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

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

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

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

Division of Occupational Psychology conference report

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/