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

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

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

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

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

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

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'?

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