Autocratic people dampen group collaboration... when the group lets them

New research suggests that formal leaders with a strong sense of personal power have a negative impact on the performance of their team. The work by Leigh Tost and colleagues outlines how feeling powerful leads to a sense of entitlement within group discussions that can crowd out other voices and lead to less valuable information-sharing. This happens only when the powerful-feeling person has a formal leadership role; if they don’t, other group members don't allow the domination and therefore healthy information transfer is maintained.

The research is based on a trio of experimental studies with a total of 400 university students, gathered into groups of between three and six to tackle business simulations and problem-solving tasks. The tasks favoured information sharing. For example, in one task, briefings containing different information were given to each participant, such that the right decision could only be reached if participants combined what they knew. This made it crucial that all group members were involved in discussions.

In an initial study, certain teams were placed in a condition where, before the task began, one member privately wrote about a past situation where they felt powerful. This is a standard way to induce feelings of power, and manipulation checks showed these were successful, compared to a control involving writing about a recent neutral activity. When individuals in this power condition were also given formal authority - right down to a name tag saying 'leader' - they were perceived by other team members as talking disproportionately during the discussion. Team members also rated these discussions as poorer in terms of openness towards different perspectives, and these factors contributed to poorer performance at the task overall. Yet a second study showed that  the power induction task had no effect on discussion or on task performance for teams that had no formal leaders.

This study found that participants who took the power induction tended to display a more autocratic communication style, characterised by wanting to impose discipline or take control. This was true regardless of whether they had a leadership position. But they only influenced the group dynamics measured – speaking time and the climate of openness – when they had this leadership role.

Without this data, we might have imagined an additive effect: that feelings of power would make a person want to take control, that formal authority would do the same, and that when the two come together the person’s controlling influence on the group would be at their greatest. But in fact formal leadership didn't make those who felt powerful any more autocratic; instead, formal leadership affected the rest of the group, such that they deferred to a controlling person instead of resisting them. Formal leadership doesn't change the psychological state of the leader, it changes the reactions of the led.

The theoretical explanation for why we treat others differently when we feel powerful is that the state leads us to objectify others and see them as less useful. Why should I listen to them when their opinions don't matter and they have nothing important to tell me? Another study investigated this by providing formal leaders in one condition with an additional instruction, suggesting that  “everyone has something unique to contribute in this task” and advising them to make best use of it.  When this instruction was in place, formal leaders didn't speak more or limit openness when they felt powerful, and their teams performed as well as for formal leaders without the power manipulation. So this suggests a potential mechanism to counter the stifling effect of power, by presenting open communication as being in the leader's self interest.

Tost and her colleagues conclude that “leaders’ subjective experience of power increases their attempts to dominate team interactions,” which others are more likely to defer to, leading to less-than-optimal outcomes. Leaders whose roles naturally provide high subjective experience of power, such as those in highly hierarchical organisations, could focus on cultivating openness to the perspectives of others, possibly by reflecting on the value that team members provide to discussion. Similarly, we can break the habits of deference to leaders by encouraging healthy dissent and the sharing of opinions amongst team members.



Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino, & Richard P. Larrick (2013). When Power Makes Others Speechless: The Negative Impact of Leader Power On Team Performance Academy of Management Journal,, 56 (5), 1465-1486 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0180



Further reading:
Halevy, N., Chou, E. Y., & Galinsky, A. D. 2011. A functional model of hierarchy: Why, how, and when vertical differentiation enhances group performance.
Organizational Psychology Review, 1: 32–52.

Situations shape personality, just as personality shapes situations

It’s easy to think of ways that personality affects how we approach situations. But a new study looks at the other side of the coin: how situations alter our personality. This research suggests that while our personality at work has a stable, predictable quality, experience of meaningful events produces ‘personality states’ that deviate from our baseline traits.

Timothy Judge’s team recruited 122 participants in full employment into this online study, measuring their general personality traits at the outset using a combination of scales that all focused on the ‘Big 5’ traits (extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness and neuroticism) that comprise our best understood model of personality. Over the next ten days, participants made daily recordings of their experiences at work, as well as rating personality states – how they saw themselves as being on that particular day – again using Big 5 scales. Participants were asked to make these daily entries as close to the end of the day as possible, and the online survey was only available for completion between 3 and 11pm.

Judge was interested in how personality states on one day are influenced by events on the previous day. Research suggests that the day is a meaningful unit for investigation, possibly because of the way sleep functions to consolidate experiences into learning; it also makes claims about causality more credible than looking at variables simultaneously. Here is a summary of the key findings:

Engaging in helpful, proactive organisational citizenship behaviours led to higher next-day extraversion, openness to experience and agreeableness. Engaging in personal goalsetting was associated with higher next-day conscientiousness; and high levels of intrinsic motivation – e.g. "Today, I’ve not needed a reason to work; I’ve worked because I want to" – was related to next-day agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. On the negative side,  work conflict on one day left participants in a heightened neurotic state the next.

Two things important to note. First personality state often influenced likelihood of next-day events: for instance, a higher state of openness was associated with more intrinsic motivation the following day. When you consider this, the data sounds a bit of a tangle – if motivation and openness climb for days, what’s driving what? – but the analysis used specific technical controls to separate out the effects. And of course, if personality were having no effect on how we behave, it wouldn’t be a very useful thing to measure in the first place. But it’s pertinent that the effects of event on state tended to be stronger than the reverse.

Secondly, personality states were always strongly associated with personality traits. Who we are still has a consistent quality, it's just that we vary around this. As with previous research (eg on affect spin http://bps-occupational-digest.blogspot.de/2011/08/some-of-us-experience-bigger-emotional.html), it appears that we each differ in how much we vary from our baseline. This study suggests that higher variability in our personality states may be associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism, and an up-one-day, down-the-next volatility certainly fits that profile.

Understanding that personality isn’t merely a static predisposition but involves interaction with the environment is a key part of ‘whole trait theory,’ an important advance in individual difference research. And it has practical applications: we often think about conscientious people as being those who tend to set goals. But it’s empowering to flip it, and know that setting goals is part of what makes us conscientious. It helps us better understand virtuous cycles, where one good turn produces the state that can lead to another, and keeps us aware of the power of dynamics in a working environment.

Judge TA, Simon LS, Hurst C, & Kelley K (2013). What I Experienced Yesterday Is Who I Am Today: Relationship of Work Motivations and Behaviors to Within-Individual Variation in the Five-Factor Model of Personality. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 24099348

Further reading:
Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 1011-1027. 

Organisational newcomers respond to ebbing support by making less effort to fit in

New research about the experience of new entrants into an organisation, suggests that early support from co-workers and supervisors tails off across the first 100 days. The study shows this to matter at two levels:  week on week, support influences the newcomer's state of mind and how much effort they make to settle into the workplace. And across those 100 days and beyond, it can influence successful integration as well as efforts put back into the organisation.

Typically, research on organisational entrants focuses either on monolithic organisational factors such as on-boarding (how entrants are introduced to the organisation’s people and processes, or examines the newcomer as if they were an autonomous agent, freely choosing whether to put effort in to integration. This study, headed up by John Kammeyer-Mueller, instead focuses on the local circumstances of the newcomer – the behaviour of the people they see day-in, day-out – and investigates whether these circumstances shape the efforts that the newcomer makes. After all, 'pro-socialisation behaviours' such as asking questions, seeking feedback, or making overtures for closer relationships all involve making demands on people still unfamiliar to you. Isn't it possible that newcomers are more prepared to do so when they see co-workers and supervisors as supportive rather than hostile?

The results of this study suggest so. In their first week in a non-faculty position at a research university, the 255 participants performed more pro-socialisation behaviours when they received higher levels of support from supervisors or from co-workers.  Data collected over the following thirteen weeks showed that when support declined - which it tended to do, steeply at first before levelling off - pro-socialisation would also fall; when support happened to increase, then these behaviours also tended to increase. Support was also related to positive mood in a similar manner.

Each week newcomers also recorded levels of undermining behaviours, dark-side tendencies measured through statements like '[this person] made my life difficult'. Although undermining behaviours affected weekly mood, they had no effect on pro-socialisation behaviours. One reviewer speculates that an effect could be masked by individual differences, with some participants exposed to hostility becoming dispirited, while others actually try harder, energised to succeed in spite of the climate.

What about longer-term consequences? Co-worker and supervisor support affected several measures taken at the end of the 14 weeks, with more support (initially or in an increasing trend over time) leading to higher organisational commitment and more proactive efforts to solve work problems, together with fewer withdrawal behaviours such as skipping meetings. Each effect was mediated by the higher levels of pro-socialisation behaviours produced by a supportive climate. Undermining had less sweeping effects, but one potent one: newcomers exposed to undermining supervisors were more likely to leave the organisation voluntarily within the year.

There's a growing body of evidence that suggests the first 100 days of a job are crucial. Jobholders undergo more attitude change during this period than any other of their tenure; this time shapes our idea of 'what it is to work here'. In the current study, we see that when new entrants fear asking too much of others during this period, they will tend to foresake the very behaviours that will help them be useful to the organisation at the end of it. But if we start rewarding early support behaviours, and give leeway to co-workers and supervisors so they also have time to help out, this gives newcomers the support they need to make an impact.

John Kammeyer-Mueller, Connie Wanberg, Alex Rubenstein, & Zhaoli Song (2013). Support, Undermining and Newcomer Socialization: Fitting in During the First 90 Days Academy of Management Journal, 56 (4), 1104-1124 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0791

Further reading:
Ashforth, B. E., Sluss, D. M., & Saks, A. M. 2007. Socialization tactics, proactive behavior, and newcomer learning: Integrating socialization models. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 70: 447–462.

The Family Innovator's Dilemma: how family firms approach discontinuous technologies

The unique properties of family firms are often characterised by four Cs. Continuity, their commitment to longevity; Command, concentrating power within leadership, not across the organisation or with shareholders; Community, the organisation in some ways resembling an actual family; and Connections, with close relationships to suppliers and stakeholders. In a recent theoretical paper, Andreas König and colleagues consider the impact such qualities have on the uptake of discontinuous technologies, game-changers like e-publishing, online news, or biotechnology. They suggest that although family firms are free from typical 'innovator's dilemmas', they trade these off for some profoundly psychological obstacles to taking on the Next Big Thing.

The first trade-off is that family firms are less formalised than other organisations, but more mentally rigid. A formalised business absorbs and processes information using standardised approaches – information-gathering is assigned to certain roles, using prescribed methods, such as visiting trade fairs, or annual audits of business processes. Similar to installing a radar screen, this makes it easier to spot what you are looking for – typically, trends that are likely to have impact on short-term performance – but also easier to miss things that go beneath the radar, such as  discontinuous technologies. Family firms tend not to be formalised, as the community aspect of family firms encourages more informal information-sharing, and its continuity aspect makes it receptive to conversations on wider issues that might turn out to have long-term benefit.

But according to König, family firms end up trading external regimentation for an internal one. Mental models are the ways individuals see and think about the world, and evidence suggests that organisations with less change thanks to long employee tenures – family firms fit squarely in this category – end up with less flexible and diverse models. People tend to see things the same way, and the same way they've always done. This makes it harder to identify new technologies, and if they are implemented, to fully recognise the ramifications for the whole of the organisation.

The second trade-off surrounds the decision to adopt technology after it has been identified as potentially useful. The classic 'innovator's dilemma' describes how established companies, lacking both the family firm's focus on continuity and the oomph of top-down control, prefer to invest in continuous innovations (such as minor process improvements) to fulfil short-term financial obligations to shareholders, even when discontinuous ones better serve its long-term prospects.

The 'family innovator's dilemma' is rather different: an innovation may be best for the future, but can we justify the short-term disruption this will cause to the company – to the family? Adopting new technologies can be painful, involving lay-offs and acquisition of new skills, as well as diverting funds and focus from existing projects. The community focus and desire for employee continuity may paradoxically hamper taking steps in the long-term interest. Successful family firms are hardly sentimental, and accustomed to making tough decisions, but collateral damage due to a break with the old ways may feel like violating a compact made with organisational members.

On the plus side, when a family firm does decide to adopt a discontinuous technology, it is well equipped to get it up and running. This is thanks to its lower levels of formalisation and bureaucracy, coupled with a long-term willingness to sustain investment even when results are not immediately apparent. The study authors suggest that if family firms can learn to widen their knowledge bases and flex the mental models of their members, then they may reap substantial benefits from the discontinuous technologies emerging in our age.

Andreas König, Nadine Kammerlander, & Albrecht Enders (2013). The Family Innovator's Dilemma: How Family Influence Affects The Adoption of Discontinuous Technologies by Incumbent Firms Academy of Management Review, 38 (3), 418-441

What makes ill feeling between work colleagues shift faster?

An instance of personal friction with a colleague can create angry feelings that are slow to abate. Paradoxically, when the prickly day also involves a specific work-related dispute, bad moods don’t linger so long. This counter-intuitive finding may reflect our willingness to seek a benign explanation for unpleasant situations, blaming the context rather than the person.

The research, from a team led by Laurenz Meier, looked at day-to-day swings in ratings of anger. This longitudinal study asked the 131 participants to diarise their mood before work, after work, and before bed, over a period of two weeks. The participants also recorded daily incidents of task conflict - disagreements about how to solve problems – and incidents of personal frictions, or relationship conflict. Meier's team looked at how mood was altered following such conflicts, after controlling for start-of-day mood. Did conflicts lead to impaired well-being, in terms of a fouler mood, and if so, how much and for how long?

Study participants tended to feel angrier at the end of a day that involved interpersonal relationship conflict with colleagues, feelings that continued in a weaker form to bed-time and could even linger to the following morning. However, when the rough day also involved a task conflict as well as a relationship one, well-being was only worse at the end of the day, and tended to recover by bed-time.

Consistent with previous research, the unpleasant nature of interpersonal tensions awaken negative feelings that colour the working day. Meier's team believe that their paradoxical finding for work-related conflict reflects a preference to attribute such instances to a situation: 'tempers ran high because we all want the project to succeed', rather than to a person: 'she just doesn't like me'. Taking the more benign interpretation allows us to go to bed feeling less chewed up. The researchers also looked at somatic complaints such as headaches and back pain, and again found that these symptoms were highest with relationship conflict and no task conflict, but this mirroring of the angry-mood pattern did not reach overall significance.

According to this research, the more personal 'storm in a teacup' may actually be the most insidious type. With nothing wrong to fix, it's easier to paint the other person as difficult or even malevolent, and that may be a hard place to recover from. If you want to smooth ruffled feathers it may be useful to focus attention on the task components of disagreements, encouraging reappraisal of the situation, and leading people away from a less defensive mindset.

Meier LL, Gross S, Spector PE, & Semmer NK (2013). Relationship and task conflict at work: interactive short-term effects on angry mood and somatic complaints. Journal of occupational health psychology, 18 (2), 144-56 PMID: 23506551

Further Reading:
Spector, P. E., & Bruk-Lee, V. (2008). Conflict, health, and well-being. In
C. K. W. De Dreu & M. J. Gelfand (Eds.), The psychology of conflict
and conflict management in organizations (pp. 267–288). San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass.
 

Writing your way to a new career: a look at the literature on narrative career learning

Are you ever unsure about what you want from your working life? If so, you may find writing about it will help. A new paper proposes that the act of writing can help develop career narratives and make sense of ourselves. Here's the big idea, and some approaches you can take to become a ball-point explorer.

Over the last few decades some career counsellors have begun to move from what psychometrics offer - fixed snapshots of current capabilities and interests - to begin exploring the value of narrative. Patterns over time, routes begun but abandoned, as well as underlying hopes and fears: all of these are material that can help in creating meaningful paths for the future. Now researchers Reinekke Lengelle and Frans Meijers suggest that with the right techniques to hand, this kind of progress can be achieved through solo writing techniques. After all, writing also involves dialogue - with the page, rather than another person - and is known to enhance meta-cognitive and self-reflective skills. Does it work, and how can we investigate what's really going on?

The current paper showcases methods for systematically evaluating writing content, a common one being to look at patterns of word use. Existing research suggests that shifting from one pronoun to another (e.g., They to I) reflects an ability to step in and out of a situation and gain control of its narrative. The mix of emotional words are also significant, with writing that contains more positive than negative words reflecting a healthier direction for a personal journey. However, an absence of negative emotions suggests an unwillingness to see the whole situation. Looking at such measures over time makes it possible to see changes in how individuals think about the world and their future – for our purposes, their career future.

The article describes a study using these techniques to explore texts produced at various stages of a writing course taken by students preparing for a work placement. The study used a very small sample that allows only a quasi-quantitative approach to the data, with no statistical analysis, and appropriately the article notes that the outcomes – that a writing course may help some people develop clearer career direction – should be considered highly tentative. My interest in this study is that it lays the groundwork for longitudinal research: I would want to see work exploring whether writing training leads to exploration of narratives, and whether that leads to better long-term career satisfaction.

It may be early days for the research on writing for career guidance, but that doesn't prevent you from exploring these techniques yourself, or even putting them to the test systematically. So here are some links which could help you get started, using the evidence base that currently exists. It should be emphasised that the techniques may well be more useful when delivered in a structured course such as the one described in the, especially for those fairly new to writing.

Creative writing

”Our fictional narratives offer important information about what is salient for us.” One approach is to write a piece that involves careers – perhaps imagining someone starting an exciting job - and then step back to reflect upon the themes that emerge. Alternatively, poetry and the construction of metaphor can also expose surprising truths as the limitations demands new ways of expression.

The authors reference Gillie Bolton as well as the collection The self on the page, and another online resource is here.

Reflective writing

To see experiences from a range of viewpoints. Lengelle's students were asked to respond to a series of prompts such as “Write a sentence about yourself and then write it again saying the opposite. Write each so that they both feel true” or “The one fear I have around writing (e.g. poetry/story) or the creative process is . . . ” followed by “I sense that an uplifting response to that fear might be . . .” Another method is to write out a dialogue between two perspectives that relate to work, such as the concept of the“Labour market” having a conversation with the archetype of an“Employed” person: “You need me”; "I don’t pay you a thought unless I’m disattisfied".

The canon suggested includes Stories at work also by Bolton, as well as this article in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. Online resources include Monash University's page on the topic

Expressive writing

Try writing about personal topics , doing justice to their emotional dimension, and exploring how events make you feel. This emotional element permeates and overlaps with the others, but a clear example is perhaps the use of Byron Katie's “The Work”, involves a technique where a stressful thought is investigated through responding to four questions - eg “How do you react when you believe the thought?” to deepen and tease out the depth of the possible feelings.

Texts that explore the value of expressive writing include James Pennebaker's corpus of work, most recently The Secret Life of Pronouns, and Karen Baikie and Kay Wilhelm's paper on emotional and physical health benefits. Online resources at the national writing project.

 

Reinekke Lengelle, Frans Meijers, Rob Poell, & Mijke Post (2013). The effects of creative, expressive, and reflective writing on career learning: An explorative study Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 83, 419-427 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2013.06.014

Do conscientious people speak out to improve the workplace?

Conscientiousness – describing those who strive, invest effort, and are reliable – is the personality trait most associated with positive work outcomes, from punctuality to the quality of work. Conscientious people also tend to exceed the core demands of the job, and are likely to engage in citizenship behaviours such as helping others and advocacy for the organisation. Another citizenship behaviour is expressing challenging but constructive opinions, often termed ‘voice’. Voice is good for organisations, but it's risky and potentially disruptive to the smooth running of things, so is this something the conscientious do?

Subrahmaniam Tangirala and colleagues felt this is a question without an obvious answer because conscientiousness involves two components that point in opposite ways. One component is all about duty: following principles, looking after the interests of the group, and generally 'doing the right thing' - such as speaking out when something is wrong. Its counterpart, achievement orientation, is about investment in personal success and career aspirations, which can potentially be put at risk by being the first to comment on the emperor's new clothes. Following the lead of 'role theory', the researchers investigated whether these different orientations influence how individuals see their role, and specifically whether they think expressing voice is part of their job.

Tangirala's team asked 262 employees at a Singaporean mail and financial services company to rate themselves on various measures including how much they judged different aspects of voice to be part of their job. Their managers contributed ratings of how much they actually exhibited these behaviours, as well as information on their status and how much visibility they had of each employee, as these could easily influence the results if not controlled for.

Participants who rated their duty orientation more highly were more likely to see voice as part of their role, whereas more achievement oriented participants tended to see voice as out of scope. This sense of responsibility translated to more voice behaviours, as observed by managers. The boost that duty gave to speaking out was greater for participants who had also rated themselves high in voice efficacy, the belief that their use of voice could bring about change. Meanwhile, the suppressing effect of achievement orientation was heightened for participants who had rated their team low in psychological safety, meaning that they suspected any risky behaviours may be judged, evaluated or even reported by their colleagues.

Speaking out can invite ridicule or even hostility, despite the fact that voice behaviours are associated with organisational benefits like preventing errors or readying the organisation for unexpected situations. This means that people focused on getting ahead are liable to keep their head down, but we can reduce that risk by cultivating psychological safety in teams. Conversely the duty-minded are ready to act, especially if they believe they can make a difference, so enhancing those skills can also help getting voice into your workplace.

Tangirala S, Kamdar D, Venkataramani V, & Parke MR (2013). Doing Right Versus Getting Ahead: The Effects of Duty and Achievement Orientations on Employees' Voice. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 23915430

Further reading:
Morrison, E.W. (2011). Employee voice behavior: Integration and directions for future research. Academy of Management Annals, 5373-412.