What are the pitfalls of moving away from hierarchy?

What's the best way to organise groups of people?  Experimentally-minded organisations have explored the use of 'autonomous workgroups', where teams are led from within rather than being allocated a supervisor. The psychological benefits are apparent: providing workers with more direct autonomy is well-known to promote motivation. Is the relative rarity of such approaches merely down to inertia within the world of work, or are there some challenges that need consideration? 

In a recent article, Jonas Ingvaldsen and Monica Rolfsen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology present a case study detailing 'Tools', a Norwegian tool company that decided to move from a traditional foreman situation to a flatter structure, partly led by an organisational and national culture that is sympathetic to labour empowerment. The investigators took a qualitative approach, using interviews and focus groups to gather information from team members over 13 years. They began as a new approach kicked off, where each week a different team member took on a spokesperson role. Then, the  workforce was enthusiastic: 'The flat structure has come to stay. We won’t return to the foreman system, where someone points the finger and tells you what to do.'

Yet eight years later, interviews and discussions revealed several issues. Although members wanted to do good by their team, the transient nature of the spokesperson responsibility made it possible to skimp on more onerous and seemingly less essential activities like information-sharing. Moreover, the fact that the spokesperson role was crafted around the team needs meant that when tensions between teams or functions emerged, there were few formal mechanisms to resolve disputes. Spokespeople were unable to enforce decisions that were individually unpopular but better for the larger system:  'self-management ends up with what is optimal for each individual, and that is comfort' - meaning that products were put together on a schedule that was efficient for the team but was harmful to the inventory management.

Tools switched it up. The new system involved distributed leadership, where managerial responsibilities were unbundled and made the responsibility of different team members. In this '5-M' model, one person would look after Man (eg staffing), another Machine, and so on. While this appears to have had some powerful benefits - Mileu specialists can get together in their M-meeting, and discuss how to improve air quality across the organisation - real-life problems don't always fall neatly into boxes. The interviews revealed concerns that non-essential issues often got kicked from one M to another without resolution. Concrete and immediate problems did tend to get resolved rapidly and effectively, but anything big-picture called on co-ordination that no-one was equipped for.

This case study encapsulates some of the benefits and challenges of non-hierarchical methods within large, complex organisations. Are all members dispositionally suited to taking on leadership duties over their existing work? How can they develop mastery and hence satisfaction for these duties when only practiced one week in six? Are the domains that we carve the world into sufficiently legible to the human users who have to operate with them? Worthwhile questions to help us toward a 21st century approach to the workplace.

Jonas A Ingvaldsen, & Monica Rolfsen (2012). Autonomous work groups and the challenge of inter-group coordination Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726712448203

How does availability of men in the environment affect women's career focus?

A recent article argues the ratio of men to women in an environment may influence women's pursuit of lucrative careers. Authored by Kristina Durante and colleagues, it begins by describing a correlational finding: women in US states with proportionately fewer men tend to have fewer babies and have them later, tending instead to be in higher-earning jobs. The rest of the article describes a series of experiments with female university students conducted to explore this.

The first experiment asked 89 participants to examine a set of photographs, ostensibly to test their ability to count frequencies of men and women in scenes from the local environment. Depending on the condition, photographs depicted more men, more women, or an equal sex ratio. Participants then rated items describing the importance of various life goals. The researchers found that participants exposed to a high-female sex ratio prioritised career over family goals to a greater extent than those in the other conditions. Perceptions of sex ratio appeared to shape personal priorities.

There are at least two explanations for why this effect exists. One is that sex ratio shapes the labour market, fewer men entailing more employment opportunities for women. The second is that sex ratio shapes a mating market, making finding a partner harder and thus encouraging a different strategy for life security. To differentiate between these, another experiment replicated the previous one using a similar exposure technique and also asked the 58 participants to rate how difficult it would be to acquire a good job or to find a mate (phrased in terms of marriage and dating prospects). Those participants exposed to a high-female ratio were more likely to see mate-finding as tough, but their expectations for the ease of finding a job were similar to their counterparts. Pulling the data into a model, the researchers demonstrated that putting career first was mediated not by their expectations that good work would be easier to find, but that a good mate would be harder to find.

A final study followed the same design, additionally asking participants to rate their self-perceived value to a mate via items such as "I receive many compliments from members of the opposite sex". Durante's team predicted that those who feel they may struggle finding a mate will be most responsive to these mating-market fluctuations, as they are more likely to end up alone. The analysis bore this out: when the environment was framed as containing many women, only those participants who personally felt they had a lower mate value placed a greater emphasis on career.

This article takes evolutionary research on sex ratios into the study of women's career decisions. It would be fascinating to see the same research pointed towards men, who also have desires to produce children and to advance their careers; does the mating market have a similar influence? The evolutionary argument predicts not, as it is based upon the concept of deep-seated divisions of labour based on biological differences. However, it could be that gender-based pay differentials shape this effect, and I wonder how different it would look in a society that had more equal pay than the US.

Durante, Kristina M., Griskevicius, Vladas, Simpson, Jeffry A., Cantú, Stephanie M., & Tybur, Joshua M. (2012). Sex ratio and women's career choice: Does a scarcity of men lead women to choose briefcase over baby? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103 (1), 121-134 DOI: 10.1037/a0027949

How can work be addictive?

You've been moping at home all week, your partner wisely giving you space as he senses how antsy you are. Then the phone goes: a buddy has scored, and it's a big one. Do you want in? You only want to know two things: when and where.

The weeks that follow are a blur.  You and the others – the gang - are in the same boat: when you're not doing it, you're talking about it. And when it's done, and you return to mundanity, that emptiness sets in. At the anniversary dinner your partner makes for you, all you can think about is the next big score.

This is a narrative of addiction. In a fascinating article on the New Zealand film industry, Lorraine Rowlands and Jocelyn Handy argue that this is just what freelancers experience due to the nature of their working patterns. They conducted interviews with 21 industry insiders, interpreting the data using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a technique that emphasises emotional features of responses, rather than simply looking to cluster content into themes.
They found a number of features that chimed with this addiction model. What were they?

Firstly, people tend to enter the film industry because it offers something scarce and intrinsically desirable: an opportunity for artistic expression. Moreover, freelance project work has a heightened quality: no lazy days at the office surfing the web and making small talk. As one respondent put it,

"From an artistic point of view there is a definite energy and pace.... you can actually come up with some incredible work and you couldn't have contrived it outside of that crazy environment. It's a collaborative energy that is created by pressure, by unreasonable deadlines and last minute changes."

This highlights a key feature of addiction: the addictive object or activity exists within a social context, where relationships strengthen with those who share the addiction and wither with those outside it. If all you want to talk about is the shoot tomorrow, your mundane friends are likely to seem like encumbrances; this leads to a vicious circle where the addictive context is the only thing that offers comfort.

Moreover, freelancing work involves extended periods of downtime, or withdrawal. A respondent notes that when their project came to a close "a lot of other people too went into depression. You start thinking 'oh god, I'll never get employed again'". These quieter times could be a time to reinvest in neglected relationships, but this can feel more like an obligation, whereas chasing ties with other industry figures remains urgent, as gaining new work involves being in the right networks. This means the relationships around the object of addiction continue to be prized.

Finally, freelance work is hard to quit, for the simple reason that without a company to formally exit, it's very easy to come back for another hit. What's more, given the specialisms of the industry you can very well be the necessary piece for your network of worker-friends to secure a piece of work, so exiting can be seen as a slight or even as a betrayal. One respondent took that plunge, and noted "all these people I had connected with were just like - snap - never seen me before....Even at the film première and the post thing - it was like - no one spoke to me".

The authors suggest this confluence of features may be common to other cultural industries such as “theatre, television, fashion, music and new media work.” And you never know; it might be worth examining the highs and lows offered by our own working patterns.

Rowlands, R., & Handy, J. (2012). An addictive environment: New Zealand film production workers' subjective experiences of project-based labour Human Relations , 65 (5), 657-680 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711431494

What's so special about family firms?

Family firms are a significant phenomena on the business landscape. Estimates suggest they account for approximately 90% of all firms. Yet their unique qualities are often ignored by organisational research, or otherwise ghettoised into specialist conversations. According to a new review article in the Journal of Management, this means missing out on insights that can inform organisations of every stripe.

Eric Gedajlovic and colleagues raise some of the unique features of a family firm. The first is they are necessarily run by their owner, which has consequences for the motivations, intent and effort put in by leadership. Deep ties to personal reputation, the use of personal finances for investments, and obligations to future generations (literally, in the form of family descendents), make such owner-managers more likely to operate ethically, prudently, and for the long-term.

Another feature is informality. Businesses that rely on formal governance can't get away with handshake deals and overt, personal reciprocity, but family firms operate more personally, finding quicker ways to get things done that lower transaction costs, such as bypassing a laborious tender process. As a further edge, this is an effective way to cultivate strong, trust-based personal networks. Finally, long-standing family members and other loyal lifers offer a wealth of tacit knowledge: things you know but don't necessarily know you know, that makes things run more smoothly. Family firms can leverage such information, free to use gut and rules of thumb for rapid responses.

There are downsides too. In general, the model is in some tension with meritocracy, and there is evidence that CEOs who get their job through primogeniture tend to under-perform compared to the market. Dishonest or slack managers may be forgiven due to personal ties or outright nepotism. And finally, the strong in-group formed may carry a failure to trust outsiders, and make these firms slower in keeping up, particularly with fast-changing trends such as in technology.

These features of family firms are often magnifications of things present in any work organisation, which makes them worth exploring. Take the tensions, so evident in family firms, between the decision that makes financial sense and the one that 'feels right'. Owner-managers may want to cement power, crave a high status, risky deal, or be unwilling to deviate from the founder's vision, and investigating them has been helpful to prospect theory, looking at the roots of seemingly irrational business decisions. Another perspective looks at how these non-financially driven decisions can help organisations in the long run; such 'mixed motives' in businesses help encourage collaboration and the sense of a mission bigger than any bottom line. As a result, the risks and benefits associated with the way business is done in family firms can be understood and used to develop ways of working for organisations in general.

Eric Gedajlovic, Michael Carney, James J. Chrisman, & Franz W. Kellermanns (2012). The Adolescence of Family Firm Research: Taking Stock and Planning for the Future Journal of Management , 38 (4), 1010-1037 DOI: 10.1177/0149206311429990

Ambition predicts attainments over lifetime and contributes to satisfaction

Ambition is a quality of clear relevance to the world of work, but its psychological definition has been murky. A recent paper begins to clear the waters, proposing that ambition is essentially a middle-level trait, meaning that it gives a specific form to the tendencies that flow from more fundamental features such as personality traits. So what are those fundamentals? And what occupational consequences does ambition have?

Investigators Timothy Judge and John Kammeyer-Mueller drew on the longitudinal data contained in the Terman life-cycle study, begun in 1922. Available information included personality measures, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test, biographical factors and various indicators of life outcomes. Ambition, defined as 'persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment', wasn't the explicit focus of the initial study, so the measure used was a composite of items including a rating of life purpose, parental judgements of childhood ambition, and a coding of participants' descriptions of their own best and worst qualities to catch any references to ambition - or lack of it.

Building a structural equation model makes it possible to see how one factor can contribute to another, which in turn contributes to another, in a web of cause-and-effect. The model revealed that ambition was greater in the 717 records used when the following factors were present (brackets denote investigator explanation):

• Higher conscientiousness (providing the will to achieve)
• Higher extraversion (through striving in social situations, often related to confidence)
• Lower neuroticism (as doubt reduces likelihood of setting ambitious goals)
• Family prestige (creating a climate where high achievement is the norm)
• A fairly weak relationship to higher childhood general mental ability (leading to encouragement and expectations of success)

The longitudinal data made it possible to look forward to the consequences of ambition. More ambitious individuals tended to attain more in their education and enter into jobs with more prestige. A prestigious job was also a predictor of both income and life satisfaction.  As is increasingly recognised, people more satisfied with their life tended to live longer. In all these areas, ambition was a better predictor of life outcomes than its antecedents such as conscientiousness and extraversion, suggesting that focusing on middle-level traits when trying to understand real-world outcomes may be a sensible research strategy.

Ambition isn't about a single strong aspiration, it's a general orientation towards getting ahead. Commentators are often suspicious of this as  nothing more than an 'unquenchable desire for unattainable outcomes', but Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller point out that on their data, the ambitious 'did not appear to be made miserable or insatiable by their ambitions'. Instead, it seems that this forward impetus can help individuals make inroads into at least some of their wants for life.

Judge TA, & Kammeyer-Mueller JD (2012). On the Value of Aiming High: The Causes and Consequences of Ambition. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 22545622

Why do job applicants behave the way they do?

Truth, lies and rolling dice. Not a Vegas weekend, but new research looking at applicant self-presentation: how individuals use behaviours to give a favourable account of themselves in job selection situations. We might call it faking, but are applicants just doing what recruiters expect of them?

The researchers, Anne Jansen and colleagues, drew on 53 recruiters (HR professionals)  from a range of Swiss companies, and two  adult student groups representing applicants (416 Masters students, replicated with 88 vocational apprentices). Both recruiters and applicants were presented with a set of self-presentation behaviours, such as "When applying for the job, I praised the organization" or "When applying for the job, I claimed to have experience that I didn’t actually have".

Recruiters were asked how appropriate the behaviours were, and agreement between their responses was high, strongly sharing expectations for half of the behaviours, and moderate agreement for virtually all the remaining. Collectively, they saw some behaviours, such as describing skills or knowledge, as appropriate and uncontroversial, with others definitely inappropriate, such as fabricating details, and still others, strategic ploys such as de-emphasising negative attributes, fell in between. This shared set of norms is what the research team expected, creating a job selection 'situational script' that recruiters expect to be followed. Did the applicants do so?

Enter the dice. Afraid of being tarred a faker, people are reluctant to admit to self-presentation, even for supposedly confidential, anonymous research. To address this, the applicants gave responses using the randomised response technique, which asked them only to reply truthfully to an item if they rolled a three or greater on a playing die - otherwise, they must respond affirmatively, regardless of the truth. This makes individual profiles impossible to identify whilst the aggregate data remains analysable, by looking at how responses differ from the base rate.

Jansen's team examined this data using correlation to compare frequency of applicant behaviour to recruiter judgement of that behaviour; they found high correlations at well above .8 (.9 in the larger Masters sample). The frequency of a self-presentation behaviour was strongly related to whether it was something that recruiters saw as acceptable.

The authors see this as the inevitable outcome of a 'strong situation', with right or wrong ways to behave - the shared attitude of the recruiters - where applicants are just trying to follow that script and do what they are 'supposed to', as learned from advice, previous experience, websites, or tacit feedback from the recruiter. Jansen and her colleagues conclude that common reactions to self-presentation behaviours, such as  moral condemnation or celebration as a social skill (not dissimilar to the concept of 'ability to identify criteria'), may be attempts to conjure individual qualities from what is mainly a situational phenomena. Conversely, it seems to me that, as understanding an individual's qualities is so useful in job selection, we would do well to experiment with meeting candidates in weaker, ambiguous situations with no right way to behave, to let them slide off-script and see the real them.

Jansen, A., König, C., Stadelmann, E., & Kleinmann, M. (2012). Applicants’ Self-Presentational Behavior Journal of Personnel Psychology, 11 (2), 77-85 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000046

How can photography help us to understand organisations?

"The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book." - Fathers and Sons by Ivan S. Turgenev, 1862.

As textual as humans have become, it's hard to deny the power pictures have to convey and enhance meaning. 20th century researchers recognised how images can be a tool for understanding, but the study of work and organisations has been slower to get in on the act. A paper from the University of Tennessee explores the possibilities of organisational research using one type of image, the photograph, and considers how to help our shots hit the target.

Authors Joshua Ray and Anne Smith outline the core benefits of photos, rich representations that offer others a 'glimpse of reality' captured mechanically in a way that bypasses memory recall bias and other forms of distortion. Photos can present the same environment at different times, allowing contrast that reveals subtle changes that might not otherwise be apparent. And the fun, familiar act of taking a photograph is something that members of the organisation can do themselves placing them 'into the research limelight'. Such participant-led research generally requires clear direction as to what constitutes a good use of their shots, and will mean they are generally absent from their own photos; however, it does broaden the voices heard in the research, offering a true organisational eye. Other options include the researcher taking all photos - offering more control at the expense of losing the insider perspective - or a hybrid approach, such as teaming the researcher with organisational members who can act as spotters, pointing out key environmental features.

The act of taking the photographs needn't be the end of the research process. Ray and Smith recount how the research philosophy has migrated to photo elicitation, where the photo acts as an object for discussion for organisational members. The text from these interviews or focus groups can be analysed using established methods such as content analysis. When using photo elicitation it is better that members themselves select the photos to discuss rather than providing them with the 'most important' images as determined by the researcher.

Other approaches directly analyse aspects of the photo, such as layout, the elements included in the image, or broader themes across images. Ray and Smith describe work by a team led by Alan Felstead of Cardiff University, who analysed photos of home offices and found they corroborated a pre-existing model of types of home office, but also demanded it be refined to account for photos that defied the existing typology. Hybrid approaches also exist that meld text and image into a 'visual script', all fair game for analysis.

Photography raises unique ethical issues. It is intrusive and more difficult to anonymise; consent issues abound, such as accidentally catching people in shot; visible branding and logos may require certain permissions. Researchers need also be aware that some may be sceptical of camera-led research, which may need to be justified to avoid harming its face validity with stakeholders. Nevertheless, photographic research could shed light on issues as various as whether managers and leadership are in sync with what features of the work world are strategic priorities, or how organisational members frame their identity. The authors conclude that 'the time is ripe for researchers to consider the use of photographs in organizational research'.

Ray, J., & Smith, A. (2011). Using Photographs to Research Organizations: Evidence, Considerations, and Application in a Field Study Organizational Research Methods, 15 (2), 288-315 DOI: 10.1177/1094428111431110