Is it better to enter negotiations with a team? It depends on your culture

Research suggests that negotiating parties tend to benefit when fielding a team rather than an individual. Generally, more heads are better than one, providing more ideas, helping to synthesise new information, correct each others biases and keep each other on target. Evidence suggests that even a single team operating in a negotiation (versus a solo counterpart) is sufficient to produce outcomes better for both parties. However, a research team led by Michele Gelfand has explored how universal this finding is, and provides data that suggests a different pattern in certain cultural contexts.

The research was conducted at universities in the United States and Taiwan. In each location, students (144 US, 100 Taiwanese) were recruited into a standard negotiation task, where parties are asked to decide how a new business will be run by finding agreement on four different factors. Each factor had various possible outcomes that led to different points awarded to the two parties, who sought to maximise this. Each negotiation was either between two pairs of negotiators, or between two single negotiators.

In the US sample, negotiations involving teams reached as positive outcomes as those helmed by individuals. (Note that teams didn't actually do better, as previous research would have suggested. The researchers suggest the anomaly may have occurred because the four-factor task was not cognitively demanding enough to benefit from many heads). But in the Taiwanese sample, worse collective outcomes were reached when groups were negotiating rather than individuals. The paper also presents an initial sample with smaller sample sizes that bears out this finding: specifically for Taiwanese negotiators, teams performed worse.

Neither national culture nor type of negotiation alone influenced performance, but their interaction did. Why? Gelfand's team decided to conduct this research because one effect of groups is norm amplification: a greater likelihood of behaving in line with your culture. This can be in sync with your goals or in tension with them. The researchers believed that individualistic norms found in the US encourage fighting for your corner and thus help push negotiations into hard but fruitful places. But collectivist norms that prize harmony and agreement may mean negotiations are handled tentatively and non-optimally; this is a component of Taiwanese culture. After the negotiation, all participants identified via a questionnaire how much they believed group harmony was important. Analysis showed that in the team conditions, was what was driving the performance difference between US and Taiwanese students was the higher harmony emphasis in the Taiwanese negotiations.

This research is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it helps us tease out the various effects teams have on negotiations. here raising the importance of norm amplification. It may be for instance that negotiations between friends also evoke a harmony norm, regardless of nationality, making teamwork possibly unwise. Secondly, this work illustrates 'the value of shifting the focus from static cultural differences to cultural dynamics'. By looking at behaviour across contexts, we arrive at a richer understanding of how cultures differ.

Michele J. Gelfand, Jeanne Brett, Brian C. Gunia, Lynn Imai, Tsai-Jung Huang, & Bi-Fen Hsu (2013). Toward a Culture-by-Context Perspective on Negotiation: Negotiating Teams in the United States and Taiwan Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (3), 504-513 DOI: 10.1037/a0031908

Women leaders don't get a free pass for acting tentatively - but men do

Women seeking leadership have historically been hampered by stereotypical beliefs that they don't - and shouldn't - behave actively, confidently, with agency. Leaders need to be agentic, shaping an organisation toward a desired vision. But traditional gender roles demand that women take a more nurturing, passive stance, and when they do not, as copious research from the 1980s and 1990s found, they are met with disapproval.

However, society has changed over the decades, to the extent that agency in female leaders may no longer be an impediment. However, researchers Renata Bongiorno, Paul Bain and Barbara David suspected that the lifting of this barrier may reveal another, more subtle one for women leaders: that non-agentic behaviour is unfairly punished.

Why might this be? Real-life demonstrations that women can demonstrate agentic behaviour enter into culture (and are propagated through media and narratives) and change baseline beliefs. But these successes may be considered curious exceptions, with the associative link between 'leader' and 'male' still largely intact. This means that women may be considered as possible leaders, but scrutinised much more carefully for any evidence of non-leadership behaviour - scrutiny that men, as 'leaders-in-waiting' - may escape. There already exists some evidence that men have a freer hand in leadership - they receive positive endorsements for a wider range of leadership styles than female leaders do.

Bongiorno and her colleagues' first study presented students with manuscripts that detailed a speech on action on climate change. In a first condition the speech was designed to be assertive, with unapologetic speech and italicised components to denote emphasis. The other was tentative, containing hedges, hesitations and qualifiers. The speech was attributed to a male or female politician, who participants then rated in terms of likeability, perceived influence and agency. After controlling for communality (a measure of the speaker's warmth and sensitivity), the sample of 167 partcipants rated the male politician's likeability and influence the same regardless of the agency of his speech. But the female politician was rated more poorly on both measures when her speech was tentative rather than assertive. When acting assertively, the male and female leaders were rated the same way, but when the male example became tentative, he received a free pass that his female counterpart didn't.

A second study replicated this using audio speeches and a topic more personally relevant to their student sample, tuition fees. The only difference in findings was that in this case the assertive female leader was rated as even more likeable than the male one. My one nit to pick with this is that  having the audio produced by four different actors (two men, two women) introduces a lot of variance. Perhaps the agentic and non-agentic women have vocal attributes that really set them apart in terms of likeability, whereas the men were much of a muchness.

As the authors note, this is a subtle form of prejudice. It is legitimate to hold your leaders to certain standards of agency - it is part of the job. But observers – both men and women in this study – are far more forgiving of men when their behaviours deviate from this. We still need to understand why, or the many whys: there may be unfairly high expectations that women demonstrate 'female capability', whereas others may use this as a safe outlet to express sexism. And while leadership is still dominated by men, the curiosity factor of female leadership may draw attention and disproportionate scrutiny. It's on us to be aware that successful leaders can operate in many different ways, whether they are male or female. 

Bongiorno R, Bain PG, & David B (2013). If you're going to be a leader, at least act like it! Prejudice towards women who are tentative in leader roles. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 23509967

When is it better to be a directive or an empowering leader?

In its early existence, a team led with a clear, directive approach outperforms one with a leader who is hands-off and emphasises empowerment. Over time, however, the empowered team forges insights and patterns of working that lead it to improve performance at a higher rate than directed teams. This is the finding from a new article by Natalia Lorinkova, Matthew Pearsall, and Henry Sims Jr, that aims to help solve the uncertainties about which leadership style is better. For them, the question is not which, but when.

The researchers investigated this issue using a computer strategy task undertaken by 60 5-person teams, each composed of undergraduates. Team members had distinct roles and had to coordinate actions to verify the accuracy of intel produced by Intelligence players to identify 'sweet spots' where their surveillance was highly accurate, traverse the battlefield safely and destroy enemies. My criticism of this study is that this kind of activity is very far from typical workplace activity, and the time-scales - one 3-hour session - out of proportion from the normal maturation of a work team. With that out of the way, the methodology is interesting, and the results notable.

The study required teams to be led by directive or empowering leaders. The directive style involves clear directions, explicit feedback, and minimises ambiguity on what you are supposed to do, similar to the 'tough leadership style'. An empowering style encourages followers to take ownership for tasks, and find their own norms of how to work well together. When they were recruited, participants completed measures of each style. The 30 highest scorers in directive leadership were each assigned leadership of a team, and additionally provided with pre-session training: 30 minutes including watching a clip from Apollo 13 showcasing the desired style and roleplaying out its behaviours. They were then provided with a 'cheat sheet' of advice to give, and a short speech to give at the outset of the task, that all reinforced their directive status. The other 30 teams were led by those scoring highest in empowering leadership, who received comparable training and resources.

After orientation and explanation of the task, teams completed 10 rounds of the task, with a break half-way through. The researchers predicted that the clarity of directive leadership enhances team performance within a stage of team development called 'role compilation'. Meanwhile, empoweringly-led teams use this stage to invest effort into figuring each other out, which pays off for them during a subsequent stage called 'team compilation' when the unit should be purring along. This is based on a four-stage model of team development by Kozlowski et al. (1999), but the mapping of role compilation onto rounds 1-5 and team compilation onto 6-10 seems a little arbitrary to me. Lorinkova's team do point out that risk-taking behaviour dropped between 1-5 and 6-10, suggesting they had moved to more routinised action.

Directive leaders earned higher performance in the task during rounds 1-5, but over stages 6-10 the empowered teams improved at a higher rate, leading to comparable performance by the end. The analysis confirmed several reasons behind this: the empowered groups learned to coordinate better, felt psychologically more in control, and after the study end were more accurate at characterising their colleague's capabilities and focus in a separate task. When entered into the analysis beforehand, the effect of empowered leadership could no longer be detected, suggesting that these were the routes through which empowerment was having its effect.

The authors would like to see this research conducted over longer time-scales, using set-ups more reflective of the workplace. However, this study already raises an important angle on leadership style: its impact may be profoundly tied to context, in particular the developmental stage of a team. Existing models emphasise the need for individual follower readiness for empowering leadership to work - some people may not expect nor desire ownership of tasks and the freedom to choose methods. But this research points to the dynamical processes within a team - where members stand in relation to one another and the team as a whole. The reliance on cross-sectional methodology in many leadership style studies may explain the controversy between studies: measuring at round 4 or round 9 would have produced very different conclusions about the relative benefits.

In conclusion, Lorinkova and colleagues offer a warning of taking these findings too simplistically: 'Although there may be some advantage to employing a combination of the two leadership approaches (e.g., Gratton & Erickson, 2007), our results suggest that the benefits of empowering leadership in teams tended to manifest because team members initially engaged in role identification and learning processes during the role compilation phase. Empowered teams, therefore, may not be able to reap the benefits of improved performance over time without first suffering the initial performance delays.'

Natalia M. Lorinkova, Matthew J. Pearsall, & Henry P. Sims Jr (2013). Examining the differential longitudinal performance of directive versus empowering leadership in teams Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 573-596 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0132

Further reading: 
Seibert, S. E., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. H. 2011. Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96: 981–1003.
 

Employers benefit when members don't only identify with them

Where does our work allegiance lie? At first blush, probably with the employer organisation that pays our wages and paints a vision of why we are doing what we do. We identify as National Trust people, or as part of Rummidge General Hospital. Identification with an organisation helps it meet objectives and lines employees up towards common goals, such as meeting hospital targets. But perhaps we also identify as a member of the medical profession: two identities, not one. And for in-sourced employees - 3rd party contractors working under the roof of a client company – this question is especially sharp: am I part of IT-Help Inc or Global Furniture Plc? Research suggests that people can and do answer 'both' to this question. Recent research looks at dual identification, helping us understand how it influences organisational goals.

Yen-Chun Chen, Shu-Cheng Steve Chi and Ray Friedman opted to investigate a clear example of dual identification: brand counter staff in department stores. The employees have a workplace - a Macys or Selfridges - that differs from their employer - the counter for a Levis or Fat Face. 181 participants, mostly women, from eight Taiwanese department stores completed a survey on how much they identified with their store and with their counter. A month later they reported their turnover intention and job satisfaction, and measures were taken of sales performance (using hard metrics) and customer focus (through ratings by colleagues in their team). The analysis controlled for job tenure - recent incumbents may form weaker attachments to their location - and social desirability of questionnaire responding.

As anticipated, participants identified primarily with their employer. And the stronger the better: highly identifying individuals were more satisfied, less likely to plan to leave, performed better in the job and more displayed more customer-oriented behaviour (as flagged by colleagues). But performance and customer focus were even higher when these individuals also identified strongly with their workplace, the department store.

The finding suggests that inwardly focused outcomes - whether I'm happy with the job and want to stay in it - are influenced by their identification with the employer, not the workplace. This makes sense: the employer assigns pay, establishes mission and vision, and holds the key to future prospects. The more outward aspects of the job - pleasing customers and making sales - are also tied to identification with the employer, but here the context - the workplace - matters as well. The authors suggest that workers who are aligned to their environment will operate more freely within it, finding it easier to liaise with staff on other counters and store management. This leads to easier coordination and a smoother experience for the customer - who after all, expects the parts of a store to work together for their benefit, rather than as a series of competing market vendors.

Statistically, the effect of workplace identity moderated the employer-identity benefit by just 1-2%. And when participants had low identification with their employer, workplace identity didn't matter either way. In this sample, workplace identity was definitely subservient to the employer one. But a significant moderator of a few percentage points is meaningful in this research area; over repeated interactions, small effects can add up. So if companies intend to invest efforts into aligning teams with their own organisational agenda, they should consider going the extra mile by fostering a positive dual identification. The people across the hall may be drawing their paycheck from a different account, but they make up the working environment, and it pays for your people to feel part of that.

Yen-Chun Chen, Shu-Cheng Steve Chi, & Ray Friedman (2013). Do more hats bring more benefits? Exploring the impact of dual organizational identification on work-related attitudes and performance Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/joop.12017

Further reading:
 Riketta, M., & van Dick, R. (2005). Foci of attachment in organizations: A meta-analysis comparison of the strength and correlates of work-group versus organizational commitment and identification. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 67, 490–510. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2004.06.001
 

Junior doctors squeezed by working conditions

How do junior doctors experience current working conditions? Pressures on public sector spending in many countries have put the squeeze on their health services, and this strata of the workforce - already renowned as being under pressure - seem to be feeling extra strain. This is the suggestion of a recent study that investigates the experiences of twenty junior doctors in the Irish medical system.

The participants provided their experiences through qualitative interviews with the researchers, working from the ground up to collect their perspectives and identify the common themes that emerged. Those interviewed were just about to transition into roles as clinical tutors, a hybrid role that involves both clinical practice and academic teaching of medical students. The shape of these individuals' careers to date mirrors what is typical for junior doctors: working as temporary employees on a 3-, 6-, or 12-month basis.

The first theme that emerged was one of staffing shortages. The interviewees saw shortages as contributing to longer hospital stays for patients, whose problems were not getting detected as quickly. In addition, they complained that lean workforces often meant that a senior perspective was not available as much as they would like, which would normally provide an expert viewpoint to benefit both diagnosis and the junior doctor's understanding. Because of staffing shortages, there were also fewer opportunities to take leave for training. As one interviewee remarked, 'Training isn’t the best. It’s very much ‘see one, do one, teach one’'

The next theme was how unrealistic workloads had become. Some of this was due to wider societal factors: as healthcare developments both extend lifespan and increase detection of multiple conditions, patients' problems can be more acute and involve multimorbidity (multiple diagnoses), making treatment a more complex matter. But workload issues also related to the first issue of shortages, which contributed to long hours, interrupted breaks, and pressure to complete tasks quickly: 'I have a sense of dissatisfaction with being able to give each patient on a round just 90 seconds on average.' Another interviewee noted the personal consequences of this overworking: 'When you do something wrong, not out of malice or incompetence, because you’re too tired, then you have to live with it.'

As well as these themes, interviewees reported issues with unpredictability of their work. Their schedules as well as lengthy (80-90 hour weeks) were subject to change, leading one to comment 'It is the not knowing. I have missed christenings and birthdays and let people down'. The high workloads also forced the work-home divide to become porous, with paperwork often taken home to be completed outside of 'work'. And within the hospital,  cuts meant doctors could not rely on having the needed equipment to hand, but at times had to devote time to hunting it down elsewhere.

Despite all these challenges, respondents tended to give less attention to how the conditions affected their own wellbeing, framing issues more in terms of problems for patients or the smooth running of the system. The authors reflect that this tendency to soldier on may be because doctors see their role as evaluating stress and illness in others, and so are reluctant to see themselves as the ones who may at times be in need. Previous research also suggests that doctors are reluctant to seek health care from other doctors due to embarrassment, especially for less-defined illnesses such as stress. This is despite the fact that doctors display higher levels of stress than those found in the general population.

'The challenges currently faced by junior doctors in Ireland identified within this study are likely to be illustrative of problems faced by junior doctors in many countries where government spending is decreasing and deficits are rising.' Overextension of this layer of the medical profession is bound to have consequences for patients - US figures estimate medical error contributes to 180-195,000 patient deaths annually - and also, whether they like to admit it, to the wellbeing of the junior doctors on whose shoulders so much rests.

McGowan, Yvonne, Humphries, Niamh, Burke, Helen, Conry, Mary, & Morgan, Karen (2013). Through doctors’ eyes: A qualitative study of hospital doctor perspectives on their working conditions British Journal of Health Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.12037

Further reading:
Kay, M., Mitchell, G., Clavarino, A., & Doust, J. (2008). Doctors as patients: a systematic review of doctors’ health access and the barriers they experience. British Journal of General Practice, 58 (552), 501–508. doi:10.3399/bjgp08X319486
 

Employees don't feel obliged to pay back managers who support them emotionally

The offering of emotional support from a manager at times of need is perceived very differently by managers and the recipients of that support. According to a new paper, while managers see such efforts as over-and-above their expected responsibilities, employees see it as just part of the manager's job. This clash of expectations can lead to problems.

Researchers Ginka Toegel, Martin Kilduff and N Anand drew their data through interviews and network analysis of staff at a recruitment agency. The network analysis asked the 67 employees to detail who they relied on when experiencing negative emotions. Those lower in the company hierarchy tended to turn to more senior colleagues for emotional support when stressed, angry or fatigued. There was little traffic in the other direction, as senior staff typically sought support from peers rather than subordinates. (We've covered leadership responses to challenges here.)

Interview data suggested that as well as responding to direct requests for support, managers often actively scanned their environment for brewing issues, and engaged with subordinates to offer venues to discuss emotional issues. And the ways in which managers helped ranged from simple listen-and-advice to more involved interventions, such as reframing and transforming the employees perspective.

What are the managerial motivations that lie behind such patterns of helping behaviour? Some managers expressed a fairly-hard nosed attitude: 'I don’t want that people leave, or I don’t want them to be really low or down at work, because this will have negative impact on me.' These individuals expected their efforts to pay back in terms of renewed commitment to the team. Other managers were more pro-social, acting because they are interested in people and concerned for their feelings. Still, they also expected reciprocity in terms of warmth and appreciation for their efforts. As one manager expressed, 'what I am doing [by way of emotion help] is over and above my responsibilities as a manager', and this view emerged as a consistent theme across the 14 managers interviewed: emotional support is an extra-role activity.

But employees saw things differently. 'If it is a work-related emotional problem, then it is my manager’s job to support me.' From their perspective, emotional support is simply a feature of the managers job, and saw little or no obligation to reciprocate. Employees did sometimes perceive that a manager was doing an excellent job in emotional support and consequently saw them as exceptional leaders, attributing them experience, wisdom and even referring to them as father- and mother-figures. The authors speculate whether putting the manager into such roles is a way to remove the need to actively reciprocate, just as children are rarely expected to match the efforts of their parents. While this can be flattering to a manager, the lack of a quid pro quo led to some managers feeling 'let down and disappointed', such as when an employee supported through a difficult episode went on to abruptly quit the company for a better position.

Neither the employee nor manager is wrong, but this study suggests that they can commonly be on different pages with regard to the role of emotional support. Being a 'toxin handler' of other people's negative emotions can be challenging and have knock-on effects for those who intervene. The authors conclude that 'our model suggests the paradox that helping behavior designed to ameliorate negative emotions may itself generate negative emotions on the part of managers waiting in vain for employees to repay their kindness with personal loyalty.'

Toegel, G., Kilduff, M., & Anand, N. (2012). Emotion Helping by Managers: An Emergent Understanding of Discrepant Role Expectations and Outcomes Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 334-357 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0512

Further reading:
Elfenbein, H. A. 2007. Emotion in organizations. In J. P. Walsh & A. P. Brief (Eds.), Academy of Management annals, vol. 1: 315–386. New York: Erlbaum.
 

Starting negative may help you be creative

Positive emotion has long been recognised as facilitating creativity, through broadening thinking and allowing exploratory mental wandering. Conversely, high negative emotion tends to lead to narrow focus on salient, possibly threatening environmental features (such as an impending deadline or difficult conversation), which has lead many to discount it as an impediment to creativity. But recent research suggests that prior states of negative emotion can improve subsequent creative activity.

The paper, by Ronald Bledow, Kathrin Rosing and Michael Frese, does not contest the idea that positive emotions crucially support creativity: what they propose is that positivity rising over time while negativity descends over time may offer better conditions than high positivity coupled with an absence of negative affect. They provide two reasons for this.

Firstly, the narrow, alert focus on issues can be useful by focusing on things that are in need of a solution and spurring motivation to act on these; previous research does suggest that negative emotion can lead to more persistence in problem solving. Once this focus has been set, allowing the negative emotions to slide away and positive emotions to explore the possibility space is a good recipe for getting to innovative solutions. The first study investigated this by asking 102 participants in creative roles to document their affect at the start and end of each day for a week, independently rating positive (excited, alert, inspired) and negative (distressed, hostile, guilty) emotional terms. Positive affect at the end of the day predicted how much creativity the participant reported in that day, but that relationship was significantly stronger when start-of-day negative affect was higher.

In a second, experimental study, Bledow's team focused solely on another advantage of starting in a negative mood, that it is specifically a decrease in negative mood that opens up associative networks of memory, allowing wider associations. The 80 participants in this study completed a brainstorming task after writing an autobiographical essay about a positive event. Before either, all participants wrote an initial autobiographical essay, and those who were tasked with articulating an unpleasant instead of a neutral experience ultimately performed better the brainstorming task, producing more varied and unique ideas. This happened even though the negative state had no function in focusing their attention on anything related to the creative task, which suggests the better performance was due to entering a more suitable cognitive mode.

Further research is needed on these dynamic relationships between different types of affect, in particular to examine more closely how fluctuations on a shorter timescale may impact work goals. But this paper suggests that treating positive affect as the wellspring of creativity may perversely be itself an example of overly narrow focus. Individuals who routinely dismiss negative thoughts to stay in their happy place may wish to dwell a little longer, as a station on the way to their creative destinations.

Bledow, R., Rosing, K., & Frese, M. (2012). A Dynamic Perspective on Affect and Creativity Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 432-450 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0894

Further reading:
Baas, M., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Nijstad, B. A. 2008. A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research: Hedonic tone, activation, or regulatory focus? Psychological Bulletin, 134: 779 – 806.