BPS Occupational Digest

Sleep less and waste more time online: the temptations of cyberloafing

2012-03-06T16:16:00.001Z

Cyberloafing is when work time is frittered away on unrelated online activities, whether it be web comics, perusing news sites or watching the 1982 snooker championship final. A new article suggests that we may be more prone to it when we haven't had enough sleep. Its authors, led by David Wagner, began sifting through Google's publically available data for rates of Entertainment-related searches, judged to be a reasonable proxy of cyberloafing. But how can anonymous data shed light on an issue involving sleeping habits?

The investigators recognised an event that affects everyone's sleep: when the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving Time. Prior evidence suggests we lose on average 40 minutes of sleep per night following the switch, as our body rhythms struggle to adjust. (Exploiting a fixed phenomena is an example of a quasi-experiment; another would be the hurricane that occurred within this study on emotional hangovers.) The researchers used data from 203 metropolitan areas in the USA, weighted by area size, across 2004-2009. They found that Entertainment-related searches on the Monday after DST were 3.1% more prevalent than the Monday before, and 6.4% than the Monday after. It's worth noting that the data isn't segmented by work and leisure hours, so the effect includes extra surfing that might occur later at night, when people are still feeling awake; however, the bulk of online activity occurs during working hours.

A second study took this to controlled lab conditions. 96 undergraduate students wore a sleep monitoring bracelet overnight before attending a lab session to complete a computer task - assessing a potential new professor for the university by watching a 42 minute video lecture. What the researchers were really interested in was the amount of time they would spend surfing the internet instead. Cyberloafing was higher for participants who experienced more instances of sleep interruption or less sleep overall, as recorded by their monitoring bracelet.

This is another piece of research advancing the ego depletion theory of why we fail to effectively regulate behaviour. This states that willpower is a resource that is used up through effortful acts, leaving us susceptible to temptation or laziness. Researchers have previously argued that sleep is a means of recharging our regulatory resources, and these studies confirm that less sleep does indeed make us prey to counterproductive activities like cyberloafing. However, those who naturally exercise self-discipline may be somewhat resistant: in study two, sleep interruption didn't lead to more cyberloafing for participants who scored high on a measure of conscientiousness administered beforehand. (The effect of less overall sleep still remained.) This is consistent with ego depletion, as highly conscientious types are more likely to actively use methods to regulate their effort to overcome counterproductive behaviours, rather than taking the path of least resistance.

The costs of cyberloafing have been estimated at around £300m a year, so it's worth understanding when we're more vulnerable to its temptations; UK employers should remember this when our clocks go forward on the 25th of this month. Aware of its power, I've included only one extraneous, non-work related link in this article, and a niche one at that. If you're a classic snooker fan with a tricky deadline, I'm so sorry. Just think about all the time I wasted considering the alternatives.

Wagner, D., Barnes, C., Lim, V., & Ferris, D. (2012). Lost Sleep and Cyberloafing: Evidence From the Laboratory and a Daylight Saving Time Quasi-Experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0027557

How does clear specific feedback affect candidates who fail tests?

2012-03-01T11:47:00.000Z

Online tests for recruitment are widely used, and routinely followed up by specific feedback to applicants, in order to communicate decisions, emphasise the pedigree of the process to forestall complaints, and to benefit the candidate. But does it deliver on all these fronts, particularly when candidates have failed to meet the required threshold?

Sonja Schinkel and colleagues explored this through two studies. The first asked 81 university students to put themselves into a hypothetical job application process and attempt two ability tests, drawn from a well-established measure of general mental ability. All participants were then told they were 'rejected' due to scoring worse than the top 20% of test-takers. They then answered questions about how fair they felt the outcome was, and provided a second set of well-being evaluations (the first taken before the test as a control variable for analyses). How did appearing to fail the test make them feel?

Participants were happier when they felt the outcome was ultimately fair... unless they possessed an 'optimistic attributional style', measured before the test with items like 'what do you think when bad things happen to you?'. Why was this? This style involves attributing negative events to external, impermanent factors, and that attitude can help you dismiss a disappointment as just bad luck. But this buffer to well-being is eroded if you accept that an outcome is fair, owing something to internal and more enduring factors.

A second experiment with 244 participants replicated this finding, and extended it by contrasting the non-specific test feedback (you didn't make the cut-off) with false, specific feedback (this is where you scored). Such specific feedback was worse for the well-being of all participants. Moreover, optimists in this condition didn't enjoy the well-being buffer when they judged the outcome was unfair. It's as if the specific feedback unavoidably presents a jarring internal attribution that can't be explained away.

Experiencing a negative event, such as rejection, is unwelcome. Being able to attribute the event to external causes can lighten its emotional impact, but these studies demonstrate how many of the features of ability test feedback – emphasising the fairness of outcome through reference to psychometric properties, specificity of feedback including ranges of performance – impose internal attributions, and lead well-being to suffer, at least in the short term. Whether the self-insight gained outweighs the self-efficacy lost is a calculation left to another day.

Schinkel, S., van Dierendonck, D., van Vianen, A., & Ryan, A. (2011). Applicant Reactions to Rejection Journal of Personnel Psychology, 10 (4), 146-156 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000047

What kind of personality helps you engage with work?

2012-02-22T13:13:00.000Z

Job engagement is one type of wellbeing at work, where an engaged worker is one who both feels positive about work and invests a great deal of energy into it. Engagement has taken the stage from the more passive notion of 'job satisfaction', grabbing the attention of organisations and those who study them. Research has focused on how a job's features make it engaging, but another line of study has begun to understand how personal attributes add to the mix.

In this vein, Ilke Inceoglu and Peter Warr will soon publish analysis of three data sets comprising some 700 English-speaking employees. Theirs is the first engagement study to look across the 'Big 5' personality traits, using data from the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (not a Big 5 tool, but the frameworks have been aligned through previous research) collected online from participants keen to get insight about job assessment processes. The site also presented a short six-item job engagement scale, asking participants to rate how much they feel e.g. "I get absorbed in my job" over the past two months.

Previous, less comprehensive investigations of personality separately found engagement related to 'Big 5' Conscientiousness and in another study to Extroversion and Emotional Stability. Looking across their datasets Inceoglu and Warr replicated these relationships as well as others, but then used multivariate analysis to see which personality components were unique predictors. (The interrelatedness of personality traits can otherwise falsely colour results.) The analysis showed that besides Emotional Stability the only significant factors were the 'Social potency' component of Extraversion, and the 'Achievement orientation' facet of Conscientiousness. This was as they had predicted: these are the energetic components of the traits, contrasting with their quieter siblings in 'Affiliation' (Extraversion) and 'Dependability' (Conscientiousness).

Other wellbeing measures like job satisfaction depend on a combination of environmental and personality factors, so it's appropriate we understand engagement in these terms. This approach could explain anomalies: why do we tend to feel more engagement when we feel our job has the wrong amount of a given feature - too much travel, or too little autonomy? Shouldn't we feel less? The authors note that personality might be the hidden causal variable: maybe Achievement orientation drives both high engagement and high expectations for a job. Either way, it's clearer and clearer that workforce engagement isn't just down to job design, or organisational culture, but is influenced by the personal attributes of its members.

If you're interested in accessing a preprint of the paper, try this link (pdf) courtesy of the University of Sheffield where Prof Warr is based.

Ilke Inceoglu, & Peter Warr (2012). Personality and Job Engagement Journal of Personnel Psychology

Predicting leadership young, and a cultural case study

2012-02-20T11:52:00.000Z

More from the DOP 2012 conference, this time from the pen of Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist and the Digest.

Could C. Moustaka and colleagues, including Ian Bushnell at the University of Glasgow, be pioneering a new field of lifespan occupational psychology? Their poster asked ‘Leadership starts young: Do attachment style, personality and narcissism predict emergent leadership?’ Assessing late primary and early secondary school children during a visit to a science centre, the authors found that extraversion was the best single personality correlate of leadership, but that this was supported by experiences that may well include effective attachment. Aspects of so-called ‘narcissistic performance’, such as ‘I am very good at making other people believe what I want them to believe’, were associated with leadership performance on a ‘build a tower’ task.

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast: the tale of a nomadic storyteller’ was the intriguing title of a talk from Trixy Alberga, Head of Culture Change at the Highways Agency. Based on a comment made to her, the title reflected the belief that ‘culture is more powerful than strategy, since it reveals how things are actually done, whether or not this was intended’.

The Highways Agency, part of the Department for Transport, promotes the more effective use of the strategic road network by addressing the causes of congestion and unreliability. A large workforce, with mixed backgrounds including culture and preferences brought from previous organisations with powerful cultures, led to clear challenges for Alberga. She reported that engagement scores had suggested there is real room for improvement, especially in leadership at all levels; there were persistent rumours and some data about behaviours regarding diversity; and a greater number of grievances, complaints and sickness than desirable.

Alberga recounted her struggle to tackle the ‘multitude of conflicting stories’ around the organisation’s culture and systems. In attempting to agree a new vision, Alberga has worked towards ‘one story to unite all’. The result – ‘we take professional pride in keeping our roads moving safely’ – is currently the subject of debate, but it was fascinating to hear Alberga describe the occupational psychology behind the choice of each word. Supporting this was a range of interventions including a diary study of how people actually feel about the communications they receive; a ‘back to the floor’ scheme for senior management; and new performance data to include cultural features. ‘Still talking’, concluded Alberga, and these stories from someone making sense of a major and complex organisation were well worth hearing.

National culture and personality

2012-02-14T14:23:00.001Z

Here's another report from the 2012 DOP conference.

If people of different nationalities score differently on a personality test, does this say something about national temperament, or simply that the test is biased? Prof Dave Bartram took us through an interesting approach to unknot this tricky issue: when “national differences” in personality also correlate with other measures, we can be more confident they are the real deal.

Bartram worked with a big data set - one million participants all told – but as the correlations were made between countries, not individuals, they involved just 31 cases, a modest sample in which to detect patterns. Correlating the Big 5 personality factors with the four Hofstede dimensions of national culture, he found that each personality measure correlated with one or more Hofstede dimension; for instance, Emotional Stability tended to be higher in cultures that are less masculine, more individualistic, more tolerant of ambiguity, and have less power distance (meaning less acceptance of unequally distributed power).

The next analysis was neat, correlating the cultural dimensions with the standard deviation of personality scores in each country – whether scores tightly clustered or showed large variation - rather than with their average levels. This made it possible to explore the idea that some countries are culturally “tighter” than others, giving less scope for individual difference. The analysis picked up several such effects. The higher the power distance of a culture, the more uniform its members were in terms of measures like agreeableness, conscientiousness or extroversion; the reverse was true for countries high on another measure, individualism. Even with this small data set (the 31 countries) it was possible to predict large amounts of the variance of Big 5 measures from the Hofstede scores, as much as 76% in the case of Emotional Stability.

Correlation of personality with culture ratings might not strike you as objective enough to produce a verdict; perhaps they are both subject to a common confound. But how about correlations with hard measures such as GDP, life expectancy, UNESCO education index and the UNDP human development index? These measures were all found to correlate with standard deviations of personality scores, for instance high GDP was related to larger ranges of openness to experience in the population.

This study doesn't answer whether national culture shapes typical personality or vice versa, although it's useful in honing hypotheses for investigating such matters. But this cascade of correlations does suggest that personality differences between countries, although they are small, reflect something real, rather than meaningless measurement error.

Attrition in the army: why do so many leave during training?

2012-02-09T15:40:00.000Z

Here's another report from the 2012 DOP conference.

The British army loses nearly one third of its recruits to attrition, many leaving during the first 14 weeks of training. Its size means reducing this figure by a percentage point could save almost £750,000. MOD psychologist Natalie Fisher investigated the nature of this early attrition, taking a multi-layered approach, speaking to recruits at various stages around the training period.

In a series of five focus groups, Fisher drilled deeply into the experiences of successful trainees. She found that the majority had considered leaving at one point or other, due to missing their families or dissatisfactions, such as over basic wage levels. The reasons for pushing on were diverse, but commonly included the desire to serve overseas and a sense of letting the family down.

The focus groups identified a critical period around week seven of training, which proved particularly challenging for leavers: this was the time when they were least likely to feel like a soldier or a sense of belonging. It's probably no coincidence that this period coincides with the weekend home and the chance to catch up with the world left behind...

Interviewing recruits who left during training, Fisher found negative reasons for joining up, such as ‘no career options’, were more frequent than for those who stayed through training. The latter group more often cited being driven by expectations and having family support. The interviews with leavers also identified they were much more likely to feel homesickness from the first week in training onward. Fisher pointed out that the psychological literature on this is problematic, as it focuses on students and children away at camp, and may not be generalisable. Certainly, some of the recommendations from that research, such as ‘get enough sleep’, aren’t entirely compatible with the training experience. However, the advice to establish solid routines and ensure access to someone to speak with are pertinent.

The study raises many questions: for instance, of those who were recruited but never even made it to training, some had concrete reasons, such as illness or family need, but one third simply changed their mind at the last minute. Why? And Fisher spoke to training instructors, who identified some perceived characteristics of those who left, such as a dislike of discipline, but conceded many exits were simply unpredictable. Were they not getting something they were looking for in the role? Like most organisations, the British army want to warn off applicants who would be a poor fit, but also prevent avoidable attrition of people who could have ultimately been a success in the role. In such high-stakes positions, this is a true balancing act.

Leadership positions for women are often atop a glass cliff

2012-02-07T14:41:00.000Z

Back in 2003, Michelle Ryan checked her pigeonhole and found an article from the business section of The Times in 2003, stating that the ‘triumphant march of women into the country’s boardrooms has wreaked havoc’ on companies' performance. This was to be the spark for a line of enquiry that has borne years of fruitful research, and the story began her DOP keynote tour of the 'glass cliff'. The term riffs on the metaphor of the glass ceiling – the invisible limit which prevents women from making it to the top of organisations. The glass cliff is an invisible risk, referring to the experience of women who make it to senior positions, only to discover they are unusually precarious.

Ryan began to perceive the glass cliff by scrutinising the claims of that newspaper article, deposited by an unknown friendly colleague. Historical data comparing 19 women appointed to the Board of Directors with a matched sample showed that appointments of women were indeed associated with slumps in share price, but that the slump preceded the appointment. The article had based its claims on a false assumption of causality, and it seemed instead that women were more likely to be appointed to companies in crisis.

Ryan then used experimental investigations involving hypothetical situations. She asked participants to decide how they would fill a position, such as company finance director, by choosing between two similar candidates who differed in gender. When the position was presented within a stable context – a growing company, a winnable political seat – then the candidates were similarly favoured. However, when the situation was presented as one with a high chance of failure – a company in crisis, or an unwinnable seat – the woman was a far more popular selection. People were even more likely to choose a female youth representative for a festival that was experiencing declining popularity.

Perhaps women are seen as better crisis managers than men? (Ryan quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘women are like teabags. You don’t know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.’) In another study, participants judged that a company in a stable context need a leader who was assertive, competitive, or possessed other traits judged to be stereotypically masculine by other participants in a pre-study phase. Meanwhile, leaders in crisis situations should be understanding, tactful, creative – more stereotypically feminine.

But what is it about crises that women are seen as suited for: taking control and improving performance, for instance? Not so; a follow-up that separated out different aspects of leading in crisis found female traits were only favoured for the purpose of soaking up criticism or enduring negative conditions. And another study showed that when the crisis situation had full support of senior leadership, there was no preference for women to take the role. The data suggests that women are preferred when the situation is not just risky but actively precarious, with likely negative repercussions for the situation and themselves.

What are the consequences for female board members? Well, there is evidence that female CEOs have far shorter tenures, and these may reflect the fact that their positions are often set up to fail. Ryan concluded that in the pursuit of equal opportunity, we shouldn't be misled by the raw numbers of women in leadership positions; the nature of the role matters just as much.

In an interesting extension of her experimental work, Ryan and colleagues collected folk theories for the glass cliff via the BBC website. Women tended to believe that women are singled out for precarious positions, or that they have fewer opportunities and therefore accept riskier positions. The majority of men simply didn’t believe that women are differentially placed on the glass cliff.

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Sample article:

Ryan MK, Haslam SA, Hersby MD, & Bongiorno R (2011). Think crisis-think female: the glass cliff and contextual variation in the think manager-think male stereotype. The Journal of applied psychology, 96 (3), 470-84 PMID: 21171729

Proceedings from the DOP annual conference

2012-02-07T14:33:00.001Z

Last month saw the BPS's Division of Occupational Psychology hold their annual conference, this year on the theme of delivering excellence. Over our next posts, the Occupational Digest will give a round-up of what we learned at the conference, reporting on established phenomena as well as breaking research. Note as always that conference proceedings are yet to be peer reviewed.

Resolutions 2012 roundup

2012-02-01T08:38:00.001Z

Posting this January at the Occupational Digest has had a twofold aim: to provide a retrospective on our first year in the blog, and to gather insights from these into a set of actionable 'resolutions' to take into your workplace this year.

For ease of access, here's a quick directory to these posts. Alternatively, simply click the resolutions label at the bottom of this post or in the tag cloud in the left sidebar to see them all.

Resolutions 2012: Working together

2012-01-31T15:58:00.000Z

In our final set of resolutions for 2012, we look at the foundation of any organisation, the need to work together. The workplace has always lived or died by the ability of its members to communicate, collaborate, and navigate tensions. Even oft-maligned areas like middle management make contributions by helping different parts of the organisation make sense of others, translating grand concepts to the practicalities of the shop floor and vice versa.

Get smarter about being creative together.

1. Encourage helping on creative tasks, but avoid that responsibility falling to the same people. Evidence suggests that soliciting and obtaining help can lead individuals to more creative outcomes. The catch is that help-givers show reduced creativity, perhaps because helping behaviours eat into their own time for exploring possibilities, or they become increasingly sure of their own perspective, narrowing their horizons.

2. Bring ideas up-front to a collective brainstorm. This isn't a new idea: there is substantial evidence that ideas can get lost in the mix of a freewheeling conversation driven by social factors. Recent research suggests another issue: early suggestions in the brainstorm can activate related concepts, leading to a domination of one class of suggestion at the expense of others. Ensuring you have surveyed your own mental landscape before exploring those of others' makes it more likely you can cover all the bases.

Responsibility and collaboration

3. Avoid diluting responsibility when setting goals. Research suggests we put in less effort to plan and monitor progress towards goals when we contemplate how others will step in if we fail. In this sense, strong support networks can have counterproductive effects: they let us off the hook. It's a good idea to make it clear that sources of support shouldn't be burdened with keeping things rolling, but are there to provide help with problems or when things are truly stuck.

4. Address lack of trust and bad feelings in teams to prevent things turning toxic. Evidence suggests that a key precursor to teams fracturing into subgroups is a low level of liking or trust. A group in this situation could continue to function as long as members nonetheless understood each other's perspectives; however, the factionalism would still persist, as this comes down to how people feel, rather than think, about each other.

5. Prevent teams going rotten by pairing members with non-team buddies. The dark side of trust: too much within a morally flexible team gives them the freedom to embark on dodgy behaviour. If trust isn't absolute - the team isn't fully "psychologically safe" - then such suggestions are more likely to be suppressed. One way to produce this might be to ensure team members have regular individuals outside the team that they are encouraged to speak to and confide in; peer mentoring or buddy systems would mean that unscrupulous ideas are never safe from some sort of exposure.

Ethics and power

6. Role model better moral perspectives to followers. When your team chuckles over that customer who couldn't get the hire car out of the garage you could join in, or stand apart and draw attention to the responsibility they should be feeling. Standing apart can be risky; being typical of the group helps leaders retain sympathy, especially after failures (external link, abstract only). But it's only by doing so that you are able apply influence to shift people to a new perspective. And the evidence shows that leaders who take this different perspective are accepted as more ethical by their teams.

7. Call out abuses of power to prevent bad seeds rising. It seems that casually breaking rules makes you appear more powerful to others, probably because the converse is true - powerful people can afford to break rules. As positions of power are apt to be given to those who appear ready for them, this attitude can help the wrong people to the top. If organisations encourage employees to challenge personal rudeness, skipping lunch queues, and the like, we can put the bad behaviour back in its box.

Leader support

If you're towards the top of your organisation, there's good you can do within and beyond it.

8. Commit to longer mentoring relationships to give the most to mentees. It can take time for mentoring relationships to yield value to those involved, especially when there are impediments to the relationship quickly forming, such as coming from different backgrounds or being a different gender. A few months isn't enough to get over that hump, so put yourself in the picture for longer.

9. Offer support to other leaders. According to one study, a CEO receives twice as much work-related support from having access to a CEO network as they do from their friends and families. Offering this support, through one to one conversations or informal groups, enables other leaders to engage in more critical leadership behaviours, such as mentoring their own subordinates; the help gets paid forward, so to speak.

2012 Resolutions: manage perceptions, focus attention

2012-01-26T10:05:00.000Z

We know that subtle cues can influence how we behave in the world and in the workplace. For example, women give different ratings of work gender discrimination depending on whether they saw a phrase on a poster moments before. And perception can have a more overt influence, such as the way that external scrutiny encourages boards to dump compromised directors. What we notice and who notices us matters: it's the attention, stupid.

So here are some ways to orient attention and create more helpful perceptions within your organisations.

1. Dig into the impact of your incentive programs. Individual incentives encourage productivity, whereas group incentives tend to lead to better quality. But trying to simply layer individual targets over group ones can end up smothering them, especially in work teams with very fixed capacities. And theorists warn that employee of the month programs might have perverse effects. Why not find out the situation at your organisation? Try speaking to staff, and if you have the resources, do some research.

2. Scrub stereotype threats from your customer-facing environments. Certain services and products can produce associations with maths (eg finance) or engineering (car garages) or other areas that women are stereotypically depicted as weaker. Cues that draw attention to gender or the technical nature of the area can turn women away, sensitive that a male who sells to them may attempt to exploit them.

3. Ensure your invitations for employees to voice opinion are authentic and not seen as lip service. When people believe that their suggestions or survey responses are not going to be listened to, they can see it as deceitful, lose their faith in the organisation's legitimacy, and can end up mired in conflict within teams (link). So if you're going to ask for opinions, make sure you will be able to read them, and at least in principle have the power to act on them.

4. Get more conservative estimates by framing your requests correctly. People seem to see a chunk of work differently depending on how long they think it will take, versus how much of it they can get done in a fixed amount of time. Bias can creep in both ways, so make sure you know what you are asking for.

And finally... improving your own circumstances

5. Get good at self-promoting - but hold back in high-modesty cultures. Particularly in job application contexts, candidates who can advocate for what they bring to an organisation are more likely to be successful. However, there is a sting in the tail: in some cultures, this kind of behaviour is frowned upon and can hurt your chances. Meanwhile, highball your salary requests to reach higher settlements (6). Thanks to the anchoring effect, introducing large numbers into conversations can frame the negotiations at a higher level, leading to better outcomes. These numbers can even be ridiculous, as long as they are delivered with a sense of humour.

2012 Resolution: attract and keep the right people for your workplace

2012-01-20T16:57:00.000Z

Getting people in

It's all very well having the best methods of selection, but you need to get motivated, capable and well-fitted people interested in working with you.

1. Cultivate a good word-of-mouth reputation to attract highly educated graduates. So treat existing employees well and avoid allegations of hypocrisy by ensuring your internal culture fits with your external brand. The received wisdom of 'campus presence' turns out to be on rather flimsier ground (it may even be counterproductive for world-wise candidates), but the evidence is that people trust word-of-mouth.

2. Ensure online recruitment materials reveal the diversity within the office. There's evidence that both black and white applicants are more likely to peruse sites that present images of diversity, treating it as a marker of merit. Of course, this doesn't mean misleading applicants as to the true nature of your workplace!

3. Treat your intake of young workers as you do graduates: as an investment in the future. Many industries rely heavily on young workers, and experts argue we should take this work more seriously, offering better working conditions, access to training and recognising good performance. That way, those who thrive will recommend their workplace to their social circles, reducing churn costs, and may themselves stay with the company into adulthood, or return after studies.

Keeping people sweet

We're living in an era of unprecedented attention to the notion of wellbeing, satisfaction and happiness. Even if we believe that material conditions are primary – for instance, that money buys you happiness – there are undoubtedly other measure we can take to better conditions in the workplace, and here the psychological literature can really help.

4. Explore whether your older employees are hankering after managerial responsibilities. Employees older than 45 have a stronger preference to supervise others than their younger colleagues. Of course, "want to" does not equate to "should", but such preferences are likely to drive engagement, so it's unwise to ignore them, especially in a workforce, which, at least in the first world, is ageing at an unprecedented rate.

5. Take up volunteering. An unexpected resolution? People who volunteer time out of work gain benefits they carry into the following working day. Actually, it shouldn't surprise: volunteering epitomises many of the evidence-based five ways to wellbeing, including giving, connecting to others, and (often) a degree of physical activity.

6. Experiment with focused breaks to enhance health and energy at work. Maintaining our health at work allows us to function better and avoid illness, stress and burnout. So you may want to explore the idea of packaging activities such as mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises or physical activity into bite-size packages during the working day.

However....

There is a potential dark side to a focus on enjoyment on the workplace. As outlined in this article, emphasis on "fun" can end up being inauthentic, pressurise everyone into the same mould, and draw young workers into unhealthy dependency on their employer as the source of their social support as well as income. So stand up to cynical uses of fun and socialising in the workplace (7).

2012 resolutions: people differ (so now what?)

2012-01-18T07:05:00.000Z

This year, time to pay more attention to the fact that our people are different. Sometimes the best resolution is to not act on this - for instance, the fact that people's earnings relate to their weight almost certainly reflects a degree of bias that we would be better to shake off. And some research is currently too provisional to figure out what to do with: if a leader's facial width really is related to company success, the implications for what to do about that are far from clear.

Yet some people may suit some work better, or approach things in very different ways. Here are some thoughts on how to approach this with the evidence in mind.

1. Challenge black-and-white notions of "what good looks like" at work. For instance, two voguish notions are that emotional intelligence is a desirable trait, and impulsivity a problem one. Yet recent research shows that for some behaviours the exact opposite is true. If there is one resolution I would put above all others, it's to take recognise that a person's profile is multivalent, containing good and bad. Overall, the uniqueness of each employee is an asset if deployed correctly; a cookie cutter workplace would be a disaster.

2. Avoid driving your introverts to distraction. Work environments differ in their bustle and activity, and research suggests the introverts bear the brunt of a noisy environment.

3. Leverage the broader assets your people bring to organisations. Extroverts are likely to have large social networks that may help them spread messages or identify resources to solve organisational problems. But don't neglect introverts on this matter either: while they are likely to have fewer contacts overall, their relationships overall are just as deep.

4. Consider people's different expectations for what they get out of work. Some jobs are intrinsically pretty grim - so-called dirty work, like euthanising animals. If it has to be done, it's worth knowing that people with lower expectations are most likely to take the down and dirty in their stride. Indeed, high expectations and optimism carry their share of risk in other professions too, with so-called positive pollyannas more likely to leave managerial career tracks if their aspirations aren't quickly met.

5. Don't get sucked in by the claims of the arrogant; it's often they who need attention. It turns out that noisy bluster about the shortcomings of others and personal superiority masks substandard performance. Perhaps this doesn't surprise you, but noting that even their own self-ratings tend to admit to lower performance, we can take this as a starting point to intervene.

And finally...

Let's not let the above suck us into too essentialist a view of who we all are. An awful lot of our performance at work depends on learned capabilities rather than innate talent. Now, it may be unsurprising to hear that the single most direct predictor of performance for computer programmers is their level of programming knowledge. But how about the discovery that charisma can be trained through the identification of discrete behaviours? So my final resolution for you is to be imaginative about how to develop employee's capabilities.

2012 resolution: get a handle on emotion and mood in the workplace

2012-01-16T16:28:00.000Z

Find ways to cope with problematic moods

You don't need to be a believer in Blue Monday (thank goodness) to feel that January isn't the happiest month in the calendar. Here are some steps to smarter mood management.

1. Take into account the emotional legacy of positive and negative events at work. This might mean rescheduling a challenging meeting that follows a day of inordinate strain. Note that people can differ in how much of an 'emotional hangover' they feel, so be especially sympathetic to those hit harder.

2. Decide on how to manage anger in the workplace. Contrary to what some may think, this doesn't necessarily mean taking a zero-tolerance approach; in fact, evidence suggests that tolerating some outbursts of anger - especially in response to perceived injustices - is a good way to allow organisational problems to surface. However, anger imposed on others habitually is a sure way to dampen creativity. Consider what is needed in your organisation.

3. Tolerate benign envy, but combat the toxic type - a little bit of emotional response to others' successes can buck us up and push us further ourselves. But when it threatens to impede work relationships, it's time to take a deep breath and let it go.

4. Put cynicism aside in favour of a healthy, balanced caution in negotiations. There is evidence that defaulting to distrust in negotiation situations can not only result in poorer outcomes overall but also harm the cynic's self-interests. The solution isn't naivety, but rather recognising that trust can open up opportunities for clear-headed scrutiny.

Actively leverage emotion abilities

Understanding our 'Emotional Intelligence' (EI) and deploying it in the workplace is an idea that will be familiar to many. These resolutions, then, take us a bit deeper into the implications of trying to leverage our capacity to understand and manage emotions.

5. Take better EI measurements and weigh its relevance using evidence. EI is a surprisingly controversial concept in research circles, so if you're going to rely on it, review the types of measures and what they have been proven to predict. Moreover, job applicants have inflated self-ratings of EI compared to the (presumably more honest) job incumbents - so be especially cautious if comparing scores across such groups, such as when comparing internal and external candidates.

6. Get better at expressing emotions to influence others. There is increasing evidence that showing your emotions can influence others and lead to better work outcomes, so think about how effectively you do this. Note this is not a prescription to pretend to feel emotions to get things done - the research is clear that such surface acting is if anything counterproductive.

7. Review how employees or colleagues use emotions in their day-to-day activities. Some interesting light was shed by a recent study of doctor's receptionists, revealing how their job requires them to constantly manage their emotions. If you consider how this might be true also in your organisation, you can make this clear to prospective employees and have a more informed position to help people currently struggling with these demands.

2012 resolution: make better selection decisions

2012-01-13T14:00:00.000Z

A simple resolution, but how to go about it?

1. Review practices to align with your organisation's unique context. As a whole, companies using 'best practice' approaches such as ability tests, structured interviews and monitoring recruitment sources do no better on aggregate than those who don't use these methods. This tells us that it isn't about slavishly following a right formula, but evaluating what's been proven to work elsewhere with your understanding of the local context of your organisation. So consider the below recommendations in this light.

2. Consider introducing well-designed, low effort assessments. There is research to suggest that automated assessments such as tests of knowledge or situational judgement, when well-designed, can do the job virtually as well as more intensive face-to-face assessment. Again, this will depend on your organisation and industry, but it may bear exploring for you.

3. Develop a policy on checking out job applicants online. Recruiters can find it tempting to google applicants or peruse them on social networking sites, getting free, quickly accessible, and otherwise hidden information about them. But there are questions about its fairness, risk of generating feelings of invasiveness, and possibility that it leads to decisions being made that aren't defensible. It's probably already going on in your organisation, so establish some ground rules for how you approach it.

4. Provide focused training to people who play roles in assessment simulations. In particular, evidence suggests focused training helps role players to introduce pre-determined prompts to nudge candidates into showing (or failing to show) critical behaviours; it appears that this may lead to more accurate ratings in some areas.

5. Be realistic about what you are actually measuring. Interview overall scores are strongly influenced by the picture gained from the early minutes where rapport is built. Happily, it seems that this isn't simply bias, but reflects some good information picked up - for instance, verbal ability, and some personality factors. Why not recognise this, perhaps by assigning quick ratings after that initial period.

Meanwhile, and more alarmingly, some researchers suggest that assessments scores of all kinds are heavily influenced by a personal attribute called 'ability to identify criteria'. Again, ATIC does seem to be a good predictor of workplace success in itself, but in both these examples the point is the risks when we assume we are measuring one thing - e.g., the competency "Leading for Success" when in fact we are measuring another.

And finally....

When I decided to exit research and enter bleary-eyed into the Real World(TM) I was concerned that having a PhD might be a disadvantage. Things turned out ok to me, but it turns out my feelings are well-founded: recruiters do see overqualification as a potential reason not to employ someone. Yet there are a host of reasons why overqualified applicants may be a great add to your organisation. So reconsider how you approach overqualified candidates.

Resolutions to take the harder edges off work

2012-01-10T15:40:00.000Z

Work can be engaging, social, and fun. It can also be draining, lonely, and stressful. So let's kick off with resolutions that can reduce these hassles.

Actually, let's be specific: our debut post examined how some work hassles are hindrances of no benefit. But others - often more initially intimidating - are actually challenges that can transform and educate. So our byword should always be avoid hindrances, or eliminate them once and for all - but arm yourself to take on challenges.

Reducing work-life conflict

Work-life conflict dampens engagement and increases burnout, leading to illness and days lost at work - and it can spread to affect your co-workers too. Any steps that can be taken to manage these hindrances benefit the person and the organisation. Here are some steps you might take:

1. Introduce a leisure hours switch-off policy for work technology. It's harder to mentally disconnect from work, especially when technology keeps you plugged in, so introducing a formal policy, or simply taking personal initiative to power down your Blackberry at 6pm (as I decided to do), can pay dividends. The call for more offline time is likely to increase this year, both for leisure and working periods, but why wait to put a good thing in place?

2. Give shift employees more say in when they work. Or if you're that employee, start to demand it. After all, such autonomy - allowing people to coordinate work and home activities - makes more of a difference than the financial incentives that tend to accompany awkward shift patterns such as Sunday working.

3. Lobby for family-friendly policies in science, engineering and technology organisations. In all organisations, really; but women in SET careers, in academia and the private sector alike, experience a leaky pipeline that winnows out many before reaching seniority. If you're serious about this, men could cultivate more welcoming atmospheres whereas women might offer mentoring and support to more junior colleagues.

Role-specific issues

Particular responsibilities come with particular problems.

4. Reduce bureaucracy and other demands on time for academics. For example, burnout is now comparable in higher education to that in other sectors, and particularly high in younger staff. This is an institutional problem, so those with influence might want to think about how to help them keep their head above water.

5. Offer support to those who work at the edge and defend them from internal critics. It's often an unpopular duty to work at the interface between two functions, or between one organisations and another: you end up distrusted by both home and away sides. Try and break that habit, and offer some solidarity.

Meanwhile, newly minted MBAs can struggle in the transition from conceptual classroom to hands-on management. Perhaps you know one?
6a. Apply a little patience with new managers, and offer feedback on their blind spots where possible.
If the new manager is you, remember that the climate and attitudes of your MBA class is no model for the wider world:
6b. Get to understand how your team operates and what motivates them.

And finally...

Coming out of this holiday period, I'm taking a month off from overindulging. If you're a musician, you could choose to act as a drink-free buddy for your musician peers (7). Evidence suggests the muso boozing lifestyle isn't always one of choice but due to peer pressure, boredom, and habit. Be a haven for others who might want to shift down to soft drinks and save some cash - and their liver - for a while.

Let the Occupational Digest help with your workplace resolutions for 2012

2012-01-09T15:36:00.000Z

Feetfirmly planted in 2012, it's the time to survey the year ahead andset some resolutions. Perhaps you want to increase your personaleffectiveness, become more fulfilled, or find some time tobreathe. Perhaps you want to change your organisation,creating a better culture for employees or designing better work processes. If so, why not set your sights with thebenefits of the evidence we've covered in 2011?

Inthe next few posts, we'll cook up the Occupational Digest's firstyear of reporting on psychology in the workplace, and cream off thekey implications. The first post will focus onresolutions that can take the harsher edge off of work, which some ofyou might be feeling after a relaxing break.

Aswith any resolutions, these will require willpower and in some casesingenuity and negotiation to stick to. Luckily our parent blog theResearch Digest has some thoughts on sticking to your commitments...

2011 review

2011-12-31T14:36:00.003Z

It's the end of the year, the perfect time to look back at all the great research and psychology stories we haven't covered here - mainly as they were covered so well elsewhere. If you've been following @occdigest on twitter you may have seen some of these at the time.

Bob Sutton at Work Matters reports that "having the right co-workers can help us live longer, while having the wrong ones might kill us." link

Jon Sutton at the Psychologist asks "Is the popular view of meetings justified, and can psychology provide the science behind making them better?" link (pdf)

The BPS covers a study that suggests "people with subtle asymmetries - for example, imbalances in ear or finger length - are often better “transformational” leaders, able to inspire followers to put self-interest aside for the good of the group." link

Psyblog looks at how "making plans helps free up mental space for whatever we are doing right now, allowing us to be more efficient in the long term." link

Our mood at work worsens over the day, according to tweeting patterns reported at the BPS. link

Covered in Workplace Psychology, lab experiments suggest that "employees who stay up late working and miss sleep are more likely to distort/misrepresent/bend results and engage in other forms of cheating." link

The Research Digest covers an article that suggests "our view of companies is encapsulated by four fundamental dimensions: honesty, prestige, innovation and power." link

Research Digest again: "gossipers are perceived not just as unlikeable but also as lacking social influence" link

"Knowledge gained from our failures lasts longer than those from our successes", meaning organisations should treat failure as a learning opportunity, says Workplace Psychology. link

"IQ scores are absolutely predictive of long-term outcomes. But what our study questions is whether that's entirely because smarter people do better in life than other people or whether part of the predictive power coming from test motivation." An important study reported at Medical News Today. link

Medical school seems to decrease empathy in its students, particularly from the point where they begin seeing patients. Writeup at Mindhacks. link

Does a man's facial dimensions influence his leadership performance?

2011-12-20T12:47:00.000Z

You might notice thatmany studies we cover rely on survey rating data. This reflects thefield's research focus and its desire for 'ecological validity' -examining real-world contexts rather than simplified laboratoryset-ups. Nonetheless, as someone with a heterodox psychologybackground, I find it heartening when studies choose more imaginativemeasures.

Here's a great example,entirely rating-free: a study that evaluates whether male CEOappearance affects company performance by actually measuring CEO facewidth-to-height (WHR) ratios in photos. The study suggests that incertain leadership contexts, leaders with larger WHR ratios generatehigher firm returns on assets, seemingly due to such faces conferringa psychological sense of power needed for dynamic decision-making.

A similar finding thatrelied on rating data would be as much about perception as reality,but by using objective dimension measurements, the authors can makethe claim that biological features directly predict work performance.So is it time for HR departments to pull out the callipers? Let'shear more on the study.

Elaine Wong andcolleagues gathered data from 55 Fortune 500 organisations,collecting online photos and available financial data. In anotherexample of a neat measurement variable, they conducted contentanalysis on letters to shareholders, analysing the frequency of wordsthat reflect high and low cognitive complexity - the tendency to seethe world as nuanced and graded (suggested by words like"possibility" or "trend") or black and white("absolutely", "irreversible"). These letters aregenerally understood to be the work of whole senior teams, not theCEO alone, so they tell us which company teams are cognitivelysimple, making them more likely to take decisions quickly indeference to authority.

It turns out that onlyfor companies run by cognitively simple teams did wider-faced CEOsdelivered higher firm return on assets. In cognitively complex teams,where decisions are made more collectively and systematically, thereappears to be less opportunity for firm, powerful leaders to stamptheir authority. A fascinating nuance to the study.

A skeptical view couldmount a counterclaim: CEO faces don't matter, but cognitively simpledecision-makers think they do. Their black-and-white thinking demandsa stereotypically solid-looking leader, or perhaps their history ofsolid-looking leaders has conditioned them toblack-and-white-thinking. Either way, such teams then compete overCEOs of desired appearance and, all things being equal, the mostattractive firms will be better at acquiring them. The lack of aneffect in cognitively complex teams? Faces don't loom large in theirchoices of leaders.

It's an ad-hocargument, weakened by the fact the study analysis controlled for firmperformance in previous years. However, it's still possible that afirm on the verge of an upturn has a cachet they use to draw inleaders of the desired mould. Until a study explicitly measurespsychological power, and demonstrates that it is the linking variablebetween the biological characteristic and performance, it remainspossible that leaders with WHR are simply jumping on board to puttheir face to success.

All in all, amethodologically sharp study that opens up examination of howbiological features act as markers for work-relevant capabilities.

Wong, E., Ormiston, M., & Haselhuhn, M. (2011). A Face Only an Investor Could Love: CEOs' Facial Structure Predicts Their Firms' Financial Performance Psychological Science, 22 (12), 1478-1483 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611418838

Impediments to private sector careers for women in science, engineering, and technology

2011-12-19T10:29:00.000Z

Morethan ever, women are taking advanced degrees in SET subjects:science, engineering and technology. Yet a 'leaky pipeline' meanswomen are significantly under-represented at higher levels inacademia. What's the experience of those who take their expertiseinto the private SET sector? A recent study investigates.

AuthorsLisa Servon and M Anne Visser surveyed 2,493 women who hold or haveheld SET management positions in private companies, following up withfocus groups. Many women experienced a grind in SET roles, with 8% ofthe sample working 100-hour weeks, compared to 3% of women in thegeneral workforce. Yet only 9.6% of STEM corporate roles were held bywomen, worse than the 15.4% in the general workforce. As 41% ofjunior SET roles in private companies are held by women, thissuggests the private pipeline is as leaky as the academic one.

Whatspecific problems are women facing? 23% feel that women are activelyheld in low regard in their sector, notably in Engineering andTechnology. Over half of respondents reported experiencing sexualharassment at work. Balancing work and family life remains achallenge. And a third of the group felt extremely isolated at work:these individuals were 25% more likely to view their career asstalled, presumably because they lacked support systems such asmentors helpful for progression and managing tough times.

Partof the isolation relates to the expectation that a good engineer(scientist, technologist) acts and thinks a certain, oftenstereotypically male way. One reaction was for women to act moremale, even distancing oneself from other women by putting them downor disavowing their work. Another strategy was to find a 'pocket ofsanity' in the organisation where being a woman wasn't an impedimentto getting on with the job. But such a strategy can undermine careerprogression: 36% of interviewees reported making lateral job moves,and 29% down-shifted to lower positions at one point. Once a safespace is found, it may feel difficult to leave.

Toaddress these obstacles, Servon and Visser suggest changingorganisational culture, developing more diverse career routes andintroducing family-friendly policies. Women at the top make adifference too: when women held at least 10% of the top roles,respondents reported higher levels of support and feeling valued.Changes could be of wide benefit as "some factors causing womenin management to leave SET careers...may eventually drive men away aswell", especially if they disagree that blunt criticism orliving in your lab epitomise a functional SET culture.

Servon, L., & Visser, M. (2011). Progress hindered: the retention and advancement of women in science, engineering and technology careers Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (3), 272-284 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00152.x

Productivity forecasts depend on whether you focus on work completed or time taken

2011-12-15T08:00:00.000Z

Peopleestimate small tasks to take longer than they actually do, butunderestimate the time needed for larger tasks, leading to dangerousoverconfidence - a good reason to view projects as series of smallsteps. But what happens when you focus estimates on how much workwill be completed in a fixed time period, as is done in incrementallymanaged projects, common in IT and other industries? A recent articledemonstrates that flipping your focus reverses the biases: peoplebelieve they will be less productive within a long period of timethan in a short period.

TorliefHalkjesvik and colleagues from the University of Oslo began withsimple task estimation. Following a pilot, their second study askedstudent participants within two conditions to imagine that they hadread a book excerpt (the task was framed retrospectively to avoidencouraging ambitious estimates to whip up motivation). One conditioninvolved estimating the time taken to read a fixed piece of text,either two or 32 pages. The work estimation condition involvedestimating the amount of text read in either three or 48 minutes.

Interms of estimated productivity - page reading per minute - participants thought a big task was more efficient than a small one,but that proportionately less gets done in a larger amount of timethan a smaller one - seemingly a paradox. To Halkjesvik andco-authors, this simply demonstrates we have trouble with magnitude,dilating small things - "it's not *that* small!" andcompressing larger ones. This has parallels with other features, suchas Vierordt's law on time estimation,and the central tendency of judgment.

Movingto an occupational setting, the authors informed 94 IT professionalsabout a genuine (historic) software project, broken into 10 ‘UserStories’ - discrete components common to IT projects. Thestudy again avoided personal motivation, here by focusing estimateson the productivity of a hypothetical project developer. Unlike theother studies, no effect was found for imagined time efficiency for completingsmaller (two User Stories) vs larger (five) tasks, but participantsestimated work delivered in 20 hours would be more efficient thanthat over 100. It's worth noting the study as a whole overestimatedthe true productivity of the historic project, so the estimation ofwork completed in short windows reflects a pinnacle of unwarrantedoverconfidence.

Thesestudies suggest "smaller magnitudes (of work or of time) arejudged as disproportionately larger than large magnitudes."Breaking a software project down into a quick succession of releasesmay encourage unrealistic estimates of just how much of the projectwill get done in each release. Therefore, it's valuable to reverseyour thinking and focus on the sub-tasks involved, and sense-checkwhether their durations really do fit your fixed deadline.

Halkjelsvik, T., Jørgensen, M., & Teigen, K. (2011). To read two pages, I need 5 minutes, but give me 5 minutes and I will read four: how to change productivity estimates by inverting the question Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (2), 314-323 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1693

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

2011-12-09T17:24:00.001Z

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

Formal mentoring relationships gain momentum over time

2011-12-01T14:38:00.001Z

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?

2011-11-28T15:52:00.001Z

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

2011-11-25T13:14:00.001Z

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

2011-11-21T13:40:00.001Z

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

2011-11-14T16:14:00.001Z

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

2011-11-08T09:30:00.000Z

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

2011-10-31T15:23:00.000Z

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

2011-10-27T13:09:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-25T11:04:00.004+01:00

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

------------------------

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

2011-10-20T11:44:00.006+01:00

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

2011-10-14T11:24:00.003+01:00

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

2011-10-07T15:34:00.004+01:00

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

2011-10-03T11:12:00.003+01:00

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

2011-09-28T13:15:00.006+01:00

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?

2011-09-20T13:28:00.005+01:00

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?

2011-09-16T12:50:00.004+01:00

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

2011-09-14T11:11:00.007+01:00

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?

2011-09-05T12:41:00.007+01:00

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'?

2011-08-29T11:54:00.007+01:00

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

2011-08-25T10:49:00.003+01:00

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

2011-08-16T10:45:00.008+01:00

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

2011-08-12T16:31:00.004+01:00

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

2011-08-04T11:41:00.004+01:00

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

2011-08-04T11:20:00.002+01:00

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

2011-07-29T17:22:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-28T10:46:00.004+01:00

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.

Why do some boards hang on to compromised directors?

2011-07-26T11:14:00.001+01:00

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

Dirty work jobs call for low expectations

2011-07-21T12:13:00.002+01:00

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

2011-07-19T13:46:00.004+01:00

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

2011-07-11T15:57:00.002+01:00

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

2011-07-04T18:07:00.001+01:00

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

2011-06-29T15:38:00.004+01:00

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

2011-06-22T13:05:00.006+01:00

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

2011-06-20T10:36:00.003+01:00

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

2011-06-15T08:45:00.004+01:00

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'?

2011-06-10T09:00:00.002+01:00

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

2011-05-31T13:52:00.005+01:00

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?

2011-05-30T15:11:00.007+01:00

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?

2011-05-27T09:37:00.004+01:00

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

2011-05-20T09:56:00.006+01:00

(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

2011-05-18T13:42:00.004+01:00

(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

2011-05-16T10:53:00.003+01:00

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?

2011-05-01T09:00:00.001+01:00

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

2011-04-27T08:21:00.001+01:00

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

2011-04-20T13:42:00.004+01:00

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?

2011-04-12T08:55:00.005+01:00

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

2011-04-08T13:48:00.006+01:00

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

2011-04-06T09:16:00.006+01:00

(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

2011-03-31T15:11:00.003+01:00

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

2011-03-29T13:46:00.006+01:00

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

2011-03-25T13:19:00.010Z

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?

2011-03-23T15:27:00.002Z

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.