How Type As cope with stress – for better and worse

You might be familiar with the term 'Type A personality': someone highly strung, organised, proactive, and tackling all - sometimes more - than they can handle. There has been much attention on its long-term effects on health, notably heart disease (it turns out to have a low prognostic power), but we have a less complete picture of how it influences how we feel in specific stressful work environments. A study by Amanda Allisey, John Rodwell and Andrew Noblet reveals more, including some surprising effects.

Allisey's team surveyed 897 operational police officers, mostly male, based in Australia. They wanted to investigate a specific account - Siegrist's Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) model - which states that stress occurs when we put in effort and receive little reward, particularly when we are personally overcommitted to the work. Taking it beyond its medical roots, the researchers were interested in work outcomes, specifically affective commitment and psychological distress, and in the effect of Type A personality. They surveyed these features, along with measures of effort and various type of occupational reward, and used regression to see what factors were driving the work outcomes. A separate measure of overcommitment was taken and entered early into the regression to ensure that any effects of Type A were over and above the individual difference already known to influence the ERI.

They found that multiple components of Type A influenced the workplace outcomes, but for both good and ill. As predicted, under conditions of high levels of effort, the presence of impatience-irritability lead to greater psychological distress, and further exacerbated things when the job rewards of security and mobility were absent. Conversely, the presence of the achievement striving component seemed to act as a buffer when the individual received little in the way of status, protecting them from psychological distress. Possibly for such individuals, the intrinsic meaning of getting the work done means that organisational awards matter less.

Finally, the component of hostility was overall linked to increased strain. But there was a twist: under conditions of low security and esteem rewards, which would ordinarily lead to lower affective commitment, individuals expressing high hostility were shielded. The researchers conjecture, along the lines of recent research on negative work behaviour, that 'acting-out', for instance by sounding-off vocally, can provide employees with emotional coping benefits. This seems plausible given that both security and esteem showed the strongest overall relationships with psychological distress and affective commitment: these are the things whose absence appears to truly pile on the pressure, calling for some kind of escape valve.

This research suggests that the association of Type A personality with stress susceptibility is oversimplistic. The cluster of traits that sit within the type can help or hinder stress levels, depending on the nature of the stress environment. The study also calls attention to the fact that different rewards may matter much more when it comes to balancing efforts. In particular, the importance of self esteem suggests that maintaining a 'culture of respect' within organisations may be critical not just for employee relations but by protecting them from stress.

Amanda Allisey, John Rodwell, & Andrew Noblet (2012). Personality and the effort-reward imbalance model of stress: Individual differences in reward sensitivity Work & Stress: An International Journal of Work, Health & Organisations , 26 (3), 230-251 DOI: 10.1080/02678373.2012.714535

How to leverage the diversity of teams for creative outcomes

Received wisdom suggests more diverse teams reach more creative outcomes. Yet research is equivocal, suggesting there may be specific conditions that allow diversity to pay off. Research from Erasmus University in Rotterdam suggests that one such condition is how prepared members are to take each others' perspectives.

The potential benefits of diversity were well-expressed by van Knippenberg and colleagues some years back, in their categorisation-elaboration model. This suggests that diversity is most useful as it offers deeper elaboration: expanding on, exploring and contesting the views of other members to reach richer, more tested positions, providing the opposite of group-think. Elaboration has been shown to depend on the nature of the task and on the members having the necessary ability and motivations. In their recent article, Inga Hoever and her team examined whether the approach taken by the team could be another factor.

The study asked three-person teams to attempt a task to improve a fictional theatre's position by coming up with a creative action plan. Diversity was manipulated by giving some teams assigned roles - an Artistic, Event, and Finance Manager - whereas members of other teams held unnamed, generic positions. All teams received guidance on the key artistic, events and finance goals for the theatre: one concise package for generic members or split out, fleshed out, and handed out to the corresponding specialist manager.

In addition, some teams (both multi-role and generic) fell into a perspective-taking condition, where they were encouraged - both verbally and through an example-filled instructions page - to take each other's perspectives as much as possible during the activity. After an individual preparation period, teams spent twenty minutes together preparing an action plan, which was subsequently coded for novelty and value of ideas; both were necessary to deem a plan creative.

Manipulation checks confirmed that the multi-role teams began with more varied viewpoints (based on what members judged as the biggest priorities, recorded after reading their briefs but just before the discussion began), and teams asked to take perspectives had actually done so (based on ratings at the study close). Alone, neither factor had a significant influence on the creativity of the action plans created. But when teams both were multi-role and engaged actively in perspective taking, they performed better than the rest.

What's more, when the research team used video footage to rate teams on how much they engaged in elaboration - acknowledging and building on suggestions, synthesising ideas - they obtained scores that were also higher for diverse teams that explicitly took perspectives. Moreover, analysis confirmed elaboration scores were a mediator for how diversity influenced creativity for perspective-taking teams. When diverse teams make effort to engage in perspective, this facilitates elaboration during the task, leading to more novel, valuable outcomes.

The useful thing about this study is that having more individual ability to elaborate, or the ideal task, isn't always an option. Here we see evidence that altering the process of a creative task can play a part in unlocking the best that diverse perspectives have to offer.

Hoever, I. J., van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W. P., & Barkema, H. G. (2012). Fostering Team Creativity: Perspective Taking as Key to Unlocking Diversity's Potential Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0029159

Having more - even more to lose - makes you happier to commit to organisational change

Imagine Simone and Bridget are two professionals working in the same organisation. Bridget's role is prominent,  provides her with regular development and has an excellent bonus scheme. Her boss is encouraging and supportive. Simone is on similar pay but is based in a department that doesn't do bonuses, is underappreciated by the rest of the organisation and neglects staff development. Her boss is aloof and absent.

Along comes a sweeping organisational change program - new departments, different reporting lines, role reviews, the works. Who should be most resistant? My money would have been on Bridget: the one with most to lose. But research from Jiseon Shin and colleagues at the University of Maryland suggests the opposite: that being in receipt of 'organisational inducements' prior to a change program makes you more likely to support it.

Shin's team conducted surveys with employees from a South Korean company who were going through changes of the sort described above. For the first survey, three weeks before the changes began, participants rated organisational inducements, which involves both material benefits like health care or pay, as well as less tangible factors like development support. At time two, five months into the change program, participants expressed their commitment to change, both in terms of their cool, rational take on it - normative commitment - and their 'affective commitment' - the emotional connection now recognised as a key component of buy-in. In addition, their managers  rated whether they put this into practice, by vocally supporting the change in the presence of others or coming up with new ideas that fit with the change.

The analysis revealed that higher organisational inducements were associated with more commitment to change, both affective and normative. Why would this be? It turns out that inducements heighten both state positive affect and sense of social exchange, both measured in employees at time two. The former involves feelings of excitement and enthusiasm, and the latter is the belief that the organisation engages in reciprocity, paying back what is put into it. The better employees felt treated, the better they felt – positive affect in itself buffering anxieties – and the more they trusted they would be treated well later on. These two factors were shown to be the mechanism that caused higher commitment. What this commitment led to was slightly more complicated, but the upshot was that normative commitment had more dependable consequences, leading to both more frequent change behaviours and lower turnover, measured twenty-two months later.

A key take-away from this study for organisations is that to better manage change initiatives, they need to pay careful attention to the conditions that precede the change. If employees feel they have had been treated right to date, they are more willing and more able to surf the ambiguities of newly introduced change. If they feel otherwise, they're likely to face the future at a low ebb, thin on hope.

Jiseon Chin, M Susan Taylor, & Myeong-Gu Seo (2012). Resources for Change: The Relationships of Organizational Inducements and Psychological Resilience to Employees' Attitudes and Behaviors Toward Organizational Change Academy of Management Journal, 55 (3), 727-748 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0325

How does it feel to team up with a hotshot?

Over this summer's Olympics, few teams would have been unhappy to have an outstanding performer onboard, such as the Jamaican relay team's Usain Bolt. But in other situations, where teams are new and unfamiliar, how does it feel to have a clearly superior performer around?  A 2011 study suggests that we get threatened, affecting us to our very bodily core. What's more, close bonding experiences with the new team can actually heighten the threat.

Christena Cleveland and her colleagues were interested in hotshot colleagues because they present a  paradox. We like being connected to winners, as our self-esteem leans on social identity: who we are thanks to the groups we belong to. But social identity involves a process of depersonalisation - less me, more us - that takes time. Cleveland's team reasoned that without it, a competing process would be more salient. Social comparison is how we judge ourselves, not by reference to famous, distant people, but through our local worlds - our friends, co-workers, family - in what is sometimes termed the frog pond effect. When we come out poorly in these comparisons  we can feel threatened, as our deficiencies are laid bare, and we see that more could be expected of us. If comparison trumps identity in new groups, then outstanding colleagues should stress us out.

To investigate this, fifty-three student participants were separately recruited to work in a trio with two other 'participants' - actually confederates of the experimenters - to accurately solve anagrams. Together with behavioural data, the study used sensors applied to the chest, neck and abdomen to look for a set of cardiovascular markers that together are strongly associated with feeling threatened, rather than simply challenged by an achievable task. After the sensors were applied, the trio would sit together for instructions. Some participants were told they would be competing against the other two for financial rewards. In another condition they were told the trio's performance would be pooled to compete against other teams for prizes. The third was a stronger team condition, where in addition to the shared reward structure the trio completed an unscored pre-test activity, interacting together for eight minutes to solve a hypothetical problem (how to survive a crash on the moon). After this, participants all attempted the anagram problems; however, the confederates were prepped with the anagrams and completed theirs in just half the time it took for the participant to complete their last one.

Analysis of the participants' physiological data for all conditions suggested that relative to pre-session baseline measurements, one of the three threat markers was more present during the anagram task. For the strong team condition, meanwhile, all three markers were active during the task. How did an imaginary moon trip cause this? At study close, participants in this group rated themselves as more psychologically close to their team mates, thanks presumably to this shared experience. While you might think such closeness would attenuate threat, the researchers predicted the reverse: psychological closeness raises the stakes, by surrounding you with those whose opinions matter more, before the feeling that 'we're all part of something bigger' has had the time to bed in.

The authors admit that a control activity that matched the moon problem in time and effort would have been useful. I would also have liked a condition where the confederates didn't outperform the participant, to establish that it wasn't intrinsic to the nature of the anagram task to elicit threat rather than challenge. Nevertheless, the study suggests that when you're in a new pond, the frogs you least want to fall short of are the ones you feel more connected to. In everyday work environments, this may speak to the utility of early team-building exercises in situations were excellence is visible and unevenly distributed.

Christena Cleveland, Jim Blascovich, Cynthia Gangi, & Lucie Finez (2011). When Good Teammates Are Bad: Physiological Threat on Recently Formed Teams Small Group Research , 42 (1), 3-31 DOI: 10.1177/1046496410386245

When and how does mentoring matter?

A recent meta-analysis on mentoring aims to shed light on what matters in these relationships. Mentoring is a distinctive relationship where the mentor acts as a role model, has more experience than their protege, offers them guidance, and provides a safe space for learning and exploration. Obtaining mentoring is often proclaimed as a life-changing opportunity, so a chance to assess this is useful.

The work, led by Lillian Turner de Tormes Eby, used database searches to gather 173 samples where mentoring had been investigated. All these samples contained data on protégé perceptions of mentoring, allowing the study to amass common findings and arrive at sizes for the different effects. The analysis spanned across academic and working contexts, and the authors found that the findings rarely differed between these contexts, doing so only in degree, not in nature.

First off, greater similarity between protégé and mentor on deep features such as aligned values or attitudes was solidly related to three key measures of mentor value: relationship quality (liking of the mentor and satisfaction with how the relationship has unfolded), psychosocial support (counselling and offering acceptance), and to a lesser extent instrumental support (sponsorship or providing visibility in organisations). Having a similar background and experiences provided a more modest boost to instrumental support and a smaller one with relationship quality. Meanwhile, surface level similarities between mentor and protégé such as race, age and gender, turned out to be in aggregate almost irrelevant, with tiny effect sizes.

In terms of the process of mentoring, protégés in more informal relationships received slightly more support of both types, as evidenced by the small correlations with those variables. And more frequent interactions were helpful in terms of all three key measures, especially for the workplace-based samples. In terms of what the protégé brought to the table, those with more social capital - supportive friends and family - appeared to be better able to form a relationship of higher quality and felt they could gain more usable instrumental assistance.

What did these effects produce? The more the relationship embodied any of the three core components, the more satisfied the protégé,  the stronger their sense of affiliation with the organisation, and the less likely they were to plan to leave the organisation. In addition, the two types of support were associated with greater learning.  More instrumental support and higher relationship quality were both associated with stronger perceptions of career success. All these effects were between small and medium in size. The analysis looked at health outcomes and found a no effects beyond a small correlation between more psychosocial support and less workplace strain.

To summarise, mentor-protégé relationships are stronger when the two align on deep features and to a lesser extent in terms of common experiences, when the contact is regular and informal, and when the protégé has other relationships to offer them solid foundations. In terms of outcomes, the authors note in concluding that 'for the typical protégé, the benefits of mentoring are likely to be more limited in both scope and magnitude' than have sometimes been touted.

de Tormes Eby LT, Allen TD, Hoffman BJ, Baranik LE, Sauer JB, Baldwin S, Morrison MA, Kinkade KM, Maher CP, Curtis S, & Evans SC (2012). An Interdisciplinary Meta-Analysis of the Potential Antecedents, Correlates, and Consequences of Protégé Perceptions of Mentoring. Psychological bulletin PMID: 22800296

Interested workers are better performers

Vocational interests – the activities, processes and environments you prefer at work – are, compared to ability and personality, the neglected child of occupational psychology. This is partly thanks to a 1984 meta-analysis, which reported a weak correlation with job performance of just .1. However, recent focus on the idea of person-job fit has drawn attention back to this domain, and a new meta-analysis appears to further rehabilitate interests by showing a rather stronger relationship to performance.

Lead author Christopher Nye and his team gathered 60 studies by searching the literature for terms such as vocational interests, job performance, and turnover, and by perusing the bibliographies of texts such as interest inventory technical manuals. Half the studies followed the 1984 meta-analysis, 42 involved employment (the remainder looked at academic achievement), and these related interests to various measures of performance, such as job outcomes or organisational citizenship behaviours. Interests were measured in various ways, but common to many studies was John Holland's six-interest taxonomy, comprising work that is realistic (e.g. technical), investigative (research), artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. Interest scores can be treated in a fairly absolute way - your standardised interest score is above average, so you should be somewhat suited to this role - but the team suspected that stronger relationships would be found in by taking a different approach. An individual's interests can be portrayed in terms of a personal ranking or interest profile, where the absolute scores matter less than the relative priorities; a strong investigative interest matters less if other areas matter even more to you. Matching individual interest profiles to job profiles produces 'congruence scores' that, by more closely reflecting fit or misfit, could be better predictors of outcomes.

Overall, the regression-based meta-analysis revealed the baseline relationship between interests and job performance to be .20, already twice as strong as the original 1984 analysis. Moreover, the congruence indices had a much stronger relationship, on average .36. Highest correlations were found around organisational citizenship behaviours, which makes sense: if you enjoy what you do you are more likely to go over and above what the job asks of you. Across the measures, the team found that "interested employees are likely to perform better, help others in the organization, and stay with the company longer." These correlations are substantial and suggest that interests are of greater value than previously believed.

The analysis also made it clear that choosing the right measure is critical. In Holland's taxonomy certain domains are more closely related than others: social interests can be partly compatible with artistic or enterprising job features, but opposed by realistic features. Following that example, studies that correlated a social interest measure with job performance found stronger relationships when the jobs were dominated by social features, weaker ones for artistic, and weakest for jobs that were essentially realistic. This re-emphasises that for interest to be valuable, it must be considered in terms of fit to a particular role, rather than as a more-or-less proxy of motivation. “Because past research has  indicated that interests are not strong predictors of performance, vocational interests have seemingly been ignored in selection contexts”, concludes Nye's team, inviting a new wave of research to fill in the gaps.

Christopher D. Nye, Rong Su, James Rounds, & Fritz Drasgow (2012). Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of Over 60 Years of Research Perspectives on Psychological Science (7), 384-403 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612449021

Do we prefer potential over achievement?

From job interviews to first dates, people emphasise their personal achievements, reckoning that track record is certain, whereas potential is not. But high potential commands attention: consider the 'next big thing'. A new study makes the surprising case that in many contexts we actually prefer people with the potential to achieve over those who already have.

The researchers, Zakary Tormala, Jayson Jia and Michael Norton, noted that although uncertainty can be aversive, ambiguity does serve to create mystery, posing questions that the questing mind wants to resolve. This encourages deeper processing of information, and when that information is positive, this could lead to greater overall investment than would otherwise occur.

Across 8 experiments, the authors demonstrate this effect in a variety of domains. For instance, experiment two used an occupational setting, in which 84 participants considered a hypothetical job candidate. In one condition, the candidate had two years of experience and a high rating on a test of 'leadership achievement', the other was just beginning work with a similarly high rating in 'leadership potential'. Both were matched on qualifications. Participants were asked to anticipate how well each would perform five years into this position, and favoured the high-potential over the high-achieving individual. Note this means the participants felt a high-potential will do better five years into a career than their counterpart reaches seven years in.

Experiment three replicated the finding, this time asking participants to weigh two candidates against each other, one high-potential, one high-achiever, again based on presented test scores. Candidates were explicitly framed to be of the same age, to avoid confounds from a bias against older applicants. This study used multiple measures: how favourably they rated the candidate, and concerns about how risky it would be to hire this individual. This was to explore the possibility that the ambiguity inherent in the high-potentials leads to more extreme assessments per se, not necessarily just good ones; enigmatic wild cards who could do the impossible - or the unspeakable. Participants rated the high-potentials as a more favourable hire, and neither  candidate was seen to be a risky prospect. All participants provided ratings that showed they accepted that the high-achiever was objectively stronger on paper; nevertheless, they tended to prefer the high-potential for the role.

Other experiments ranged as widely as evaluations of restaurants and stand-up comics, where the up-and-comers were judged more favorably than those who had already delivered. The researchers used these not just to extend the generalisability of the finding but to test the central hypothesis that framing around potential leads to deeper processing. A particularly nice example was an experiment that leveraged the well-established finding that deeper processing helps distinguish strong arguments from weaker ones: accordingly, participants given a letter advocating for a student's acceptance to graduate school were better able to differentiate a strong argument when that student was positioned as high-potential, rather than a high-achiever.

The authors emphasise that they doubt that high potential would compensate for an actively horrible track record; the research focused on examples that were positive rather than containing mixed messages. They also suggest that truly outstanding achievements - like an Olympic medal - would outshine potential, not least because their exceptional nature would encourage deeper processing. Nevertheless, their research 'suggests that potential framing can be an effective means of persuasion', whether seeking employment or winning business for your company.

Tormala ZL, Jia JS, & Norton MI (2012). The Preference for Potential. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: 22775472