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

Can you be coached to better outcomes on a situational judgment test?

The Situational judgment test (SJT), which asks respondents to choose their preferred course of action in a workplace scenario, has become a popular way of assessing fit to attributes of a job or organisational culture. It's used by governments, military, polices forces, and for educational selection such as certification of GPs (medical General Practitioners). Like other popular techniques, it has spawned an industry that promises to help people pass them. Can coaching enhance performance on such a test?

Filip Lievens and his team examined this in a real-world context - laboratory studies can lack the motivation to learn that drives coaching's benefits - in the form of August admissions to a Belgian medical school, where candidates take a battery of assessments including an SJT. A challenge is that candidates who seek coaching may differ from their counterparts in ways that could influence their eventual performance, independent of the effect of the coaching itself. Lievens' team addressed this through two routes. Firstly, they used a form of matching called propensity scoring, by which every coached candidate is matched against an uncoached one through deriving scores based on a range of individual factors, including demographic background, career aspirations, previous academic performance, and their tendency to prepare through other means, such as practice tests. Secondly, the team only included candidates who had previously failed the assessments in July, and had not engaged in any coaching prior to July. This meant that the July SJT performance could act as a pre-test measure of how candidates did before coaching was introduced. From a larger sample, Lieven's team ended up with 356 matched candidates that fit the stringent criteria.

Merely examining the August performance, it appeared that coaching did have an effect: matched candidates scored an average of 1.5 points higher, with an effect size of around .3. But by comparing the difference scores of how much candidates improved between July and August, the team found that coached candidates improved by 2.5 points more than uncoached, for an effect size of around .5. This is because the candidates who decided to receive coaching on average had been weaker performers the first time around - possibly one reason they invested in assistance. This effect size is fairly large - a boost of half a standard deviation - especially compared to those for coaching in cognitive tests, which fall between .1-.15.

SJTs are popular with candidates, being intuitive and overtly job-relevant. Employers are also fans: SJTs are strongly predictive of relevant job performance, with incremental value over and above that supplied by ability tests, and have less adverse impact, with demographic groups typically showing small average differences in performance. But this evidence suggests that their results can be influenced by coaching. Does the coaching result in an increase in the underlying ability? It may do, but programs tend to focus on 'teaching to the test' rather than broader ability, meaning results may be distorted. The researchers suggest this needs to be investigated, and that test developers explore different scoring techniques and broaden the attributes assessed by SJTs to make them difficult to exploit.

Lievens, F., Buyse, T., Sackett, P., & Connelly, B. (2012). The Effects of Coaching on Situational Judgment Tests in High-stakes Selection International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20 (3), 272-282 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00599.x

How organisations need to forget

Should an organisation forget? Seems a strange idea, given how we prize information. But a recent study suggests that an eidetic memory may get in the way of a coherent, enduring identity.

Researchers Michel Anteby and Virág Molnár studied the French aeronautics firm Snecma, founded by de Gaulle in 1945. It's preeminence in the field was seen as a national success, and Snecma cast itself as a quintessentially national company. Anteby and Molnár were interested in how this influenced how the company reported on and remembered times where it operated together with other nations. They investigated this through interviews with company retirees, and review archival material and the company bulletins, 347 in all, which acted as the formal voice and memory bank of the organisation.

Snecma was involved in two major collaborations where its future course depended on foreign assistance.  The first was just after WWII where the development of key engine technology was jump-started by a contingent of 120 German and Austrian engineers, leading to among other things the development of the ATAR engine. Yet amongst the 5,622 pages of bulletins describing these endeavours, only five made explicit mention of any German involvement. Another source stated that Snecma's management made a 'more or less conscious drive to "erase" the German presence responsible for the ATAR'. This continued well into the 1980s, where a speech at the retirement of an engineer saluted him as entering the company as a simple draftsman, when in fact he had trained as an engineer in Germany during the war.

This was mirrored in the second instance of foreign assistance, a 1969 collaboration with General Electric to develop civilian engines. Just 0.3% of bulletin pages on GE-related activities made explicit reference to GE itself. Many of the retirees interviewed had worked closely with GE counterparts, often visiting the US to do so, and when probed could recall benefits of these collaborations such as access to technology that was superior and even remarkable, such as x-ray-like machines that allowed them to peer inside engines. But their natural habits of recounting their Snecma experience omitted these elements, focusing on  their time within the country and referring to a key engine that resulted from this collaboration as a Snecma creation. It seems that even vivid direct experiences became discoloured and de-emphasised by a consistent organisational leaning towards remembering the national and forgetting the foreign.

The result? In the minds of the retirees, the national quality of Snecma's identity endures. 'Snecma's success was France's success', quoth one. Just as the autobiographical narratives that shape individual human identity involve both focused attention and deliberate castings-away - so it seems that organisational identity endures through selective forgetting.

Anteby, M., & Molnar, V. (2012). Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm's Rhetorical History Academy of Management Journal, 55 (3), 515-540 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0245

Driven away by hypocrisy: when endorsing a caring workplace backfires for leaders

Interpersonal justice - treating others with care and respect - is something every organisation seeks to cultivate. Such a climate can lead to favourable team interactions,  better customer service and higher employee engagement, and managers can play their part by communicating standards and the importance of such behaviour. But can an expectation for interpersonal justice backfire? What about when the manager demonstrates they have no interest in following it themselves? This question led Rebecca Greenbaum, Mary Mawritz and Ronald Piccolo to examine the impact when an act of managerial mistreatment is also seen as a hypocritical one.

Hypocrisy has only recently garnered attention in the examination of 'dark-side' leadership behaviours. Also referred to as word-deed misalignment, it specifically denotes occasions where leaders espouse rules that they regularly break themselves - distinct from other types of immoral but at least consistent behaviours. According to Behavioural Integrity Theory, employees seek to predict and control future encounters with the leaders who hold power over them, so a hypocritical manager is a real issue, being hard to predict on the basis of their words.

The team surveyed 312 participants from a range of industries, the questionnaire tackling how much each experienced supervisory undermining (if they 'Talk bad about you behind your back), Leader Hypocrisy ('I wish my supervisor would practice what he/she preached'), and Interpersonal Justice Expectation, such as the extent to which you are asked to 'treat people with respect'. The questionnaire also probed intention to leave the organisation, and collected control data on similar variables such as trust in your leader and psychological contract breach, meaning whether you felt that specific promises made to had been broken.

After controlling for the other variables, higher levels of hypocrisy were associated with greater turnover intentions. Supervisor undermining was positively related to turnover, but close examination of the data revealed that this effect became significant only at a certain level of justice expectations. In other words, when employees didn't feel that their supervisor emphasised fair treatment, their own unfair treatment didn't reliably lead to greater intention to leave. This strongly suggests that hypocrisy is a driving factor here, the concern being less about the instances of undermining but the sense that the leader is hostile *and* unpredictable and therefore the employee has no control.

As the authors conclude, 'the promise of interpersonal justice expectation adds insult to injury as subordinates realise that their leader's behaviour deviates from the dignified and respectful behaviour they promote.' Managers who espouse organisational behaviours they have no intention of keeping may end up chasing employees away quicker than if they made no secret of their severe treatment of others. From the employee point of view, if you're going to work with a devil, better one you know.

Greenbaum, R., Mawritz, M., & Piccolo, R. (2012). When Leaders Fail to "Walk the Talk": Supervisor Undermining and Perceptions of Leader Hypocrisy Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312442386

Ruminative thoughts deepen the long-term impact of workplace violence

Experiencing workplace violence can have negative impacts far beyond the event itself. How do our own thoughts and cognitions influence this? And is there anything we can do about it?  Karen Niven and colleagues from the universities of Manchester and Sheffield suspected that ruminative thoughts may be a problem. Rumination involves returning to a difficult memory or thought over and over without a clear goal-directed purpose. Its generalised nature means it obstructs solutions while maintaining the negative qualities of the thought in time, extending its impact.

 After an initial experimental study, demonstrating that rumination on simulated violence prevents our emotional state from returning to normal levels in the short term, the team took the effect out into the field. This study investigated whether trait rumination - our individual tendency to fall into ruminative thinking, would predict longer-term outcomes following actual workplace violence. The sample of 78 social workers were surveyed on their experiences of violence over the last six months on the job (only 23% had experienced no violence), as well as completing measures of current psychological wellbeing, health complaints, and trait rumination.

Using regression analysis, the team found that individually both violence and rumination led to worsened physical and psychological health, but that violence didn't have an impact on wellbeing for those who tended not people to ruminate. In other words, rumination appeared to be a necessary condition for violence to cast a wider pall upon psychological health.

Existing research warns of the hazards of suppressing our thoughts, which is psychologically involving and can lead to negative outcomes. However, once thinking starts to become ruminative, going over old ground again and again, then finding a means of distraction may be effective in reducing impact both immediately, and in the longer term. Regardless, we shouldn't forget that the onus is on the perpetrators of workplace violence to change their behaviours.

  Niven, K., Sprigg, C., Armitage, C., & Satchwell, A. (2012). Ruminative thinking exacerbates the negative effects of workplace violence Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02066.x

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

Monitoring 'self-managing' employees may provoke negative work behaviours

Good things can come when members of an organisation are allowed to manage their own work, such as greater job satisfaction and better adherence with organisational policy. But this involves management doing an uncomfortable thing: surrendering control. Often, organisations compensate by coupling self-management with surveillance techniques of the  close-up or electronic variety. New research suggests that self-management has even more benefits, but that mashing it with surveillance can end up bringing out the worst in people.

Authors Jaclyn Jenson and Jana Raver conducted two studies, the first looking to establish whether people given freedom would use it to perform more positive, discretionary acts, so-called organisational citizenship behaviours or OCBs. By mocking up a fictional consultancy, the researchers could recruit 211 participants (in their own minds, employees on a one-off, very short-term contract) to show up, review investment advice, and write it up in the form of a report. Before starting their short-term shift, they were given Terms of Service both printed and read aloud; these either emphasised self-management or other-management, a promise cashed out by the shift supervisor sitting passively or actively pacing the room. The work involved discretionary elements, such as how long the report and whether to complete or skip some optional questionnaires. The amount of discretional effort  was turned into a OCB score: individuals in the self-management condition scored higher, making efforts over and above what was demanded.

Study two surveyed individuals across a range of organisations, to offer a field replication and extend the investigation to understand how surveillance interacts with self-management. The survey introduced a further outcome measure, counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs), choosing to undermine the organisation in some way, such as deliberately dragging your heels on a task. The data from the 423 respondents suggested that surveillance in itself encouraged CWBs, but this was driven by its interaction with self-management. When individuals believed they were supposed to be self managing - 'It is my responsibility, and not my organization’s, to monitor my own workplace behavior and job performance' - but the reality was that they were being monitored,  their CWBs were markedly higher. Jensen and Raver predicted this finding, seeing it as an example of psychological reactance: when freedom you believe you deserve is seemingly taken away, you will try to recover autonomy through other means, even at the expense of the organisation. Analysing trust in the organisation, also surveyed, revealed that the normally observed relationship between self management and higher trust was severed once surveillance entered the mix.

This research suggests that if you don't want to evoke petty revenges from employees, it's vital that cultures of self-management aren't tempered by close surveillance. By resisting that temptation, you're likely to yield benefits, your people more willing to perform beyond what is expected.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, & Jana L. Raver (2012). When Self-Management and Surveillance Collide: Consequences for Employees’ Organizational Citizenship and Counterproductive Work Behaviors Group Organization Management, 37 (3), 308-346 DOI: 10.1177/1059601112445804

Laugh and the workplace laughs with you

How far can a laugh carry? According to Christopher Robert and James Wilbanks, it can reverberate through time, with far-reaching consequences. Their theoretical paper, synthesising research from neuroscience, behavioural psychology and the workplace, suggests that funny incidents can have a cumulative positive effect through a 'Humour Wheel'.

Humour can be understood as a positive emotional state arising from incongruity: a joke puts two elements together in an unexpected way, and sarcasm belies what is said with what is intended  (and appears to facilitate creativity for this reason). It's one of the most intense positive emotions, putting aside triumph, which tends to accompany rare events, and sensual pleasure, typically inappropriate for a workplace. Humour is instead quintessentially social, and can occur frequently; for Robert and Wilbanks this is crucial, as established theories of workplace affective events (situations that change our mood or emotions) suggest that quantity matters more than significance of such events for shaping workplace outcomes.

Moreover, the contagious nature of laughter - we laugh at a laugh even shorn of context, and our brains respond to laughter sounds in a similar way as they do to something funny - means that a single moment of humour can evoke and encourage others - both directly through emotional contagion and also by acting as a trigger to permit employees to breach straight-faced operations with crinkled smiles. As a consequence, an instance of humour can lead to a longer-standing 'humour episode', and it is these that lift mood and have an effect on interpersonal contact, deepening affection and also helping to shape group norms of what behaviour is desirable - including 'humour is ok'. Hence, a positive feedback loop or wheel. Not every humour instance need be joy inducing; a wry comment can be sufficient to seed the ground and make it possible for other moments to follow.

What could be the consequences of the positive affect that humour elicits?  Frederickson's broaden-and-build theory suggests it encourages us to approach opportunities rather than retreat: exploration and playness ensue, allowing us to build positive resources for the future. This is a good way to make sense of the manifold effects of positive affect - on health, cooperation, organisational citizenship, job satisfaction, flow and more. And as negative states can form their own feedback loops, humour can be valuable as a derailer - its disruptive, intrusive quality ringing out over frustration or fear. Getting a 'humour wheel' going in regular work teams is clearly useful, and other contexts suggested by the authors include mentoring, where the importance of satisfying and informal relationships would naturally fit with humorous episodes, and also leadership, where leader affect is known to be contagious to employees, and the oft-desired transformational style is linked to humour usage. They call for deeper research into these areas, as well as how humour may work against tendencies to absenteesim and attrition, and suggest that 'humor might be an unsung hero in peoples’ day-to-day affective lives.'

Christopher Robert, & James E Wilbanks (2012). The Wheel Model of humor: Humor events and affect in organizations Human Relations, 65 (9), 1071-1099 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711433133