Eighth day of Christmas digested: Hunting Holly

Our final day digested is dedicated to Hunting Holly, on the lookout for a job but finding stiff competition in the market.

Help Holly out with her CV. When paid employment is scarce, many people take up voluntary activities to fill their time, but may wonder how much attention to devote to this in job submissions. Research suggests that recruiters don't overly care about whether work came with wages: what matters is the relevance of the skills and experiences accrued. In fact, a mix of voluntary and paid work is preferred to all-waged, demonstrating a more rounded candidate.

Also, Holly might want to include references to her potential as well as to proven track record. Contrary to intuition, indicators of what a person could achieve can be more attractive than simply focusing back on actual achievements. 'Potential-framing' may be a more effective approach to punching up that covering letter.


If Holly is looking for work abroad, she may be interested in whether national personality differences are real or imagined. Recent evidence makes us more confident that these are genuine. This can also have implications for strategies within assessment interviews, as we reported on last year.

When putting yourself forward for a job, there is a pressure to self-promote, even go beyond the truth, especially if you think everyone is doing it. A neat piece of research on job applicants uncovered honest admissions about their use of self-presentation tactics; it turns out that we tend to stick to the ones that recruiters consider ethical, bend the rules less frequently and break them even more rarely. So we could advise Holly to use her conscience as a guide as to how much to pitch herself.

Many job applications involve tests, and test providers commonly provide feedback on how well you did. The principle is laudable, to provide something of worth back to the candidate in the form of insights into their own capability. But for some, being forced to face a personal shortcoming, rather than being able to chalk up a job rejection to bad luck, ends up eroding wellbeing. It's possible that this could end up undermining motivation to make applications, so Holly may want to think about whether it's worthwhile picking through this feedback or pushing on regardless.

Given the ubiquity of testing, one gift you might want to give Holly is preparation for it, such as a book, article or even coaching. Recent research suggests that this can have a moderate effect for taking situational judgment tests.

Seventh day of Christmas digested: Go-getting Gyasi

Ah, the entrepreneurs, the doers, the makers. Someone like Gyasi, a go-getter. Maybe even a maverick, as outlined by this recent research. What do you get for the guy who does everything? A bit of digested advice, that's what.

As he builds his start-up, or recruits for his team, Gyasi might be wondering how to gather like minds. Is there a personality profile that really sinks their teeth into work? Here's some research that suggests so, and tells you what.

Many people appear to be making the move to self-employment nowadays, but the able self-employed are periodically offered jobs. What side of the fence would Gyasi be better on? The time he sticks as his own boss is likely to correlate with a few core traits, as explained by this research.

We spoke about stress when planning for Boris, but the picture is more interesting for Gyasi. Type A personalities, who really feed off work, do suffer more when their irritability is put under strain from high work loads. But they are rather more insulated from the dismaying stress that normally accompanies not being recognised for your efforts and under some conditions can even blow off stress better by venting it. To that extent, our advice for Gyasi is to recognise when his stress-reduction strategies may impact those around him in unpleasant ways.


Gift: A holiday. He probably deserves it. The trick is to get him to focus on the trip and not take the desk with him mentally. Highly absorbing activities are going to be a better respite than two weeks on the beach with the smartphone flashing under the deckchair.

Sixth day of Christmas digested: Farsighted Freya

Farsighted Freya likes to look ahead, and at the big picture. Ideally she has a senior role, or at least an advisory one, helping shape strategy in her organisation. Here are some ways she could influence company policy for the better.

Periods of organisational change can have critical effects on employee engagement, which can make the difference between a successful change and one that flounders. Evidence suggests that those who feel they've received the least from the organisation to date are, paradoxically, most suspicious that the change could improve their conditions. Freya could use this as an indicator as to which organisation areas will be less easier to get buy-in from.

Organisations involve a dance between form (directing efforts towards outcomes) and freedom (for individuals to discover, explore and modify activities). When employees are given the latitude to self-manage their work, it's tempting to want to balance this out by monitoring them. This turns out to be a terrible approach, eliciting push-back and counterproductive behaviour from workers who find this intrusive....so warn Freya off it. Perhaps she wants to go the whole hog, and move her organisation towards a non-hierarchical structure. Exciting stuff, but what are the pitfalls? Recent research explores this.

One way in which an organisation finds form is through developing and maintaining an identity - design and aesthetic at Apple, say, or ethical and community-oriented at the cooperative. Freya might be interested in a recent study exploring how identity is formed both by what is remembered and what is forgotten – sometimes deliberately.

Gift: a whistle. Simply to remind her that the long-term health of organisations depends on the willingness of its members to speak out about unsavoury practices. This isn't always easy, so some insights into the conditions that facilitate whistle-blowing may help her shape organisational policy in that direction.

Fifth day of Christmas digested: Existential Eric

Today is dedicated to Existential Eric, who is asking himself the question: what do I want to be? Maybe the Eric in your life is still at school, or someone arriving at a turning point later in life.,, either way, give them the gift of guidance to make their decisions a little easier.

Is leadership for Eric?

The best leaders often emerge from a match between their background and that of the group that they lead (and this year's New Psychology of Leadership is definitely giftable on that front). But there is consistent research linking individual traits to leadership effectiveness, a recent study even suggesting that these can be identified at school age.

Give a Warning: if your Eric is bullish about getting ahead and being in charge, you might want to give them a bit of farsighted wisdom: evidence suggests that people who make their way into management roles and then implode often possess a set of antagonistic traits summarised as 'moving against' others. Eric would need to discover how to manage his behaviours in order to manage others - or he's setting himself up for a fall.

Give Encouragement: conversely, if your Eric is cautious and preoccupied with their impact on others, there is actually evidence that they may be fit for leadership. You are more likely to be perceived as a good leader if you are prone to feelings of guilt - but not shame, the difference being that guilt is accompanied by an urge to take action (rather than hide in your room). Not only that, the guilt-prone are rated as actually being better leaders in both experimental and workplace situations.

Where to go

Where indeed! Your Eric might take a moment to consider following the family way: family firms have unique features that make them perform differently and form particular cultures.

They might want to do the opposite: pack their bags and see the world. The army is one time-honoured route for this, but it's worth their considering whether they will make it past training; recent research looks at the risk factors, which are complex but throw up some ideas, such as forming clear routines, and not joining up simply due to lack of options elsewhere. They should be aware, however, that military training appears to affect personality, damping down the flourishing of agreeableness that normally accompanies the movement into adulthood.

They might want to try something random: the 'happiest place on earth', where they will get to learn about customer-delighting techniques that are getting rolled out in more and more organisations, or they might want to take a grittier job that exposes them to all walks of life: that was one of the appeals reported by sex shop workers in this article on 'dirty work' occupations

Ultimately though, evidence again and again points at the importance of getting a job that you want. Intrinsic motivation - enjoying your work - leads to better managerial performance, and for all types of workers being involved with work that interests you leads to better performance, much more so than traditionally understood. Even training outcomes are influenced by being in your job of choice.

Finally, if your Eric is at a waypoint in later life and trying to figure out directions, he could do worse than consider his alternative self: who he could have been had he made other decisions. This seems a promising way to inform life decisions and crystallise understanding about your own strengths and weaknesses.

Fourth day of Christmas digested: Datahead Devani

Datahead Devani is the person in your life who is technical and loves it. Whether it be gadgets and the internet or science and facts, she loves to get involved. Here are some ways to help her help her organisation,

Give her tips on the impact of their organisation's communication tools. Perhaps she could check out this research examining telephone waiting time factors, and see whether their current set-up is solid? How about internet policy? Evidence suggests that 'cyber-loafing' peaks at certain periods, especially when people aren't getting enough sleep. One example is after the switch to summer time, as people struggle to adjust to the new hours. Perhaps smart teams might elect to employ one of the various programs that limits internet access during these 'risk periods'?

Introduce her to Occupational Psychology. Ok, we're biased here! But research suggests that the work done in our field is pretty solid; for example, experimental work tends to hold up well when examined in real-world situations. We can be proud of the scientific rigour that tends to exist underneath our work, and Devani can too. As we've documented, assessment tests have become more sophisticated and powerful in recent years, so being the go-to person in the organisation on this front could be useful. See also the BPS' resource on psychological testing, which contains research, advice and information on accreditation in the UK.

A gift? A camera. This lovely piece of research outlines the ways in which visual research in organisations democratises understanding, uncovers blind spots and gives a fuller understanding of how things are done, and could be done. Just ask her to turn off that superfluous digital 'click' sound while she's at it - she might actually be savvy enough to find it buried in the Settings somewhere.

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