A positive mindset on joining a group boosts your longer-term status

Status: a formal feature of many workplaces, an informal part of every workplace. We form pecking orders that influence who calls the shots, who gets heard, and who gets applauded or rewarded. Essentially a matter of perception, status can be influenced by rank, demographic, background, as well as race, gender, and age. A new article suggests that status is also influenced by style of behaviour when we join a group, and that these behaviours can be activated by a simple change in mindset.

Researchers Gavid Kilduff and Adam Galinsky were interested in priming, how exposure to something can change how we respond to events that follow, like seeing people as 'warm' after holding a warm drink, or  physically slowing after reading about elderly people (an effect now under some scrutiny).  As priming operates via mental states, which fluctuate day-to-day, if not minute-to-minute, we normally expect their effects to be similarly short-term. However, Kilduff and Galinsky proposed that effects that boost status during a group's formation could get locked-in for the lifetime of the group. If I'm struck by Sheila as having top-dog potential, I'll ask her perspective more often and put more faith in her opinions, and these prophecies become self-fulfilling.

The research focused on mental states that involve an 'approach orientation', where the individual is drawn to exploring and meeting people, problems, or environments, as opposed to a conservative 'avoidance orientation'. Approach orientation is associated with confidence, activity, and goal-oriented behaviour, the sorts of things that are habitual to extraverts and trait-dominant people, people who tend to take higher status roles. In some senses it is a 'state' version of the extraversion trait. Could it give the same status benefits?

The first study established this was possible - at least in the short-term - by priming their 57 student participants by asking them to write a few paragraphs on either their commute to work (No priming), their current duties and obligations (Avoidance), or their ambitions and aspirations (Approach). Then one student from each condition met as a trio for a twenty minute session in which they tackled an open-ended task (ranking the importance of items to a new business). The participants gave higher anonymous status ratings to team members who had been primed with the approach orientation task. The group also agreed (through ratings) that these Approach individuals showed more proactive behaviour during the meeting, which appeared to mediate and explain the status bonus.

The second study replicated and extended the first using a different element of approach orientation: where the previous study had focused on 'promotion focus', this one primed the state of feeling powerful, by asking this group to write on a situation where they had power over others, versus being disempowered or the same neutral condition as before.  Again, ratings following the group decision task showed that individuals in the power condition were awarded higher status and engaged in more proactive behaviours, behaviours now measured by blind coders observing video of the interaction. Two days later, the group was reassembled for another decision task with no further mindset manipulations. Those who had initially been in the Power condition continued to get a status advantage. These participants had provided personality data, and analysis suggested this Time 2 benefit to status was greatest for those lower in extraversion.

The final study replicated this two-stage approach by priming happiness, unhappiness or neutral thoughts in the writing exercise. As well as rating status, participants at the second meeting were asked to secretly apportion points between themselves and their two team members, points that contributed to chances of winning a financial prize. Participants originally assigned to the Happiness condition received more points at this second stage, in addition to higher status ratings. This use of an additional, novel metric goes some way to heading off a potential criticism of the research design, which is that Time 2 status ratings may be anchored by the Time 1 ratings. All these effects were  stable even when controlling for Extraversion, Trait Dominance and Trait Positive Affect, more durable individual features that affect status.

This research suggests a kind of butterfly effect, where small differences in initial mindset can echo through a group's interactions and shape their status relationships in a way that remains, even days later. A short-term change of mindset is relatively easy - the manipulation in this experiment is trivially easy to do yourself - especially compared to trying to alter personality states, never mind demographics. The suggestive finding that mindset could matter more for those less extraverted, who take status less naturally, makes this finding empowering.

Kilduff GJ, & Galinsky AD (2013). From the Ephemeral to the Enduring: How Approach-Oriented Mindsets Lead to Greater Status. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: 23895266

  
Further reading: 
Driskell, J. E., & Mullen, B. (1990). Status, expectations, and behavior: A meta-analytic review and test of the theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 541–553.

Racial slurs: who suffers and who speaks out against them

A recent article investigates racial slurs in the workplace, an important issue that is under-researched. Across a series of studies, Ashley Rosette and colleagues presents data from US samples that show different quantities of racial slurs experienced by white and black people, how gender and race interact with producing them, and how these factors influence willingness to speak up when a slur is witnessed. Tying this all together is a theoretical model based around who benefits when a workplace denigrates a group.

The first study asked 471 participants recruited via online survey to detail their experience of being targeted by a racial slur. The researchers controlled for socio-economic status and household income - both markers of status that reduce the likelihood of suffering abuse - and also for the degree that the individual's work interactions are same-race versus other-race, as this may provide different opportunities for abuse. Holding these factors constant, black people were subjected to a larger quantity of slurs than whites were, and the most common situation was white-to-black slurs. When gender was considered, a richer picture emerged: black men were far more likely to be targeted by slurs than white men, but for women, the difference was much slighter and did not reach significance.

Rosette and her team understand these findings in terms of social dominance and gendered prejudice. Essentially, slurs function to sustain social inequality, keeping one group down so a dominant one will prosper. In this US context, those who have most to gain from this are whites, and specifically white men, as they are both the greatest material beneficiaries of hierarchy and the gender more socialised to seek and defend status. The team predicted that observers of slurs are also more likely to be white men, as previous research has indicated that people are more likely to be interpersonally aggressive when amongst like-minded individuals. Their second study looked at this by harnessed existing telephone survey data, accessing information on 2480 participants which included the question: "Did you hear one or more colleagues at work use a racial slur?". Far more white men answered affirmatively than black men, with no differences seen in the women respondents; in fact, the overall effect of race, collapsing across genders, did not reach significance.

The final study investigated the individual differences that prompt some people to act and others to remain silent when they witness a slur. Conventionally, the background reasoning around these situations (such as whistleblowing or the bystander effect) looks at risk and cost to individuals who act. Rosette's team flip this by considering who benefits from silence. They measured social dominance orientation (SDO), "the desire for generalized, hierarchical relationships between social groups, and ingroup dominance over out-groups", in their sample of 133 students. The study asked these students to observe an online chat meeting between two simulated co-workers  discussing who to include in a task force.

After each candidate was discussed, participants were invited to record feedback on the decision-making process that would be sent on to the CEO. However, each candidate discussion included a racial slur derogating black people. Who was less likely to use the feedback to speak out? White people, who were twice as likely to remain silent. Moreover, a one-unit increase on the (7-point) SDO scale increased the odds of remaining silent 1.5 times. Finally, the race and gender interaction remained, but the black-white differences for men all but disappeared when comparing men who did have a strong component of race in how they saw their identity. In sum, those most  likely to be silent were white men for whom whiteness was important to them, and who are comfortable with, if not eager for, ingroups to dominate out-groups.

Slurs matter. Quite aside from the substantial harm they can produce in their targets, their use within groups can shape attitudes and mobilise environments against those they denigrate. Their function of keeping hierarchy in place is a contradiction to the stated meritocratic aims of most organisations. But if we want people to speak out and unmask the aggressors, it may not be sufficient to encourage safe routes. Instead, as Rosette's team conclude, 'managers should be aware that the establishment of a climate that prevents discrimination and prejudice may need to begin within socially dominant groups' who may view slurs as in their interests, or at least not against them.

Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, Andrew M. Carton, Lynn Bowes-Sperry, & Patricia Faison Hewlin (2013). Why Do Racial Slurs Remain Prevalent in the Workplace? Integrating Theory on Intergroup Behavior Organization Science DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0809

Further reading:

Graumann CF (1998) Verbal discrimination: A neglected chapter in the social psychology of aggression. J. Theory Soc. Behav. 28(1):42–61.
 

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.