Sticking with self-employment: the traits that matter

Although I'm largely self-employed, life within an organisation is recent enough that I can recall some of its attractions: regulated income, conscientious support staff, nice equipment. Still, I'm happy as I am, having never once felt the inclination to pack it in and look for a job.  Some of that owes to circumstance - and no little luck - but a recent piece of research suggests there may be important individual characteristics that differentiate those who persist in self-employment from those who leave it.

The study, by Pankaj Patel and Sherry Thatcher, gathers data on a subset of people from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which collected waves of information on a cohort of people who left high school in 1957. Their employment history was coded to note moves into self-employment and the duration it lasted. This was used to model the influence of a number of individual variables, after controlling for a host of factors including income and prestige in jobs (which might unduly tempt individuals to stay in place), family precedents such as a self-employed parent, and so on.

Patel and Thatcher were interested in the Big Five personality traits, as these have been shown to differentiate people in entrepreneurial roles, which form part of the self-employment population. The analysis suggested that  individuals who are more emotionally stable are more likely to enter, and then to persist in, self-employment, as are those who are more open to experience. This pattern, similar to that found in entrepreneurs, is fairly intuitive: confidence and resilience in the first case, and flexibility and problem-solving curiosity in the second, are vital features of the jack-of-all-trades (and crises) that the self-employed need to be. However, while entrepreneurs are more likely to be extraverted, conscientious, and less agreeable (that is, less concerned about people's feelings), none of these factors influenced decisions to start or persist in self-employment.

The team also predicted that aspects of psychological well-being - a set of beliefs about your place in the world - would also matter, specifically those utilitarian ones concerning how we can get ahead in the world. The verdict was mixed: Personal growth, the belief that you are able to learn and grow had no impact on self-employment. Meanwhile, those who believed they could master their environment were more drawn to self-employment but no more likely to persist in it. The only aspect that influenced both entering and persisting in self-employment was autonomy, the belief that independence was important to them.  The study also found that individuals more likely to tenaciously persist with goals and re-frame negative obstacles to see them as still achievable were more likely to continue to go it alone.

The self-employed, then, are marked out by individual qualities, but they don't map neatly onto the entrepreneur model. The study suggests that a sense of independence, curiosity and a tendency not to ruminate help people persevere in this kind of work, along with a goal-focused tenacity. But it seems the field is too diverse to demand extraversion, a highly systematic outlook, or a particular sensitivity to other people. Being your own boss comes in many shapes and sizes.

Patel, P., & Thatcher, S. (2012). Sticking It Out: Individual Attributes and Persistence in Self-Employment Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312446643

Does great performance depend on enjoying your work?

What fires you to get through today's pile of work? Does it intrinsically attract you, tugging your curiosity? Or do you feel a weight of obligation to do as you're supposed to? These two motivation sources, enjoying work versus being driven to work, have been well examined in the workaholism literature, with obligation leading to personal outcomes such as anxiety and rising guilt. However, despite popular accounts such as Daniel Pink's Drive, there is limited research contrasting how these approaches translate to workplace outcomes.

Laura Graves and her colleagues set out to remedy this, examining three areas that motivation could influence. The team approached managers on  a 5-day leadership program, 357 of whom consented to complete a questionnaire probing how much they enjoyed work, and were driven by it. They also rated two outcome measures: career satisfaction and current psychological strain. A third key measure was work performance, determined by ratings by those who knew the manager:  peers, superiors, direct reports, and others in the organisation.

Managers who reported more enjoyment of work were better performers, experienced less strain and were more satisfied with their careers; good news for them. But higher self-ratings of 'driven to work' were unrelated to these areas; it didn't help, but neither did it hinder. In fact, being driven to work actually helped maintain performance when the enjoyment motive was lacking. However, under that set of conditions psychological strain did increase, suggesting that the obligation motivation can be a blunt instrument of achieving performance when nothing else is available, but it comes at a cost.

This research is important in reinforcing the benefits of a workforce intrinsically stimulated by its daily activities. The effects of enjoying work can be interpreted in terms of positive mood that  increases cognitive capacity through a broaden-and-build effect, and by ensuring that goals achieved are personally meaningful and thereby satisfying. But these findings also suggest that a traditional, obligation-focused mindset isn't calamitous and can be productive – for the organisation, at least - when interesting work is lacking. Findings like this remind us that if we want to move to a world of more fulfilling, happier employment, we shouldn't allow our arguments to solely rely on the organisation's short-term self-interest.

Graves, L., Ruderman, M., Ohlott, P., & Weber, T. (2012). Driven to Work and Enjoyment of Work: Effects on Managers' Outcomes Journal of Management, 38 (5), 1655-1680 DOI: 10.1177/0149206310363612

Tendency to 'move against' others predicts managerial derailment

Derailment is when a manager with a great track record hits the skids, often spectacularly. It's highly undesirable, for the disruption and human harm it can involve, and its costs, which after tallying up lost productivity, transition, and costs of a new hire, can exceed twice an annual salary in the case of executive departures.

As a result, organisational researchers have developed measures of 'derailment potential' that consider key suspect behaviours such as betraying trust, deferring decisions, or avoiding change. Work to date has confirmed that managers fired from organisations are judged to be higher in these derailers, but these were post-hoc judgments that could have reflected biased hindsight rather than honest evaluations. 

To avoid this, a new study led by Marisa Carson utilises database information on 1,796 managers from a large organisation to examine behaviours rated during employment tenure instead of on departure. Each behaviour was rated by between eight and ten sources - from subordinates to supervisors – with ratings combined into single potential scores. Drawing on staff turnover data, the study confirmed that individuals exhibiting more derailment potential behaviours were more likely to later be ejected from the organisation. In addition, they were more likely to leave early of their own volition, suggesting they jumped before they were pushed.

The study also looked beyond the behaviours exhibited to the traits that might be behind them, through a personality inventory, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), that all managers had completed. The researchers were exploring the philosophy that derailment isn't caused by a deficit in positive traits such as conscientiousness, but the presence of additional, unhelpful qualities, measured in the HDS, that resemble features of clinical disorders. These traits come in three areas: 'moving away from people' such as a cynical, doubtful disposition, 'moving against people' including manipulation and a tendency to drama, and a third area of 'moving towards people' involving an abiding eagerness to please and defer to others.

Carson's team predicted each of these areas would predict derailment behaviours, but in the analysis only one mattered: moving against people. This factor also predicted turnover of both kinds, and its effect on turnover was brokered by higher derailment behaviours. Conversely the 'away' area turned out to relate negatively, but non-significantly, to the derailment scores, and the 'toward' area didn't emerge as a coherent factor during preliminary analysis so wasn't pursued further. The story here, then, is that qualities that rub up badly against others, such as attention-seeking, idiosyncracy, over-confidence and rule-bending translate into red-flag behaviours that predict early exit from the organisation.

What to be done? This research provides some support for screening for these types of tendencies early in a manager's career, in order to inform decisions about future role as well as identifying priority areas for training and development. These efforts, should they avert derailment, are likely to pay off in the long run.

Marisa Adelman Carson, Linda Rhoades Shanock, Eric D. Heggestad, Ashley M. Andrew, S. Douglas Pugh, & Matthew Walter (2012). The Relationship Between Dysfunctional Interpersonal Tendencies, Derailment Potential Behavior, and Turnover Journal of Business and Psychology , 27 (3), 291-304 DOI: 10.1007/s10869-011-9239-0

When does group conflict lead to better performance?

Is disagreement in teams always a bad thing? Although we don't always welcome it, we can probably agree that differences of opinion can be healthy under the right conditions. But identifying these conditions has been a challenge. There is now consensus that relational conflict, meaning disagreements of a personal flavour, are a hallmark of poor team performance: think of working with a team-mate who disliked you or had permanently low regard for your contributions. Less understood is task conflict, meaning disagreements about how to go about a piece of work. A 2003 meta-analysis by De Dreu & Weingart suggests that overall it also characterises more poorly performing teams. But 23% of those studies found it associated with better performance. So recent research by Bret Bradley and colleagues intended to seek out the key conditions that allow this kind of conflict to flip from disrupting to enabling.

The study followed 117 teams, each composed of five students working together over a semester. Their collaboration culminated in a team project that was used as the indicator of final team performance, which was expected to show variability alongside levels of task conflict measured by a mid-semester survey. What would lead conflict to help rather than hinder? The study hazarded it would be psychological safety: a group-level feature which is present when members perceive low risks and consequences for speaking freely. Bradley's team reckoned that under these conditions task conflict can remain on-task, rather than triggering retribution and spirals of unproductive negative emotion. This allows groups to reap the fruits of task conflict: more diversity of ideas and deeper exploration.

The results of the study suggest that this account is part, but not all, of the puzzle. After controlling for subject matter knowledge using scores on an exam taken earlier in the semester, the research team investigated the conflict-safety-performance relationship. As predicted, teams that scored highly on the psychological safety measure taken mid-semester showed a relationship between more task conflict and better performance on the final project. But the researchers didn't find the expected drop in performance when teams that were psychologically unsafe conflicted; at least, the decrease didn't prove statistically significant. So in this study psychological safety was shown to have benefits, but not to decisively shift conflict from burden to benefit.

More research is needed to understand harmful task conflict and what influences it. Given the benefits of psychological safety, organisations may want to make efforts to facilitate it, by giving permission to speak out; leaders can role model this, even showing they are prepared to be fallible in public. It's noteworthy that a team may work well and be cohesive without necessarily feeling psychologically safe, so it can be worth evaluating exactly what the conditions are within a group, particularly if groupthink and unexamined ideas would pose highly negative consequences.

Bradley, Bret H., Postlethwaite, Bennett E., Klotz, Anthony C., Hamdani, Maria R., & Brown, Kenneth G. (2012). Reaping the benefits of task conflict in teams: The critical role of team psychological safety climate. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97 (1), 151-158 DOI: 10.1037/a0024200

See also De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 741–749. DOI:10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741

IQ, Personality, and understanding test design

We need to talk statistics. No, seriously, you'll thank me. You'll get a handle on Item Response Theory (IRT), something pretty crucial to occupational assessment, and be able to appreciate the important study we'll go on to discuss. It'll be fine...

If you've taken a modern occupational test, IRT was probably sitting beneath the bonnet making sense of the responses. Traditional tests count correct responses to give an estimate of your true ability: 30/40 means you ought to be better than if you'd scored 23/40. In contrast, IRT moves the unit of meaning from the test to the test item. Getting one question right or wrong gives us some predictor of ability right off the cuff; a coarse one, admittedly, but increasingly accurate as further responses are given.

Let's say Item E is easy. Someone at or above average should get it, and those below average have a fighting chance. Item H is hard: the chances of a correct answer are low for most, but the chances rocket up for the sharpest. Each item has a different relationship between test-taker's ability and the likelihood of them getting it right: these are the test parameters. (Because I love my readers, I've bodged up a visual example). You don't need to understand the maths to appreciate that armed with these parameters, it quickly becomes possible to home in on the true performance behind the item responses. Potent stuff.

As well as powering the tests, IRT offers an investigative methodology for the following problem: if two populations differ in test performance, does this reflect genuine difference or simply artefacts of how those populations approach the test? Well, if parameters are similar for both groups - the verbally sharp and weak Montagues have the same pattern on items E and H as do their Capulet counterparts - then the items are functioning in the same way, making us more confident the differences are real. If not, we should start to wonder if the test is being contaminated by something else - perhaps Capulets get stressed and guess blindly to items that look tricky, even ones they ought to have gotten right on account of their raw ability.

Put Verona aside. The real issue investigated by Chakadee Waiyavutti, Wendy Johnson, and Ian Deary is whether individuals with low IQ respond to personality tests differently. Personality? Yep, IRT is used for these assessments too, in a slightly fiddlier way - item 'difficulty' and right/wrong binaries need to be translated - with the concepts remaining solid. Higher and lower IQ groups do show slight personality differences in aggregate. If these differences were because personality items were understood differently by these different groups, it would call into question the validity of making judgements about personality when testing across ranges of IQ, which would impact occupational testing in a profound way.

Waiyavutti's team drew on a large data set of 683 individuals born in 1936, categorised into two groups with a mean IQ difference of 21 points. Participants completed two personality tests, the NEO-FFI and IPIP (both based on the Big 5 personality factors) and the researchers produced parameters for each item in each group, and analysed whether averaged parameters across the groups were significantly different. They found that while the two groups did differ on average - in expected areas such as Intellect and Openness to Experience and Emotional Stability - the personality test items operated similarly. This gives reassurance that these are meaningful differences.

So: we can be more confident that personality tests (at least these) are operating in the same way in people of differing IQ, making it reasonable to use them to draw their intended insights. And along the way we've figured out something about how modern tests operate. If you want a fuller exploration of IRT, you may be interested in this open-access article in the Psychologist online.

Waiyavutti C, Johnson W, & Deary IJ (2012). Do personality scale items function differently in people with high and low IQ? Psychological assessment, 24 (3), 545-55 PMID: 22082036

When do people whistle-blow?

Corruption and bad practice remain an issue in institutions. External governance and regulation offers some protection, but issues can remain invisible to outsiders. This is where whistle-blowers come in, but what propels an individual to stand up and speak out? That´s what a new paper by Marcia Miceli and colleagues seeks to understand.

The researchers surveyed a military base, receiving 3,288 questionnaires back from military and civilian employees. Respondents were asked if they had perceived wrongdoing and how they responded: reporting it to supervisors, others internal to the organisation, externally, or not at all. Against these categories, they reviewed a number of variables, to see what effect they had in sorting people into active agents and passive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, proactive personality traits turned out to predict whistle-blowing, but a number of situational factors also arose as important.

Firstly, does the amount of hard evidence of wrong-doing matter? Previous data has been equivocal, and the invitation made to whistle-blowers is to come forward with suspicions, not to turn up with a comprehensive dossier. And motivation to speak out has previously been associated with outrage and moral obligation, tied up with hot emotions rather than cool appraisal of data. Miceli's team tried to get a comprehensive take on evidence by using a formative index, a smorgasbord measure made up of mixed but relevant concepts ('I had physical evidence' and 'the evidence was convincing to me') to go beyond what they perceived as previous narrow measures of evidence. And indeed, the data showed that more evidence, in its various forms, is a driver of taking whistle-blowing action.

Secondly, do the opinions of co-workers matter? It seems so: surveyants who checked items such as their co-workers 'were afraid to report it' or thought 'someone else would report it' were less likely to whistle blow. And thirdly, surveyants were more likely to act when they had situation-specific leverage, such as an expert in finance considering whether to report seeming budget irregularities. Previous research had suggested that generalised power in the organisation might have some effect, but this was a clear demonstration of the importance of context, that the reach of the finance pro may not extend to raising age discrimination issues.

Miceli and her team conclude that this data is consistent with the pro-social organisational behaviour model, in which a perception of responsibility to act (here influenced by innate character and having access to evidence) makes us weigh the costs (signalled by co-worker unwillingness) and benefits (stopping the wrongdoing, more likely if we have leverage and evidence) to reach a decision. They suggest that while organisations are often focused on the aftermath, protecting whistle-blowers from retaliation, they could give more attention to putting these antecedent factors in place: educating on what constitutes sufficient evidence to speak out, encouraging a culture shift to avoid the chilling effect of co-worker invalidation, and increasing perceptions of leverage: perhaps, 'when it comes to speaking out about this organisation, we are all experts'.

Marcia P Miceli, Janet P Near, Michael T Rehg, & James R Van Scotter (2012). Predicting employee reactions to perceived organizational wrongdoing: Demoralization, justice, proactive personality, and whistle-blowing Human Relations, 65, 923-954 DOI: 10.1177/0018726712447004

How they keep on smiling at Disney

I recently came across a piece on the 'happiest place on earth', Florida's Walt Disney World. Several nuggets were noteworthy: Disney World and its related local industries make Disney the largest single-site employer in the US. The site is substantial enough to warrant its own Disney police force. And the operation practices what they call the 'science' of guestology (google it). Of most interest is how Disney trains its employees to deliver that happy feeling to its paying customers.

Anne Reyers' and Jonathan Matusitz's paper focuses on emotional labour: the effort we put in to regulate our emotions to deliver the outcomes the organisation expects. In Disney's case, this is happiness and delight for every guest, all the time, enshrining the notion that even a single unsatisfied guest cancels out 70 happy ones. Walt himself, having observed frowns and negativity on tours of the grounds, insisted on Disney University, a mandatory training process for every employee, that more than anything else is an extended emotion regulation regime. From the off, the training frames the job in terms of play rather than work, and trainees are taken through methods of managing facial and voice cues to maintain a happy, relaxed, and accessible approach. This is effectively a masterclass in surface acting.

However, research suggests that Disney employees actively involved in surface acting are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion. This accords with broader evidence that surface acting is hard work. Genuinely feeling the emotions you wish to exhibit - deep acting - is aspired for at the Disney University but there are no guarantees when a pushy brat keeps calling you names. Indeed, other research indicates that buttoning back anger is the hardest thing to do for Disney employees, and having to keep doing so is a major driver of emotional exhaustion.  Studies on Disney employees suggests two ways to stave this off are by understanding the importance of  emotional regulation and a fit to role requirements, and by believing that their manager values their emotional contributions, perhaps by offering rewards (in keeping with the ERI stress model mentioned recently). Reyers and Matusitz believe that the training at Disney does in fact attend to these two coping mechanisms, which may partly explain the low attrition rate of 12-15%, compared to the 60% standard in hospitality roles. It's also worth noting recent research that if the positive emotion is reciprocated, staff may end up feeling genuinely happier too.

These things are far from Disney-specific. These principles 'have come to govern the rest of the customer service world' to push 'the frontier of Disney-like happiness across the world'...which may delight or horrify you.

Anne Reyers, & Jonathan Matusitz (2012). Emotional Regulation at Walt Disney World: An Impression Management View Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 27 (3), 139-159 DOI: 10.1080/15555240.2012.701167