give their attention to your display, because they don't trust you, because they hold the power in the interaction and are blase about how you may feel, or because they don’t see the value in trying to understand the situation (what the authors refer to as epistemic motivation). There is evidence for each of these factors moderating the effect of emotion displays.

We all know that people are influenced by the emotional reactions of those around them. But it’s valuable to recognise the ways this does and doesn’t work, know its genuine workplace consequences, and be aware that this may be better treated as an ability, rather than an unaccountable influence in the workplace. This paper does a fine job of this, drawing together a wealth of evidence, and because this research is clear, readable, and released in the freely-accessible Organizational Psychology Review, I'd encourage having a look yourself.

Côté, S., & Hideg, I. (2011). The ability to influence others via emotion displays: A new dimension of emotional intelligence Organizational Psychology Review, 1 (1), 53-71 DOI: 10.1177/2041386610379257

Second-rates and saboteurs: possible consequences of employee of the month schemes?

2011-02-11T05:56:00.000-08:00

As the BPS' newest employee, I'm thinking about how to make a good impression on my peers and managers. Perhaps I could even make it to Employee of the Month! "EOM" schemes are highly popular across companies, and considered by many to be best practice, so I was fascinated to find a paper by Johnson and Dickinson that starts to explore the motivational consequences of such schemes.

The studies described in the article seem to me preliminary, with a small student sample and favouring eyeballing over statistical analysis; I'll just touch on them below. The literature review, however, is a real eye-opener, and reveals how much opportunity there is for investigation of this area, with “no published empirical studies on EOM, even within a variety of disciplines such as psychology, management, and economics." Moreover, there are a number of criticisms of EOM design, including:

A competitive structure. If everyone performs well this month, there's still only one EOM: it pays to do better than others, not to excel together.
A winner-takes-all design. Small differences in performance may make the difference between acclaim and... tumbleweed. The pretty good and the mediocre are treated the same: they're invisible.
A focus on results over methods. Getting things done by bulldozing your workmates could be a way to win the award.
Criteria that are often vague and not transparent.

Some EOM schemes attempt to 'share the wealth' by ensuring the award revolves around to new individuals. This could however dampen any recognition value it has: "I've performed best this month... except for maybe Janet and Khaled, who already got it." The authors investigate this: in their sample of six students they don't see visible improvements on a dull computer-based processing task after being told they have won a revolving award.

A non-revolving scheme however, can end up with one or several great performers hogging the award, leaving the swathe of the 'able middle' unrecognised and unmotivated. Johnson and Dickinson look at this also, in a study where they set up their participants to always come in between 2nd and 5th place behind a named (fictional) "co-worker". Over time, a few of the students tailed off somewhat in performance, but a few others didn't. In my view this research doesn't provide compelling evidence for or against these EOM features, but lays some groundwork for subsequent work: watch this space.

One further risk, deliberately excluded from the research by using fictional teams, is that employees may seek the award via counterproductive work behaviours that could even slip into covert sabotage. If Steve is just one flawless restaurant set-up ahead of me, maybe I'll dawdle the next time he's in charge. This is serious business, and the consequence of EOMs focusing on results over behaviour.

Overall, this paper calls to our attention how shaky the theory and evidence for EOM schemes is, despite their obvious attractions as catchy, memorable, and simple ways to try to recognise employees. Raising the number of awards and a greater focus on behaviours seem supportable steps, but it's also key that organisations look inward to how the schemes are viewed by the employees who participate – or not.

Does your organisation have a EOM scheme? What are your views on its strengths and weaknesses?

Johnson, D., & Dickinson, A. (2010). Employee-of-the-Month Programs: Do They Really Work? Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 30 (4), 308-324 DOI: 10.1080/01608061.2010.520144

Hey co-worker, your family stresses affect me, too

2011-02-07T04:00:00.000-08:00

Kim is a little worried about her co-worker Greg. She hears all about his home issues: young kids, ill mother, and a house sale turned ugly.

You hear that his mammoth project has been stuttering recently - unsurprising.

It seems to have affected Kim a little too...

wonder how she is finding work right now?

Greg is experiencing family-work interference (FWI), where an individual struggles in the workplace, home, or in both domains, due to the conflicting demands they make. These include time demands and stresses, together with required behaviours - a workplace may expect an objective and cool style, whereas a family wants your openness and warmth. We vary in how we experience this: men are most likely to perceive the problem as family obstructing their work, rather than the reverse, and ‘Type-A’ traits are associated with more FWI. All in all, though, these clashes cause problems.

Now a new study by Lieke ten Brummelhuis and colleagues suggests that an employee’s levels of FWI affects not just themselves, but their co-workers too. They studied 1,430 pairs of employees from a Dutch policing organisation, and measured whether the FWI of one employee correlated with more sick days and stronger intention to leave the organisation for both members of the pair. They discovered it did: higher FWI produced worse outcomes on both measures for the employee themselves, and somewhat more weakly for their co-worker as well.

The team provide evidence that the negative outcomes are due to the transmission of emotional states from one co-worker to the other, a process called crossover. They measured states commonly associated with FWI: burnout, where exhaustion and doubts stack up to make daily responsibilities a struggle, and low levels of engagement, an attunement with your job, organisation, profession. The study showed that both crossed-over, and also showed that each appears to have a distinct effect. Burnout was more likely to lead to sick days, whereas lack of engagement, by eroding loyalty, increases intention to leave.

How the feelings caused by FWI cross-over isn’t fully understood. It’s likely to be a combination of negative banter, atmosphere, and displaced tasks from the overloaded employee. As such, it's premature on the basis of this research to recommend how to reduce the cross-over; some may be due to too much sharing between colleagues and some due to too little. But we can clearly see the benefit in seeking to reduce FWI for each and every employee, as the consequences can be far spreading. When Greg is feeling the strain, Kim may be feeling it, too.

Ten Brummelhuis, L.L., Bakker, A.B., Euwema, M.C. (2010). Is family-to-work interference related to co-workers' work outcomes? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(3), 461-469, DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2010.06.001

Arrogant employees are judged poorer at their jobs, even by themselves

2011-02-02T03:14:00.000-08:00

We all believed that Neville
was a f f f fine lad
but when we go to know him better
Neville drove us mad.
Neville is a bighead
Neville is a pain
Neville is a pratt without a brain

Toy Dolls – Neville is a Nerd

Most of us can recount work experiences involving people we would call arrogant. However, there's been little research pinning arrogance down, measuring it, or discovering its consequences for the workplace. A recent paper introduces a way to measure it and investigates what sets the arrogant individual apart.

Russell Johnson and colleagues firstly set out their definition: arrogance consists of those behaviours that exaggerate your importance and disparage others. This distinguishes it from narcissism which, although related, includes thoughts and attitudes that don't affect others, such as the physical self-admiration of Narcissus himself.

The authors gathered experiences of arrogant behaviour from employee focus groups to create the Workplace Arrogance Scale (WARS) which they validated through a series of studies. An example item is 'Shoots down other people's ideas in public'. They were then able to turn to the consequences of arrogance, firstly showing that arrogant individuals report fewer organisational citizenship behaviours – acting beyond your job to help others or the wider organisation. They then turned to the biggie: how good are arrogant individuals at their jobs?

To answer this, the researchers recruited eighty-two participants from a number of companies. They provided a range of measures including the WARS, overall task performance and specific performance areas - customers, relationships and development – on which each participant was rated by themselves and by nominated individuals in their organisation. (Getting these other-perspectives was possible as the WARS looks at behaviours rather than hidden thoughts.)

Far from being the most able, arrogant workers were judged weaker in almost every way by one rating group or other. Some of the findings are less surprising: people who think their managers are arrogant grade them as poorer across the board, which may be influenced by a reverse halo effect (overgeneralising a negative feature) or using the rating process to punish those they resent. Some are more compelling: individuals who rate themselves more arrogant rate themselves weaker at relationships and overall performance, with their supervisors and direct reports agreeing.

Another study looked at cognitive ability within another 172 working individuals who completed the Wesman Classification Test, a well-established measure of verbal and numerical reasoning. Weaker performance in either area was associated with higher ratings of arrogance.

There's evidence that arrogant people are aware of these shortcomings, not least in the lower ratings they give themselves. The studies also gathered ratings of more internal features, finding that arrogant individuals report lower self-esteem, greater work-related strain, and are more likely to fixate on minimizing mistakes rather than focusing on success. This paints a picture of the arrogant as anxious to cut it but aware they may be performing at the edge of their ability, preoccupied with failure and trying to survive by cutting others down.

However, as all studies (bar the cognitive ability scores) used subjective ratings, we can't discount the possibility that it is perceived performance that is weaker for the arrogant; perhaps they alienate others and, ostracised, join their critics in discounting themselves. Further research using objective measures of performance (eg sales data) could address this issue. For now we should pay more attention to arrogance in the workplace: it appears the bigheads don't have the capabilities to match.

Johnson, R. E., Silverman, S. B., Shyamsunder, A., Swee, H., Rodopman, O., Cho, E., et al. (2010). Acting Superior But Actually Inferior?: Correlates and Consequences of Workplace Arrogance. Human Performance, 23(5), 403-427. doi:10.1080/08959285.2010.515279

Understanding job demands: hindrances and challenges are not the same

2011-01-27T01:51:00.000-08:00

What's in a job? The Job Demands-Resources Model answers this question by defining two types of characteristics: job demands such as workload run down our energy and can harm our health, whereas job resources, including positive feedback, stimulate us and increase engagement. Neat, but the model has struggled with evidence that, against expectations, some job demands also link to higher levels of engagement.

A study by Anja Van den Broeck and colleagues approaches this by integrating work that carves demands into two further types. First are hindrances, e.g., repeated conflict: these provoke negative feeling, encouraging us to retreat into managing our feelings. Second are challenges, which include workload: these are still effortful but draw us toward a problem-solving stance which can lead to fulfillment and stimulation. Both types can run down our energy, but challenges can reward us in return.

Integrating this view into the model could remedy the inconsistencies - but not without answering some questions. Specifically, the hindrance-challenge research rarely considers job resources, and it's important to know what the beneficial effects of challenges are after resources are taken into account. (If increases in workload were sometimes accompanied by a free expresso, we'd want our analysis to separate caffeine from the workload effect.)

The study asked participants to complete questionnaires reporting levels of exhaustion (a measure of energy depletion) and vigour (stimulation), together with ratings of various job characteristics: demands (negative work–home interference and emotional demands), challenges (workload and cognitive demands), and resources (autonomy and social support). It used two samples, seeking to generalise beyond a single industry: these were 261 call centre agents and 441 police officers, distinctive due to more education and seniority.

They found that higher vigour - the good stuff - was not only associated with lower hindrances and higher job resources, but also with higher job challenges. Modelling the data confirmed that challenges had a significant and separate effect to job resources. (Bang goes my expresso theory.)

The story for exhaustion was less straightforward. Generally it increased with higher job demands and lower job resources*, in line with expectations. However the authors found no relationship either way to job challenges – surprising, as traditionally these would be classed as job demands, and demands = energy depletion. The authors recommend future work consider treating energy as elastic rather than as a fixed resource: challenges may produce energy to balance what they expend.

The study makes it clear that job challenges are made of different stuff from both job resources and their job demand cousins, hindrances, and modelling the data using three characteristics did a better job than the Demand-Resource model (or indeed, other ways to pair the characteristics).

Implications

As a practitioner, a model is a useful way to carve up the world: to consider the stresses and supports in a role for job redesign, or as touch-points for a developmental discussion. Many such models are spirited out of the air, and an approach that's evidence based is hugely preferable.

But when a model doesn't reflect the nuance of personal experience, people won't buy it. For many people, the cognitive load of a job isn't simply a hassle, a drain. It has a further quality, one the study's authors relate to Selye's concept of eustress- stress that spurs us forward. To separate these challenges from the disruptive distress of a hindrance feels right, and this study provides evidence that doing so sharpens this solid model of what's in a job.

Van den Broeck, A., De Cuyper, N., De Witte, H. & Vansteenkiste, M. (2010). Not all job demands are equal: Differentiating job hindrances and job challenges in the Job Demands–Resources model. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 19(6), 735-759. doi:10.1080/13594320903223839

*For the call centre workers, job resources did not relate to exhaustion. The authors suggest that in this group of more temporary workers exhaustion was driven by immediate concerns rather than long-term issues the resources can shield against.

Why do some boards hang on to compromised directors?

2011-01-23T03:14:00.000-08:00

A board of directors is faced with a decision when one of its members becomes associated with shady behaviour at another company: should they safeguard the board's integrity and dismiss the compromised individual? It's not an easy decision to make, weighing up the member's value against the risks of keeping them on - particularly in complex situations like accounting fraud where there isn't a simple transgression but a broader lapse in responsibilities. Why do some boards act quickly to dismiss compromised directors, and others don't?

Amanda Cowen and Jeremy Marcel of the University of Virginia have some answers. They identified 63 companies pressured into issuing a 'downward restatement' – an admission that their finances had been represented as rosier than they actually were. The authors examined the decisions made by other companies who shared a director with one of these 63 companies, finding that a compromised director was on average dismissed from 28% of their other board seats. The impetus had a lot to do with external scrutiny, with companies most willing to dismiss when covered by many external analysts and by government rating agencies.

In addition, Cowen and Marcel found an example of “mid-status conformity”, the social psychological effect that mid-ranked players are most concerned that developing events could define them in the eyes of others, as unlike the top and bottom dogs, people haven't developed fixed ideas of what they are all about. Here the boards that had mid-level social capital - as measured by their total connections to other directors nationwide - were readiest to eject problematic directors.

The authors looked for a second mid-status effect based around human capital, but none was observed. I wonder if this may be the result of using an indirect measure, using facts such as whether the board contained active CEOs, rather than directly measuring genuine capabilities or perceptions within the industry.

We might feel a little cynical about these sets of motivations, but the authors point out that their findings show that “organizational interests shape dismissal decisions”, which is better than simply saving friends and jettisoning less popular individuals. It confirms that boards take their responsibility to shareholders seriously, and this constitutes their ultimate responsibility under corporate law. However, there are dangers in such a hard-nosed cost-benefit approach. “If directors can anticipate colleagues’ reactions to their conduct, such estimations may adversely affect their risk-taking or decision-making behavior. This anticipation may be especially problematic when directors perceive that the consequences of their behaviors are disconnected from the conduct itself and are instead determined by their colleagues’ needs to manage particular external relationships.”

Cowen, Amanda P., & Marcel, Jeremy L. (2011). Damaged Goods: Board Decisions to dismiss reputationally compromised directors Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3), 509-527