Third day of Christmas digested: Caring Carl

Ah, Caring Carl. Maybe he works as a team leader, or perhaps he's simply a motivated member of a team. He certainly has ideas about how to improve the quality of the workplace. Why not give him a few more? These come with an evidence base behind them.

Getting better outcomes from the team. Simply put, a team that is willing to listen to other perspectives and to not take disagreements personally is going to reach better outcomes. On the first, research shows that the diversity within a team only translates to more creative outcomes if team members are prepared to feed that diverse input through their own positions. On the second, we now understand better that rare trick of how to transform conflict from a disabling to an enabling event: groups whose members feel free to speak out without being vilified can keep conflicts focused on task rather than relationship, allowing problems to be robustly interrogated and leading to better outcomes.

Pay attention when there is a change-up to team composition.  If Carl is in charge of the team, he should know that the emotional responses new starters have to their supervisor has a significant effect on their transition into the team. Making an effort to give support and make them feel in good hands is critical. More generally, when individuals find themselves working with a highly talented individual it's easy to feel intimidated and under pressure to perform comparably - especially once you've started to become familiar to each other but before you've developed an Us over I mentality. Being aware of that emotional component makes it easier to get past it, by recognising what lies behind tensions and acting as a spur to get the team on the same page sooner rather than later.

Finally Carl might want to be vocal about whether the managerial set-up works for his team. Specifically, evidence suggests that job outcomes and experiences can suffer when managers regularly work remotely. If it appears that this is a problem for his team, perhaps he would like to have a word, with this study as backup.

A gift for Carl? How about a book of (workplace appropriate) jokes? A compelling model has been drawn suggesting that even minor incidents of humour in the workplace lead to virtuous spirals that can lift mood and create a better working environment. Here, I'll start you off: what's orange and sounds like a parrot?

Second day of Christmas digested: Busy Boris

Yesterday we had some thoughts and gifts for Ambitious Anne, someone intending to make a success of themselves. Today, it's Busy Boris. Boris is the person who has already climbed their way into a position of responsibility. And you know what? Sometimes, it doesn't seem so great for them.

Sure, they appear to be willingly putting those extra hours into work. But are they addicted to it? Fascinating research on the New Zealand film industry (you know the one) suggests that the social addiction model developed around substance use can be extended to the social patterns that occur around work, especially when the availability of that work is uncertain and arrives in short bursts. If there is a problem with managing the impact of work on their life, raising awareness is an important first step.

 If you are a spouse or partner of a Boris in an unhappy place, you might want to suggest a move to other pastures. After all, it appears that a partner's perception of the problems that work causes has a powerful influence over and above the workers own perceptions. You can help them to make the hard decision. But assuming it hasn't come to that, how can we help keep Boris on the up?

Firstly, he would do well to keep his team onside. Your Boris is probably lovely, but it's possible they've leant towards treating subordinates instrumentally in order to get on. If they are seen to be 'in it for themselves', things can roll on without too much turbulence until team members perceive that they are being left on the outside, at which point things are likely to deteriorate. And if they make a big thing about running a caring workplace but don't walk their own talk, their stock is likely to fall very quickly. On the positive side, if they do it right, Boris can have a positive impact on his subordinates through a role in their coaching. How to get involved - alongside the coach and the individual themselves - without being a third wheel? Here's how.

Maybe work is particularly stressful - some of our loved ones exist on the front-lines of society, or are stuck in toxic work situations. The evidence suggests that if you experience violence in your work, ruminative thoughts are likely to worsen the effects these have upon your psychological health. Ideally they should speak to a counsellor or therapist, but in the meantime you might help them find ways to take their mind off the incident.

OK, but Christmas is coming up and I want something concrete, something to give. No problem, here are two suggestions:

• A sitting cushion.  There is a current vogue for research into mind-body techniques like meditation or focused breathing, which generally agree that these have positive effects on stress reduction. 
• Alternatively how about running shoes - I recommend barefoot ones. Evidence suggests that workplace burnout and generalised depression can feed each other in a vicious cycle - but that exercise can be effective in breaking that cycle, through its benefits to sleep, decreasing stress, and making you feel better about yourself.

First day of Christmas digested: Ambitious Anne

Our first post is dedicated to that person you know who is really fixed on getting ahead. We'll call them Ambitious Anne, though you'll know them by their own name. First, ambitious? Well, good for Anne. Longitudinal research suggests that possessing ambition in spades is an asset over the lifespan of an individual. It influences expected areas such as life attainments - more prestigious jobs, leading to higher income - but also longer life and higher life satisfaction.

If your Anne is a woman, she might be interested in some of the research on career progression and gender we've been covering at the digest. Experimental research has suggested that perceiving that you live in a male-scarce environment may influence women to focus more on how they can personally ensure financial stability and a legacy for themselves, a possible explanation for why US states with fewer men see women taking higher-earning positions. Perhaps an environment not overflowing with men presents a better hot-house for incubating ambition?

Also, help Anne by warding off some false advice: there isn't evidence that she needs to play tough in order to get ahead in business. A large analysis confirms that low agreebleness is correlated with better pay, but also that the effect is driven by males in the sample. And even if your Anne is a man, I wouldn't recommend them to toughen up, as other measures like life satisfaction better correlate with high agreeableness, not low. One thing we can recommend to an ambitious fella is that if he is looking to reach managerial roles in a stereotypically male environment, such as construction, he should be aware that he is likely to be held to less forgiving standards than would a female counterpart: the stereotypical attribution is that 'he has no excuse for failure'

Sticking with gender factors, Anne might want to scrutinise her future, because as a woman it's possible that opportunities she's offered will be especially precarious. Michelle Ryan's body of research has identified the presence of a glass cliff, with a long way to fall, that makes it important to consider the risks as well as the benefits of a big promotion. She may also want to recognise (not accept, as it's not acceptable) that dominant behaviour on her part may be attributed to her temperament, rather than as a tool she uses to get the job done. This attribution bias has been robustly observed, although it disappears for black women in the US, whose minority of a minority status appears to make them an anomaly with fewer norms to violate. Of course, black leaders have other perception issues to contend with, with subordinates viewing their failures as exemplifying incompetence, and their successes as due to the conditional utility of traits that are stereotypical of their race, rather than pertaining to their leadership skill.

Finally, ambitious people tend to be keen to learn from their mistakes and self-improve. So a caution to Anne would be that too much focus on 'learning from failure' can make us unhappy. Instead, an approach that mixes focus on the losses with a 'restorative' strategy, filling your mind with new demands, seems to preserve the insights from mistakes but allow the negative mood to resolve quickly, allowing you to move onto new things.

On top of all that advice, any specific gifts for Anne? How about a mentor? Consult our round-up of when mentoring is most effective. Go on, it's our round....

Introducing the eight days of Christmas digested

It's that time of the year where we start to reflect back on what we've done over the past twelve months - the good, the bad and the unclassifiable. It's also the time when many of us scrabble to find gifts for Christmas, Hanuka or your preferred celebration. So to help the Occupational Digest to reminisce - and help you out if you're short-handed - we present The Eight Days of Christmas Digested.

Today and every day leading up to the 25th, we'll offer you a post aimed at a particular type of person. A Christmas wish-list, if you will.

Intention to leave job driven by partner's perception of how work disrupts home life

We know that levels of work-family conflict can cross-over from an employee to their partner, loading them with their share of the stressors produced by such tension. Now new research shows how employee attitudes to work are influenced by cross-over from the other direction: their partner's perception of how much work is getting in the way of family life.

A team led by Marla Baskerville Watkins approached individuals in a large sample of US government agency workers to identify those who were willing to be involved alongside their partner. 102 couples completed the data collection which consisted of two phases: the first collected demographic data from the employee and asked each partner to rate the amount of disruption that the employee's work posed to family life. The second phase one month later asked the employee how they perceived their own levels of work-family conflict, and additionally the degree to which they were looking for another job.

Employees were more likely to be engaged in a job search when their partners had higher perception of work-family conflict, even after controlling for the employee's own perceptions. I may feel the late hours and weekend work is reasonable, but if my other half doesn't, I may find myself looking for other options. Baskerville Watkins and team remind us that many organisations already recognise the importance of engaging with their employees' partners in a specific context: expatriation to an unfamiliar country. But they suggest that it may be more worth more broadly for organisations 'to consider family members in employer retention endeavours.'

Baskerville Watkins, M., Ren, R., Boswell, W., Umphress, E., Triana, M., & Zardkoohi, A. (2012). Your work is interfering with our life! The influence of a significant other on employee job search activity Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (3), 531-538 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02050.x

Adjustment to a new role is influenced by how your supervisor makes you feel

Before every great employee, there was a new employee. Getting newcomers up to speed is crucial for organisations, so it's useful to know how this is supported or disrupted. Competing models suggest the supervisor as the decisive factor in onboarding, or that newcomers themselves are the crucial agent. A new article focuses on the interplay between the two: how a supervisor makes you feel shapes your behaviours that can make or break those early days.

Suhsil Nifadkar, Anne Tsui and Blake Ashforth conducted their survey-based research within the IT sector in India, where growth at around 30% and high turnover means a lot of newcomers and high stakes for their rapid adjustment. Being 'new' can mean different things in different jobs, so the team consulted with HR representatives in the industry to agree on a boundary of the first three months of employment. New starters across a range of companies were contacted and those enlisted sent a survey at the end of their first month, asking about how their supervisor treated them, in terms of levels of support and amount of verbal aggression. Two weeks later respondents were asked to complete a second survey asking how they currently felt about the supervisor, both in terms of positive affect, with items like 'I feel glad to interact with my supervisor', and negative affect, such as 'I feel very tense around my supervisor'. Nifadkar and colleagues constructed their inventories based on Russell's influential circumplex model of emotion, which defines it in terms of valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and high to low arousal, and the team opted to measure positive and negative affect separately as people can experience ambivalence with 'mixed emotions' in response to experiences and individuals. They predicted that feelings towards a supervisor would be driven by how they have been treated in the past, and this was born out, with more support leading to more positive affect and more aggression to more negative affect.

But what consequences do these feelings have? The research team were driven by the approach-avoidance model of emotion, in which emotions direct us towards one of two fundamentals of behaviour: moving towards or away from a target activity or individual. In a workplace environment, they hypothesised this could take two forms: the extent to which they proactively seek supervisor feedback to better understand the workplace, and the extent to which they avoid the supervisor when possible. These were measured in a survey two weeks further into the respondents' employment, analysis of which found positive affect led to more feedback behaviours and identified a particularly strong effect of negative affect upon avoidance behaviours. The consequences of these behaviours were measured in a final survey two weeks on, looking at in-role performance, amount of helping behaviours towards colleagues, and newcomer adjustment outcomes - a combination of social adjustment, understanding of tasks and clarity on their own role. Requesting more feedback was positively associated with performance and newcomer adjustment, and actively avoiding the supervisor was associated with worse performance and fewer helping behaviours.

Organisations can invest substantially in onboarding schemes for new staff, recognising how much a bad start can cost them. As important as these are, this research suggests that the disposition of one individual - the supervisor - can be highly influential on outcomes. Supervisor behaviour triggers emotional responses, which are intended to be protective and adaptive but can lead to counterproductive behaviour, such as refraining from seeking help on a task beyond you because you were rebuked on an earlier occasion. Nifadkar and colleagues suggest that organisations could give more attention to the formative emotional experiences that their supervisors are bestowing on new staff, and even consider that the 'probation period' is really evaluating two people: the new hire and the person responsible for their early days.

Nifadkar, S., Tsui, A., & Ashforth, B. (2012). The way you make me feel and behave: Supervisor-triggered newcomer affect and approach-avoidance behavior. Academy of Management Journal, 55 (5), 1146-1168 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0133

Applicants' voluntary experience is valued by recruiters

Job applicants with experience in voluntary roles may be tempted to report this to their prospective employers. But how favourably do recruiters regard these sorts of experience? Christa Wilkin and Catherine Connelly investigated this in a group of professional recruiters, providing them with CVs (resumes) constructed to differ systematically in the types of experience reported. They suspected that other things being equal, work experience may be favoured more when it comes with a wage, as duration in a paid role implies you have met performance and behavioural standards, whereas voluntary positions tend to lack appraisals and focus more on participation (hours of involvement) than evaluating outcomes. Wilkin and Connelly also predicted that voluntary work would be subject to the same 'relevance' criteria as paid: if it didn't obviously supply skills, knowledge and experience that were pertinent to the targeted job, it wouldn't make them more attractive to the recruiter.

The 135 participants each evaluated eight CVs with a target job in mind, rating each one on a seven point scale in terms of how qualified they seemed for the role. The work experience for four CVs was either entirely voluntary or entirely paid, and either clearly relevant or irrelevant. The other four CVs all had a mix of voluntary and paid work in various combinations (e.g., relevant voluntary and irrelevant paid work). In addition, each recruiter recorded how involved they had personally been in voluntary work, to test the hypothesis that first-hand experience may lead them to attribute more value to this kind of work.

Comparison of voluntary and paid-work CVs showed that the recruiters had no significant preference for paid experience, but did favour relevant experience over irrelevant, regardless of type of employment. A recruiter's background of voluntary work had no influence on their ratings of applicants with voluntary experience. Finally, CVs with a mix of experience were rated more favourably than either pure voluntary or pure paid work. Wilkin and Connelly had predicted this, based on the idea that voluntary work can 'round-out' a career history by showing evidence of traits that may not be illuminated in paid opportunities to date, such as altruism, cooperation, and a work ethic. It provides evidence that a candidate may be a welcome presence, which is especially attractive when coupled with evidence that the candidate can also produce results in an appraised environment.

This study paints an optimistic picture for candidates with volunteering backgrounds. Recruiters tend not to automatically deprecate these types of experiences: they simply care about how the experience is relevant to the application. Moreover, introducing volunteering work as a complement to paid experience can enhance prospects, this appears to be true even when the volunteering is less-relevant, as long as the paid work is relevant, despite the explicit positions of recruiters that this evidence is unlikely to sway their evaluation.

Wilkin, C., & Connelly, C. (2012). Do I Look Like Someone Who Cares? Recruiters’ Ratings of Applicants’ Paid and Volunteer Experience International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20 (3), 308-318 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00602.x