Workplace psychopathy: the knowns and unknowns

Workplace psychopathy was an obscure, unknown issue prior to the mid-1990s, but hundreds of popular accounts have been published since then. A measured review by Sarah Francis Smith and Scott Lilienfield gets to the heart of what we really know about the phenomenon. There is a lot to cover so we're publishing about it in two posts.

Psychopathy? It's complicated

From the off, the authors raise how complicated the issue is. Many studies rely on psychopathy and outcome data from single sources, leaving open the possibility of both rater bias - the manager whose performance and 'psychopathic tendencies' are rated by the same hypercritical individual - and halo effects, where a rater sees their organisation as ethical because their boss is so personally pleasant. Where possible I've flagged this as a monomethod issue.

Moreover, psychopathy is measured and defined in many ways, using approaches that are variously clinical or occupational. One durable distinction is between primary psychopathy - the emotional and personality traits of an individual - and secondary psychopathy, concerned with behaviours. The primary are arguably key, as a restrained psychopath can choose to refrain from unproductive behaviours.

How common in business and in leaders?

A commonly cited figure of 3% prevalence in managers versus 1% in the general population is based on a single study, so is there other evidence out there to corroborate higher psychopathy in business? Yes, but it's still tentative.

One study compared a small executive sample to larger psychiatric and forensic populations, and did indeed find the executives scored higher on specific scales that were argued to relate to psychopathy. However, the scales were designed to measure other traits like narcissism, not psychopathy per se, using a measure that was not well-validated. Another study reported that commerce majors showed higher psychopathic traits, but not behaviours, than other undergraduates.

Perhaps the clearest support comes from Babiak et al's (2010) finding that psychopathic traits are higher within a corporate sample relative to community controls, and that high scorers tended to have higher executive positions.

So psychopathy may be more common in business and even leadership, although we don't yet have comprehensive indications of how much. But does it matter?

We'll find out tomorrow.
Update: see part two here.

Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 204-218 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007

Highly extraverted sales people perform more poorly

What sales manager wouldn't hire extraverts? They tend to be comfortable in interactions, naturally display enthusiasm and confidence for their own ideas, and can be firm and persistent when they meet with resistance to their agenda. Scrutinise many sales forces and you'll probably spot this reasoning at work.

Yet research finds weak and sometimes inconsistent relationships between sales performance and extraversion, with three meta-analyses finding the summed effects to amount to .07 - a non-significant finding. A new study by Adam Grant from the Wharton School, Pennsylvania, suggests that the sweet spot for sales performance might instead be balanced between extraversion and introversion.

Grant looked at week-on-week sales performance (revenue earned) for 340 outbound sales executives over three months. All completed a big-five personality inventory beforehand, comprising extraversion along with the other four primary personality dimensions; the inventory required them to rate their agreement with various items using a seven-point Likert scale. Regression analysis on the data revealed no linear relationship between extraversion and sales performance, instead finding a quadratic effect. Specifically, performance rose with extraversion until a peak at 4.5, well before the maximum of seven. From this point, performance actually decreased.

In hard numbers, the performers at the peak made on average $151 per hour, versus $127 for those whose extraversion was a standard deviation below, and a more meagre $115 for those a standard deviation above. Grant's analysis confirmed that the findings were not being driven by a confound from other personality factors, for instance a toxic combination of low agreeableness and high extraversion which might invite conflicts.

Why might those falling more towards the middle of the scale perform better? Grant dubs these 'ambiverts' and suggests that they are more likely to engage in give and take with clients, falling back to listening as introverts tend to, but then being willing to act and engage. Meanwhile, the strongly extraverted may fall into a range of traps - the dark underbelly of their strengths - by dominating others, projecting overconfidence, and sending obvious 'influence' signals that may lead to prospective customers raising their defences.

Grant concludes that organisations may want to look harder at the relationship between personality and sales performance to guide recruitment strategies, and that they may 'benefit from training highly extraverted salespeople to model some of the quiet, reserved tendencies of their more introverted peers'.

 
Grant, A. (2013). Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463706


Further reading:

Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A. (2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next? International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9–30. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2389.00160

ADHD at work: helping others over getting the task done?

New research looking at how ADHD affects performance at work. The condition has a high prevalance, with 4.4% of American adults estimated to have it, and a body of research suggests that it can influence work outcomes like productivity, work conflict and turnover. Jonathon Halbesleben, Anthony Wheeler, and Kristen Shanine have just published research suggesting that ADHD may have consequences via two routes: encouraging behaviours that are not pointed at intended goals, and eroding the benefits that workers normally experience when they are in an engaged state.

The research applied its investigations to three samples of slightly different demographics, each numbering hundreds of participants (between 170 and 257). Samples were drawn by different methods and measured on two occasions six months apart using slightly different tools ; this variance made it possible to internally replicate any findings and make them more generalisable. Job performance was partitioned into multiple factors: performance of work tasks, and frequency of discretionary organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) towards either the organisation or other individuals. In the second and third sample, participants' performance was also rated by their coworkers or supervisors, using the same task/OCB measures. ADHD was measured throughout using a standard self-report scale, and used to create three group of low, moderate and high ADHD risk, with about 10% being in the latter across samples, and the rest evenly split between low and moderate. Participants reported work engagement using a scale capturing vigor, dedication, and absorption.

Replicating previous work, ADHD was negatively associated with job performance on all measures in all samples, with the exception of sample two's self-reported task performance. Engagement was shown to be significantly related to performance within all the samples, but greater ADHD diminished the relationship: in fact, for the high ADHD group the relationship was not significantly different from zero. Halbesleben team had predicted this pattern: whereas engagement  normally provides excess work-related resources that can be channeled towards work outcomes, the problems that people with ADHD report in prioritisation and completion of tasks means that they struggle to make the most of these extra resources.

If ADHD leads to attention-grabbing features of the environment triggering behaviours that crowd out goal-directed ones, then we might be able to see this in the types of performance that are more affected. The researchers predicted that as OCBs are often themselves triggered by environmental events, such as a colleague asking for help, they would do fairly well - at the expense of task performance. When these discretionary behaviours involve helping an individual, the short-term incentives, like gratitude or social pressure, can be particularly acute.

The self-report data didn't show this pattern. However, coworkers and supervisor ratings (from samples two and three) showed a stronger negative relationship between ADHD and task performance than between ADHD and OCBs. As the researchers note, 'whereas others view those with ADHD as diverting their attention toward less task-relevant behaviors, the employees themselves do not view themselves as doing the same.'

The paper suggests some clearer mechanisms of how ADHD may influence work performance, and in doing so helps us develop our ideas about how to support people with this condition. Previous ideas, such as time management tools, quieter work areas and reduced clutter (physical and on our computer homescreen) could all minimise the impediments between the state of engagement and productivity. Meanwhile, we can recognise that the possible tendency for people with ADHD to be more likely to put energies into positive discretionary behaviours - similar to research on impulsivity we've reported on - is both a potential organisational asset, but also something that we should be careful not to exploit, as it may be a barrier to effective performance on mandated tasks.

Halbesleben, J., Wheeler, A., & Shanine, K. (2013). The moderating role of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the work engagement–performance process. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18 (2), 132-143 DOI: 10.1037/a0031978

Further reading:

Kessler, R. C., Adler, L., Ames, M., Barkley, R. A., Birnbaum, H., Greenberg, P., . . . Ustün, T. B. (2005). The prevalence and effects of adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder on work performance in a nationally representative sample of workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 47, 565–572. doi:10.1097/01.jom.0000166863.33541.39
 

'Figuring out what they're after': a common thread between assessment performance and job performance?

A while back we shared a review of the Ability To Identify Criteria (ATIC), suggesting that difference in how people perform on a selection process like an interview is due partly how good they are at figuring out what the process wants to hear. The article suggested that this may not be entirely bad, as ATIC appears to have a role in job performance as well. Now the authors have published empirical work looking closer at this issue. Their data suggests that figuring out situational demands may have a very substantial hand in both selection and job performance, and may even be the major link between the two.

First author Anne Jansen and colleagues (principally from University of Zürich) recruited 124 participants into a simulated assessment process, pitched as a way to give them experience of job selection. Participants were incentivised to do well, with the top two candidates each day financially rewarded, and had to pay a small fee to enter the process. This encouraged motivated participation that was more in line with real selection experiences. Participants were informed of the job description ahead of time, and on assessment day, turned up in groups of 12 to undertake interviews, a cognitive test, presentations and group discussions, observed by multiple assessors (Occupational Psychology MSc students).

After each exercise, participants were asked to document their hunch of what dimensions it was trying to measure; this was compared to answers given by the assessors beforehand, with close matches leading to higher situational demand/ATIC scores. No such information was explicitly provided (otherwise ATIC becomes redundant) so participants had to rely on indirect cues, such as the job descriptions, reading between the lines of instructions, being sensitive to what assessors seemed to be attuned to. In addition, each participant gave authorisation for their real-work supervisors to be contacted online to give feedback on their real job performance; in total, 107 responded.

Overall assessment centre scores correlated with job performance, with a relationship of .21. Both AC scores and job performance also correlated with the ATIC scores for participants: someone who was savvy in figuring out what the AC asked of them did better in the AC, and also did better in the workplace. Jansen's team constructed a statistical model in which cognitive ability fed ATIC, which itself strongly contributed to performance on assessments and in the workplace. Once all of these factors were accounted for, assessment performance itself was no predictor of workplace performance. This suggests, at the least, that ATIC and the factors that sit behind it are a substantial underpinning of how assessments adequately predict workplace performance.

One way to look at this is the growing identification of 'just another factor': IQ, EI, resilience, practical intelligence - that researchers argue counts in the workplace. But actually, this line of research advocates a shift in perspective. It asks us to accept that performance doesn't just depend on the resources you bring to the job, but to your perception of what the job is. This interactionist perspective is less concerned with raw capability and more about orientation. And it raises new considerations: in jobs where orientation is clear-cut - four duties, get on with it - shouldn't we be minimising it in selection? Whereas at the other extreme, could applicants for jobs with high ambiguity be tasked with finding their own way through the application process?

Jansen A, Melchers KG, Lievens F, Kleinmann M, Brändli M, Fraefel L, & König CJ (2013). Situation assessment as an ignored factor in the behavioral consistency paradigm underlying the validity of personnel selection procedures. The Journal of applied psychology, 98 (2), 326-41 PMID: 23244223

Further reading: The original review is

Kleinmann, M., Ingold, P., Lievens, F., Jansen, A., Melchers, K., & Konig, C. (2011). A different look at why selection procedures work: The role of candidates' ability to identify criteria Organizational Psychology Review, 1 (2), 128-146 DOI: 10.1177/2041386610387000

Some of us are more suited to productive conflict

If you're interested in how team conflict can be beneficial, here's more research on the issue from Bret Bradley and colleagues, this time focusing on team member personality. Although we know that certain personality traits affect whether conflict occurs - for instance, less agreeable people are more likely to find themselves in a clash - this research investigated what matters when it occurs.

Bradley and colleagues figured that two traits might be critical. People more open to experience are more likely to raise issues and enjoy frank discussion, but are also willing to compromise and be flexible in terms of how they are prepared to act in the future. Similarly, emotionally stable people tend not to anxiously skirt issues but are willing to go to others to voice problems directly, and are more likely to contribute to positive emotional states within the team, regarding other members positively. We might expect such people to be involved in transparent and resolvable conflicts.

As with the previous work, the study drew on real academic performance of undergraduate business students, working in 117 teams with an average of five members apiece. Each team worked interdependently for 13 weeks, culminating in a final term project, which was evaluated to give information about team performance. Participants completed a questionnaire on personality in week four and another on task conflict in week ten. A week four exam was used to control for levels of content knowledge within the group.

The results of the study was firm and striking. Teams who had a high average openness to experience actively benefited from high task conflict. But those low in this area benefited from low task conflict. In fact, the high-high group and the low-low group had a comparable level of performance. Exactly the same pattern was found with emotional stability; meanwhile, none of the other Big 5 personality traits produced such effects.

The authors conclude that both openness to experience and emotional stability are important features of teams that get involved with conflict. The study poses another point: while conflict may be functional for some groups, others thrive in low-conflict conditions. This would explain the  near-zero relationship between the two observed from meta-analysis, and suggest that we should be cautious of maxims such as 'a little conflict is good for you'. On the basis of this study, it seems this would depend on who you are, and who your colleagues are, too.

Bradley, B., Klotz, A., Postlethwaite, B., & Brown, K. (2013). Ready to rumble: How team personality composition and task conflict interact to improve performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (2), 385-392 DOI: 10.1037/a0029845
 
Further reading:

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

Forcing a smile at work? Mindfulness can help

Mindfulness is a way of operating that involves paying attention to events in a nonjudgmental way, and psychological research is corroborating its benefits, reported for millennia in other fields of knowledge.  A new paper by Ute Hülsheger and her colleagues takes a neat angle by focusing on one mechanism through which mindfulness might act: reducing reliance on an unproductive emotion regulation strategy, surface acting. As we've discussed before, surface acting involves adjusting or controlling your emotional expression in response to a felt emotion. When you put on a smile and force a calm voice in response to a querulous customer, that's surface acting. It's a common strategy, but research shows it to be psychologically draining, leading to emotional exhaustion and burnout.

Hülsheger's team predicted that mindfulness would decrease the need to surface act, by depersonalising the negative elements of the experience and interrupting automatic thought processes that lead first to undesired physiological responses and then trigger counterreactions (such as surface acting). To investigate this, they recruited 219 Dutch and Dutch-language Belgians into a diary study in which they were asked to record their experiences after work and prior to going to bed on five consecutive days.

After work, participants recorded their daily levels of mindfulness - sample items "Today I found myself doing things without paying attention", and their daily extent of surface acting - "Today I pretended to have emotions that I did not really have". Job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion, the outcome measures of interest, were taken separately before bed to avoid common method bias, where participants' ratings of some items contaminate ratings of others recorded in the same sitting.

The study used a fairly sophisticated statistical method called multilevel structural equation modelling. Effectively this means that the data on daily mindfulness can be distinguished into what is consistent for the individual, their 'mean mindfulness', and daily variations from this mean. The team found that both mean and daily mindfulness was associated with lower surface acting, and this in turn with less emotional exhaustion and more job satisfaction.

It could be that the causality runs in reverse to what Hülsheger's team proposed; perhaps we're simply more mindful on days we happen to do without surface acting. To investigate this a second study introduced experimental conditions, with 64 participants receiving ten days of mindfulness training and a further 42 doing without. The training was self-managed with instruction from written and audio materials, and involved common mindfulness techniques such as body scanning to encourage bodily awareness, as well as guided meditations.

The team found that the mindfulness group had significantly higher daily mindfulness ratings, as you would expect, and members of this group experienced less exhaustion and higher job satisfaction. The data suggested that for job satisfaction this effect was again mediated by the reduced surface acting seen in the mindfulness group. However this mediation wasn't observed for emotional exhaustion, possibly on account of lower power due to the smaller samples used.

The paper contributes to the growing body of research on the impact of mindfulness on workplace variables, and I find it a helpful one in refining our understanding. Mindfulness is used to refer to a range of phenomena - a trainable activity, a behavioural tendency, and a particular state - all of which are together examined in these studies. This is helpful in joining the dots and suggesting that the different phenomena do appear to be pointing at the same thing. This helps us build a picture: we are all more or less predisposed to mindful awareness, with our actual access to this state fluctuating day-by-day (around 38% of the variance was within-person) and influenced by even a short period of training.

Hülsheger, U., Alberts, H., Feinholdt, A., & Lang, J. (2013). Benefits of mindfulness at work: The role of mindfulness in emotion regulation, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (2), 310-325 DOI: 10.1037/a0031313

Further reading:

Brown, KW, Ryan, RM, Creswell, JD (2007). Mindfulness: Theoretical Foundations and Evidence for its Salutary Effects. Psychological Inquiry, 18 (4) DOI:10.1080/10478400701598298 
pdf freely available here

Expressing your proactive potential depends on attachment style

Employees who engage in proactive behaviours tend to be an asset to the workplace; they're less phased by obstacles, more likely to pursue new opportunities, and take more efforts to master their environment. While organisations have a role in cultivating proactivity, so do our personal traits. However, a recent paper by Chia-huei Wu and Sharon Parker suggests that this influence itself depends upon our 'attachment style', a common term in therapeutic fields and finding wider application elsewhere. Essentially, unleashing our proactive potential depends on how we relate to those around us.

In this four-month study, 58 Taiwanese undergraduate students recorded their volume of proactive behaviours on a monthly basis, together with how curious and future oriented they had felt that month, and made a 'core-self evaluation' (CSE) of how able and capable they saw themselves during that time. All three factors have been demonstrated to influence proactive behaviours. At the start of the study, each participant also completed an attachment questionnaire and a measure of proactive personality, this to control for large effects that might swamp all other factors.

Wu and Parker were specifically interested in within-subject variations, such as whether an individual acts more proactively during months when their curiosity was aroused, CSE high, or future orientation more pronounced. Analysis revealed the presence of each of these influences, but the CSE and future orientation effects were mediated by participant's attachment style, specifically a form of attachment called relationship anxiety involving a fear of being unloved and perceiving one's worth through the eyes of others.

Relationship anxiety reduced the influence of CSE on that month's proactive behaviour; for such individuals, their own evaluations of current capability aren't really enough to give them confidence that they can act. Yet for these individuals the link between future orientation and proactive behaviour was even stronger than usual. This finding was unpredicted, and Wu and Parker don't discuss it extensively. I might speculate that the insecure quality of this attachment encourages individuals to act on the future when they put it in focus, to quell anxieties and get their house in order. But it's a speculation, nothing more.

This study suggests that for individuals high in relationship anxiety, higher states of CSE may not translate into proactive behaviour. So efforts at work to build capability may not have the desired effects with this group. What may be more beneficial is a more socially oriented approach: "having positive and reliable social relationships with others, such as supportive mentors or colleagues, will alleviate their worries about loss", reducing their degree of anxiety and reliance on this attachment style.  As an additional benefit, such relationships may also strengthen their self-evaluations, further helping these people make their mark in the workplace.

Wu, C., & Parker, S. (2012). The role of attachment styles in shaping proactive behaviour: An intra-individual analysis Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (3), 523-530 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02048.x

Further reading:

Fuller, J. B., & Marler, L. E. (2009). Change driven by nature: A meta-analytic review of the proactive personality literature. Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 75, 329–345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2009.05.008,