How do you avoid your problems? Different strategies, different outcomes

Is it a good idea to disengage from things that stress you?  In occupational psychology, it it seems to depend on who you ask. The work coping literature describes Avoidance Coping as a generally counter-productive strategy. Yet literature in the field of work recovery has shown that taking steps to detach from stress can be helpful and health. To dig deeper, Bonnie Cheng and Julie McCarthy have published a study looking at how disengagement affects the negative impact of inter-role conflict, such as when work commitments hollow out home life. By unpacking avoidance coping, they find a way to make sense of the conflicting findings.

The study investigated 178 university students with a history of employment over the previous 12 months. Participants completed surveys measuring biographical and behavioural information, together with measures of how much conflict occurred between not only work and family life, but scholastic demands as well. Taking a steer from recent models, Cheng and McCarthy predicted that when work interferes with family life, it's work satisfaction that should fall, as we perceive the problem to lie with the interfering domain. Satisfaction surveys taken a month later generally bore this out, but what's interesting is how these effects were influenced by the use of  behaviours that ordinarily are lumped together as avoidance coping.

Instead, avoidance behaviours were split into two groupings, with behaviours like 'I refuse to think about it too much' labelled cognitive avoidance, and others - such as  'I hope a miracle will happen' – representing escape avoidance. The data showed that the drop in school satisfaction when school conflicted with other domains was amplified by escape avoidance, but dampened by cognitive avoidance. Similarly, work and family conflict only eroded satisfaction when escape avoidance was high. This was in line with the authors's predictions: cognitive avoidance resembles psychological detachment and implies low levels of rumination, whereas the fanciful thinking of escape avoidance distorts reality and may drain resources that could otherwise be invested in improving conditions. It's worth noting that the study also measured psychological detachment separately, but was involved in no effects besides low detachment interacting cognitive avoidance to make work conflicts even more punishing. This may be a methodological effect or may reflect how psychological detachment is framed as a short-term tactic - detaching for a while this afternoon - whereas coping strategies are more of an abiding disposition.

This research takes a knife to avoidance coping, and unearths two constructs that actually stand against each other. Cognitive avoidance is  a case of taking agency over the contents of your mind rather than letting it be annexed by ruminative thoughts, known to exacerbate psychological problems. Escape avoidance casts agency aside, letting unchecked desires clog up mental territory, instead of examining them and when necessary putting them to rest.


Bonnie Hayden Cheng, & Julie M. McCarthy (2013). Managing Work, Family, and School Roles: Disengagement Strategies Can Help and Hinder Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18 (3), 241-251 DOI: 10.1037/a0032507

Further reading:

Thompson, C. A., Poelmans, S. A. Y., Allen, T. D., & Andreassi, J. K. (2007). On the importance of coping: A model and new directions for research on work and family. In P. L. Perrewé & D. C. Ganster (Eds.), Exploring the work and non-work interface: Research in occupational stress and well-being (Vol. 6, pp. 73–113). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi:10.1016/S1479-3555(06)06003-3

How do we get the science of occupational psychology right?

How trustworthy is the scientific literature about psychology in the workplace? In a recent position piece, Sven Kepes and Michael McDaniel note that higher-profile controversies over social priming, practical intelligence, and a range of social psychology effects may reflect wider credibility issues in psychology, including in our neck of the woods, occupational or industrial-organisational (I-O) psychology.

Their case begins with the fact that hypotheses in psychology articles, including I-O ones, are far more likely to be confirmed than rejected, in even higher proportion than that already found within the sciences, and getting higher over time. Why? Perhaps research questions are getting easier to investigate and predict, but a likely factor is the competitive climate of academic journals that is increasingly hungry for significant findings and 'strong theoretical contributions'.

The authors suggest researchers are armed with 'substantial methodological flexibility' that allows them to reach towards the sought-after result. Techniques include collecting data until a significant finding is found, and then stopping; including many similar variables in the design, in the hope that one will deliver; or simply retrofitting hypotheses to whatever pattern of findings the study threw out. As more positive results come out, theories become hard to disprove, especially as a single null result rarely dismisses a positive finding: 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.  Both authors published analyses last year suggesting that a number of I-O meta-analyses were likely to have suffered from publication bias behaviours.

The article's recommendations tally with those more generally made for psychology, but it's worth summarising some of these:

• An I-O research registry where researchers submit their study plans
• A two-step approval process for articles, with the initial approval based on study methodology before data is even collected; this opens the door for more publication of (eventual) null results
• Submission of raw data and syntax of analysis process, allowing verification by peers and reducing temptation to massage data
• More journal space put aside for null results and replication studies
• More attention to methodological factors in journals, for example by giving space to re-analysis without outliers or co-variates present

These proposals, and others like them, are the subject of vigorous debate at the moment - see the critique of research registries that Prof Sophie Scott has articulated (with many others behind her), and the various commentaries published following the current article, which we may visit in a later post.

Publications such as the Digests also have a role to play. This year the Occupational Digest reviewed how it could do more to support solid science, not just the sexy stuff: this lead to our Further reading links and increasing coverage of reviews and meta-analyses.

Are we getting the balance right? We'd love to hear what you think.

Kepes, Sven, & McDaniel, Michael A. (2013). How trustworthy is the scientific literature in I-O psychology? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 6 (3), 252-268 DOI: 10.1111/iops.12045


Further reading (including review of meta-analyses)

Kepes, S., Banks, G., & Oh, I.-S. (2012b). Avoiding bias in publication bias research: The value of “null” findings. Journal of Business and Psychology, 1-21. DOI: 10.1007/s10869-012-9279-0
 

The supposed benefits of open-plan offices do not outweigh the costs

(This post is courtesy of Christian Jarrett at the Research Digest, and is also found at that site.)

The worlds of business, office design and psychology really need to get their heads together. Large open-plan offices have become the norm across modern cities despite a sizeable literature documenting the disadvantages, including increased distraction and diminished worker satisfaction.

Open-plan offices are favoured by companies largely because of economic factors - more employees can be housed in a smaller space. But there are also supposed communication benefits. The idea is that open spaces foster more communication between staff and boost community spirit. A new study based on a survey of over 42,000 US office workers in 303 office buildings finds no evidence to support this supposition whatever.

Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear analysed the workers' answers to the industry standard "Post-occupancy Evaluation" that asks them to rate their satisfaction with seven aspects of their office environment including: temperature, lighting, privacy and ease of interaction, plus it asks about their overall satisfaction with their personal workspace. Two thirds of the surveyed workers were based in open-plan offices (with or without partial partitions); a quarter had private offices; and a small fraction shared a single room with co-workers.

Overall, workers in private offices were the most satisfied with their workspace. Workers in open-plan offices expressed strong dissatisfaction with sound privacy, and this was even more so the case in open-plan offices with partitions. This is probably because visual screens make ambient noise harder to predict and feel less controllable.

The most powerful individual factor, in terms of its association with workers' overall satisfaction levels, was "amount of space". Other factors varied in their association with overall satisfaction depending on the different office layouts. Noise was more strongly associated with overall satisfaction for open-plan office workers whereas light and ease of interaction were more strongly associated with overall satisfaction for workers in private offices.

But the key finding relates to whether the costs of lost privacy were outweighed for open-plan office workers by the benefits of ease of communication. There is in fact past field research to suggest that open-plan offices can discourage communication between colleagues due to lack of privacy. Consistent with this, there was a trend in the current study for workers in private offices to be more satisfied with ease of interaction than open-plan workers. Moreover, analysis showed that scores on ease of interaction did not offset open-plan workers' dissatisfaction with noise and privacy issues in terms of their overall satisfaction with their workspace.

"Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants' overall work environmental satisfaction," the researchers concluded. They added: "... considering previous researchers' finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature."

Jungsoo Kim, and Richard de Dear (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. Journal of Environmental Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.06.007 

Introducing workplace support can free us to develop ourselves and our organisation

New research suggests that when job support improves working conditions, the benefits are invested in different ways dependent on the individual's current thoughts and feelings.  The study looked at night shift performance of junior doctors and focused on structural support, meaning a part of the workplace designed-in to help employees.

Research on organisational support tends to focus on perceptions of support, such as 'My manager helps me through tough times'. This can make it difficult to identify causality: do supportive managers make high functioning teams or do struggling teams just fail to spot the lifelines their managers try to throw them? Perhaps unsurprisingly, perceived support has a flaky evidence signature, in some cases showing strong effects and in others none.

In response to this Sharon Parker and colleagues study of 48 junior doctors focused on support that varied systematically. This was the introduction of a specialist nurse available on certain shifts, there to coach on skill use, pass on patient information from past shifts, and provide emotional support. The study design looked at within-subject variation - how the same doctor responds when they do or don't have support - which makes the bias of an individual rater less problematic.

The night shift is challenging, calling for the five on-shift doctors to oversee the running of an entire hospital. But for them it's also an opportunity: to gain and develop skills in response to its demands, and to put their fresher eyes to the hospital's processes and call out possible improvements. Parker's team were interested in whether support allowed doctors to pursue these activities - skill development and manifesting voice - or whether the resources it provided would be sunk elsewhere. They predicted doctors experiencing high negative affect would be preoccupied with their struggles and focus on trying to reduce personal overload at the expense of voice and learning. These elements were all measured with surveys taken immediately at end-of-shift, with experiences still fresh.

These hypotheses were confirmed by analysis, which suggested that anxiety, rather than depression, was the element of negative motion that tipped doctors from attempting broader tasks into simply getting a grip on things. In addition, support was associated with better performance of core job activities, but only when the doctor believed they where clear on the roles of other shift colleagues, interpreted as insight that allow support to be used in a more targeted and efficient manner.

This study demonstrates a number of benefits of structural support. Improving core job performance, that here ultimately affects patient care, is clearly important, but the authors fix attention to the activities that fall outside the job specification. When junior doctors are strained and experiencing anxiety, support merely provides an important safety valve. But when they are spared these negative influences, the resources offered from support allow them to broaden and build their skill-set, and engage in changing their organisation for the better: 'their fresh perspective places them in an ideal position to identify unsafe practices and poor methods.' Finding these positive spirals can have long-term benefits for an organisation, building assets and helping it to improve.


Parker, S.K., Johnson, A., Collins, C., & Nguyen, H. (2013). Making the Most of Structural Support: Moderating Influence of Employees Clarity and Negative Affect. Academy of Management Journal,, 56 (3), 867-892 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0927

Further reading:

Viswesvaran, C., Sanchez, J. I., & Fisher, J. 1999. The role of social support in the process of work stress: A meta-analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 54a2: 314 –334.

Hostility increases unemployment, unemployment increases hostility

We know that unemployment is self-perpetuating, due to reasons including stigma and skill loss. Now new research suggests a further component to this vicious circle: hostile people are more likely to be without work, but periods without work also seem to raise levels of hostility, at least in the short-term.

The research team, led by Christian Hakulinen, made use of a large Finnish longitudinal data set beginning in 1980 with the recruitment of children and adolescents. From this set, data was available on the employment status of 1465 participants at multiple time points, together with personality information related to hostility that participants completed in 1992, 2001, and 2007. This included items that tapped cynicism (e.g. through agreement with statements like 'Most people are honest chiefly through fear of being caught') and others focusing on paranoia and distrustful attitudes (e.g. via items like 'Others do not give me proper credit for my achievements'). Hostility is associated with distrust of others, using social support less effectively, and proneness to conflict. It is a plausible variable to focus on because it’s known to predict sickness leave, which is related to unemployment risk.
 
Hostility ratings in 2001 predicted unemployment status in 2007. The analysis controlled for educational background (including the parents' education, a good proxy for family socio-economic status). A similar effect was found for 1992 hostility and 2001 unemployment , but after controlling for education this relationship was no longer significant.
 This suggests that socio-economic status may be a mediator variable, with more hostile children achieving worse educationally and through this being at higher unemployment risk.

The analysis also found an effect in the reverse direction by looking at the 2001 data. Here, holding constant the likelihood an individual was hostile in the past - by controlling for 1992 hostility scores – the researchers found that a given person was more likely to be more hostile if they had some period of unemployment that year. Other analyses suggested unemployment may also influence  hostility in the future, but controlling for education again saw these effects rendered non-significant. So the only thing we can say with some confidence is that unemployment appears to affect hostility in the short-term.

Hostile individuals tend to be less active in job searches, and their suspicion and disinclination to approach others leaves them open to becoming isolated within the workplace, making higher unemployment understandable. This research draws attention to a second dynamic, where frustration from joblessness hardens exteriors and affects personality, at least in the short term. Such a vicious circle is one that we - through policy, organisational and individual choices - should try to prevent. It's important to note the silver lining of the effect of employment status: ignoring previous hostility levels, having a steady recent employment history is associated with lower hostility. So if there is a vicious circle, it's potentially one that can be broken.

Christian Hakulinen, Markus Jokela, Mirka Hintsanen, Laura Pulkki-Råback, Marko Elovainio, Taina Hintsa, Nina Hutri-Kähönen, Jorma Viikari, Olli T. Raitakari, & Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen (2013). Hostility and unemployment: A two-way relationship? Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 83, 153-160 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2013.04.003

Further reading:

Paul, K. I., & Moser, K. (2009). Unemployment impairs mental health: Meta-analyses. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 74(3), 264–282.

A team's goals determine whether diversity helps or hinders

Diversity offers an informational resource to any group, each perspective bringing something different to the table. Yet this isn't always fully leveraged. And diversity can  also disrupt team performance, due to the easier formation of in- and out-groups, where people trust information when it comes from those similar to them, and are slower to share information with those who are different. A new study suggests that one factor that can tip the balance from benefit to harm is how team members prioritise different goals. By prizing learning and acquiring new information, and avoiding focus on the risks of failure, teams can reap the benefits of diversity.

Researchers Anne Neederveen Pieterse, Daan van Knippenberg, and Dirk van Dierendonck of Erasmus University conducted two studies, of which I'll describe the second, being larger and more comprehensive. The participants were 109 teams of business school students. Each 4-person team spent three weeks on assignments relating to the running of a fictional company, but beforehand participants completed surveys allowing each team to be characterised by its degree of cultural diversity - all-Dutch homogeneity, or containing members from other backgrounds such as Indonesian - and mean levels of different 'goal orientation'. The two pertinent measures were learning approach orientation, with high scoring teams caring about opportunities to learn and acquire new information, and performance avoidance orientation, where it is important not to fail or to be seen to fail. Individuals, and hence teams, can score high on both measures. The final measure was team performance, as graded by tutors blind to the study intent.

As predicted, diversity affected team performance in different ways depending on learning approach orientation. When it was high, diverse teams did better, but when it was low, homogenous teams performed more strongly. A reverse pattern was found for performance avoidance: when the team held this goal orientation, diversity counted against them. There are a few reasons why these findings make sense.

A strong learning orientation involves seeking an in-depth understanding of things, which encourages the seeking of viewpoints even - especially - when different to our own. Meanwhile, strong performance avoidance orientation is associated with sticking to tried and tested approaches, so the soliciting of novel viewpoints may be seen as impediments that only introduce risk into the process. Additionally, performance avoiders tend to see others in terms of categories, more likely to see people as static and unchanging, and more concerned with perceptions of their competence, all of which can rack up the negative weight of diversity. Learning approachers tend to discard broad categorisation as too simplistic to describe reality, and seeing people as malleable - if you learn, you change - makes them less likely to see people different from them as fundamentally Other.

Analysis of data from a post-study survey confirmed what other studies by this research group have suggested: when diversity does pay off for team performance, it's because members are harnessing that diversity to exchange information and gather a deeper sense of the situation from it.

The authors point out that although goal orientation does have the aspect of a personal trait, it's also a state of mind that people can enter. Organisations can help achieve this through their reward systems or through using feedback to define and shape culture. They also suggest that selection based on goal orientation may be another way to leverage the benefits of diversity. As they conclude 'With today’s increasingly diverse workforce, the ability to manage the double-edged sword of cultural diversity is of ever greater importance to organizations.'

Anne Nederveen Pieterse, Daan van Knippenberg, & Dirk van Dierendonck (2013). Cultural Diversity and Team Performance: The Role of Team Member Goal Orientation Academy of Management Journal, 56 (3), 782-804 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0992

Further reading:
Jackson, S. E., Joshi, A., & Erhardt, N. L. 2003. Recent research on team and organizational diversity: SWOT analysis and implications. Journal of Management, 29: 801– 830.

Who feels treated unfairly after taking an assessment?

Applicant reactions are the feelings people have about taking a given set of assessments in order to secure employment. We know that assessment design matters: applicants are happiest when given scope to show their capability through relevant challenges that did not demand inappropriate information.

Applicant factors matter too - obviously passing or failing the assessment can colour their perception, as can their 'attributional style' - but up to now there has been no consistent effect of applicant personality. Recent research takes a different angle that suggests perceptions of fairness depend on the applicant's personality type .

Finnish researchers Laura Honkaniemi and team suspected the problem with previous applicant reaction research was that it focused on correlations with personality traits - individual qualities such as extroversion, neuroticism and so on. This presumes that personality has its effect in a fairly linear way - 'more extraverted people will be happier in assessments', rather than involving an interplay between different features. Honkaniemi's team, working with personality data from applicants to Finnish Fire and Rescue Services, used an analytic technique to find four different personality types within the group of 258 applicants, which I describe below.

These individuals had all completed a set of physical assessments and then a psychological regime including interview, cognitive tests, a group exercise and a personality assessment (the Finnish version of the PRF). The final research sample (40 participants opted out of this) detailed applicant reactions, specifically on the use of psychological assessment, by rating items like 'I don’t understand what the psychological tests have to do with the future job tasks', after the assessment but before the outcomes were known. These items related to three areas: face validity - did the assessments seem relevant to the job?, predictive validity - do I think they can predict job performance? - and fairness perceptions - do I think this is a fair way to do things? No effect was found for the first two variables, but fairness was influenced by personality type for both successful and unsuccessful candidates.

Two of the personality types saw the process as significantly fairer than another. The first, typified by high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, and above average agreeableness and extraversion, is commonly identified within this personality typing process and labelled the Resilient type. Another hasn't been previously reported, the researchers dubbing it the 'Bohemian' due to its combination of low extraversion and low conscientiousness. In contrast the Overcontrolled group gave significantly lower fairness ratings. This is another classic type involving high neuroticism and low extroversion and agreeableness. Previous research has suggested this type is more likely to infer malevolence behind ambiguous behaviour, so their negative perceptions are consistent with this. Conversely, the Resilient profile, as the label implies, carries with it a strong tendency to adjust to circumstances and move forward, so less concerned with picking apart perceived wrongs. The authors speculate that the new type of Bohemian may have a  'let all flowers bloom' approach, their impulsive, uncompetitive nature making judgment unlikely.

A few notes: firstly, these personality types are rarely 'pure' but reflect nuances of the larger sample. Here, the Undercontrolled had higher extroversion than the Resilients, the opposite of what is seen in other studies. Secondly, the personality types are more than the sum of their parts: all these effects were obtained while controlling for the effects of the 14 individual personality traits within the PRF.

Applicant reactions matter. They can influence test performance, sour opinions of the employer, and affect a new hire's self-perception. Understanding who may experience a process as more unfair might be useful to employers for offering targeted support and feedback that takes their likely reactions into account.

Laura Honkaniemi, Taru Feldt, Riitta-Leena Metsäpelto, & Asko Tolvanen (2013). Personality Types and Applicant Reactions in Real-life Selection International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 21 (1), 32-45 DOI: 10.1111/ijsa.12015

Further reading:
Ployhart, R. E., & Harold, C. M. (2004). The Applicant Attribution-Reaction Theory (AART): An integrative theory of applicant attributional processing. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 12, 84–98.