Year in Review: Lead Well, Follow Fairly

We've had another rich year at the Occupational Digest, so before it fades, we're taking the time to review some of the themes and common findings that could be helpful in 2014. This first post looks at leader-follower relations.

There was plenty of research on the give and take between leader and follower, and the ways this can fall out of balance. This can be due to a clash of expectations: for instance, managers are likely to see emotional support of those they manage as something over-and-above their normal duties. They expect their employees to reciprocate in kind, but employees just don't see it that way. In their eyes, managers are paid to support them. Not addressing or recognising this mismatch can demoralise managers expecting appreciation for being a 'toxin handler' of other people's negative emotions.

Manager expectations in themselves can be a powerful alignment tool, drawing more performance out of those judged to 'have the stuff' by inspiring them and painting a picture of what is possible. But a theoretical paper explains that the reason why this so-called Pygmalion effect doesn't always hold may be because some leaders aren't trusted enough for their followers to take a risk and make big changes.

Newcomers into an organisation gather their sense of how much the organisation is willing to support them in their early days on the job. If that support starts to tail off, employees become less committed to the organisation and make fewer proactive efforts to fit in themselves, presumably because they feel that their newly-formed expectations have been dashed. So abandoning newcomers after a big hands-on induction week could have real problems down the line.

Leaders may have expectations about us, but we also have expectations about them. Demanding our leaders act accountably appears to be particularly important when the leader is an outsider - a business pro heading up a research institute, for instance. Data suggests that the necessity of justifying their actions leads them to make decisions that are more favourable to their team members. Meanwhile, we're relatively tolerant of tentative behaviour from leaders, willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that the situation merited careful behaviour. Unless they are a woman, in which case we judge them for it.

Meanwhile, when it comes to leadership style, we've reported on data that suggests both directive (perform work as I have told you to) and empowering (find your own routes to delivering outcomes) leadership styles can have performance benefits, in the appropriate contexts. Empowerment, it appears, can reap long-term rewards relative to direction, but often at the cost of immediate performance. And transformational leadership, sometimes considered a 'holy grail', appears to matter more when followers are low in energy, less curious and fairly pessimistic. Employees with naturally positive mindsets don't benefit so much from the transformational leader's inspiration and motivational effect - because they are in a good place to begin with.

There is no single optimal way to lead: a team's aims and general attitude matters, as does each individual follower, in terms of how much they trust you and where they are in their organisational journey. And employees should be fair to leaders: avoiding discriminatory judgments, obviously, but also by recognising the emotional investments that good managers are making in them. And of course, when managers don't offer top-notch support, it's all the more important to pick up the mantle and proactively engage with the best of what the organisation has to offer.

What does volunteering say about how much your job means to you, and how well you perform in it?

What motivates someone to volunteer? This question lies at the heart of Jessica Rodell's dissertation research, now published in the Academy of Management Journal. Rodell looked at two differing perspectives on why we take on meaningful activities outside of a paying job. Are we after something we can't get from our nine to five? Or is it that the meaning we taste in our job makes us hungry - voracious, even - for more?

Rodell's first study surveyed 208 people, students who also had jobs that occupied them on average 30 hours per week, all of whom had volunteered in the past year. In a first survey they rated the meaningfulness of their current job, and it trned out that more, not less, job meaning led to more volunteering, measured in a second survey. The second survey also included a measure of voracity for meaning, typified by the item 'I volunteer to acquire more of what I enjoy about my job' and the analysis suggested that this measure was the key mechanism: job meaning increases voracity which leads to more volunteering. 

This finding was replicated in a study of a further 173 participants - three quarters of whom were women, working mostly full-time hours, all of whom had volunteered in the past year. The study incorporated a few additional features. Job meaningfulness was now rated by co-workers in order to avoid self-report bias. And the meaning generated by volunteering - taken as read in the first study - was actually rated by participants. Regardless of how much meaning the volunteering offered, participants were likely to do more of it if their job was more meaningful.  Meaning-rich work doesn't satiate our hunger for meaning, but galvanises us to seek roles that might supply even a little more.

However, the analysis also revealed that when a participant was receiving little meaning from their job, their amount of volunteering was especially driven by how much meaning they felt it offered. So volunteering can also fill a deficit, in addition to feeding a nurtured appetite.

Rodell also asked co-workers to rate the work performance of their volunteering colleagues, who also rated their own absorption in their work. The data showed a relationship, with participants who volunteer more feeling more absorbed and their absorption being associated with better work performance. As with any such results, we should bear in mind that the personal traits that drive someone to volunteering may also influence their absorption, rather than the volunteering itself doing so, but the fact remains: those who volunteered more performed better - in terms of discretional activities, abstinence from unproductive behaviours, and the quality of their work. 

These results have practical implications for any organisation, as people from all walks of life volunteer. We already know that volunteering can help recover resources, and here we see its benefits for performance. And if a manager has cause to worry that volunteering suggests their employee would rather be elsewhere, in Rodell's words, 'the current results suggest that the opposite is more likely—that employee volunteering is an indication that their jobs have inspired them. In the alternative scenario, where employees believe they are lacking desired meaning in their jobs, volunteering may serve to compensate for that deficit.' So in many ways, volunteering is a win-win for organisations.

Jessica B Rodell (2013). Finding Meaning Through Volunteering: Why Do Employees Volunteer And What Does It Mean For Their Jobs? Academy of Management Journal, 56 (5), 1274-1294 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2012.0611

Further reading:
Clary, E. G., & Snyder, M. 1999. The motivations to volunteer: Theoretical and practical considerations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8: 156 –159.

Rebooting Organisational Citizenship Behaviour for the 21st Century

Fans of comics are well acquainted with franchises being 'rebooted', and aficionados of TV and film may have experienced this with the Battlestar Galactica series or Star Trek movies. What seems cutting edge and on-the-nose in one era can begin to look dated and out of touch in another, so a deft hand is needed to sharpen things up. But did you ever consider that psychological concepts get rebooted too? Just like TV media, what makes sense in one era can be anachronistic in another. So, here's an introduction to a reboot of organisational citizenship behaviours for the 21st Century.

In their article in Academy of Management Perspectives, Kathryn Dekas and colleagues explain how Organisational Citizenship Behaviour, or OCB, was developed as a concept in the late 70s and the 80s as a response to the lack of relationship between job satisfaction and traditional measures of performance. Dennis Organ and colleagues had identified that research was narrowly focused on job performance in terms of performance of obligatory activity, and that the consequences of high job satisfaction would instead be for positive acts that are discretionary in nature. So the OCB construct was born, and research over the years has variously defined it in terms of five main components: altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy, and civic virtue.

Dekas' team felt however that in the 21st century things that were once discretionary may be now considered core, and new frontiers of discretionary work may now matter. This may be particularly true for people engaged in knowledge work - 'thinking for a living' - estimated as being the core activity for 25-50% of workers in advanced economies.  To explore this, they conducted 12 focus groups made up of 7-10 participants, principally in the US but with European and Asian representatives. The company? That major epicentre of knowledge work, Google.

Focus groups rated items from the five traditional components of the OCB construct, determining the degree to which their work group saw them as useful and voluntary (as they should be to count as OCB items) or something else. That 'something else' came up a lot: most items were rated as core, expected behaviours by at least one of the groups – for example, attendance at meetings is here seen as expected rather than voluntary - and many items were also rated as simply inapplicable. For instance, "does not spend time in idle conversation" was discarded by many groups: that may be seen as good behaviour on a factory floor, but not at Google.

In a separate task, groups brainstormed behaviours that they did see as discretionary but valuable within their organisation. This data - 615 items in all - was then screened and categorised into new OCB components... eight in all, four that hewed to the original components, together with four further ones. Whereas Helping mapped closely to the pre-existing altruism component, another component of Employee Sustainability referred to helping others - and one's self - to maintain health and wellbeing, an OCB with a much longer-term agenda. Other new components included Administrative Behaviour (such as making sure events happen that could easily slip through the cracks), Knowledge Sharing and Social Participation. Now it becomes clear why 'avoiding idle conversation' didn't resonate as an OCB among these focus groups: employees expect each other to expend discretional effort in conversation, both functional and non-targeted, in order to grease the wheels of exchange and comradeship.

Dekas and her co-authors stress that this is not meant to be the definitive rewriting of OCB, nor that existing measures are now redundant. But it points to the fact that any construct needs to make sense in the context you use it. The team have developed the new components into a new measure of OCB, one that may be more valuable in examining discretionary acts in a knowledge-work environment. Their data - from 300 participants outside of Google – suggests that compared to traditional OCB measures, their measure may correlate better with job satisfaction, fit, and (negatively) with stress. So if you're interested in understanding OCB, watch this space.

Kathryn H. Dekas, Talya N. Bauer, Brian Welle, Jennifer Kurkowski, & Stacy Sullivan (2013). Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Version 2.0: A review and Qualitative Investigation of OCBs for Knowledge Workers at Google and beyond The Academy of Management Perspectives, 27 (3), 219-237 DOI: 10.5465/amp.2011.0097

Further reading:
Podsakoff, N. P., Whiting, S. W., Podsakoff, P. M., & Blume, B. D. (2009). Individual- and organizational level consequences of organizational citizenship behaviors: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(1), 122–141.

If you love to multitask, you better have the aptitude to back it up

Over a typical working day, I'll juggle all manner of tasks, some important, some urgent, all competing for attention. Multitasking, in this sense, is common to many a modern workplace, and it's been known for some time that people differ in their enjoyment of it.

Over the last decade, studies have confirmed that people vary also in their ability to multitask. A new study by Kristin Sanderson and colleagues suggests that to understand someone's fit to a multitasking role, it's critical to look at how ability and preference interact.

The study's 119 participants came from a range of professional occupations, which all involved multitasking to an Important or Very Important degree, as rated by independent experts. Participants then completed a computer multitasking assessment, which involved solving two types of task in parallel on a split-screen display. Each participant rated their preference for multitasking, which is termed polychronicity and is defined as how much one enjoys working on multiple tasks in parallel, rather than tackling them more sequentially.  Performance data was also available, based on ratings from their supervisors.

For especially polychronic participants – those scoring one standard deviation above the mean – there was a relationship between their multitasking ability and supervisor ratings: more ability led to better ratings. But those with polychronicity ratings 1 SD below the mean received similar ratings regardless of their ability. The data suggested that their multitasking ability just didn't have consequences, which makes sense: if you choose not to do something, it doesn't matter how good you would have been at doing it.

As you can see above, when multitasking ability is poor, polychronic participants' performance scores fall below those of their monochronic counterparts (the dotted line); perhaps reflecting such individuals biting off more task-juggling than they can chew - although I should emphasise that the study doesn't explicitly test for differences here.

 So, even in a job that calls for multitasking, being highly polychronic is not a straightforward benefit. If you are recruiting for such a role, bear in mind that both will-do and can-do matter.

Kristin R. Sanderson, Valentina Bruk-Lee, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Sara Gutierrez, & Tracy Kantrowitz (2013). Multitasking: Do preference and ability interact to predict performance at work? Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83, 556-563 DOI: 10.1111/joop.12025

Further reading:
König, C. J., & Waller, M. J. (2010). Time for reflection: A critical examination of polychronicity. Human Performance, 23, 173–190. doi:10.1080/08959281003621703
 

Why we flirt at work: the performance perspective

When we think about sexual behaviour in the workplace, it's easy to conjure up the Christmas-party fling or the clandestine affair; or, if we're in a more sober mood, we might turn to the topic of sexual harassment. Harassment and office romance are also the focus of most of the research in this area. Yet workplace sexual behaviour comes in many flavours, according to a new paper by Marla Baskerville Watkins and colleagues.

The article is interested in how the workplace contains sexual performances, meaning the act of presenting yourself to others in a way that includes a sexual component. Just like a pop concert or piece of theatre, an effective performance is something that has value for its intended audience. The value of a sexual performance can be implicit - such as when a flirtation promises the possibility of something more - but can also be self-contained, such as a flirtation enjoyed simply because flirtation is enjoyable.

The authors emphasise that while some performances snowball into torrid affairs, the vast majority may just bubble along as the froth on top of everyday social interactions. Their purpose, Watkins argues, is ingratiation – getting another party on-side. But the purpose and methods may be quite different for men and women. Women's sexual resources have a high value, so common performances involve emphasising these by adjusting dress and other aspects of appearance. Meanwhile, men tend to enact sexual performance through chivalry and giving favours. Both men and women tend to use a third type of performance, other-enhancing, which involves compliments and raising the status of the other party.

Watkins and her co-authors suggest the general male goal is to maximise the exchange of sexual performances – flirt for the chance of more flirting - whereas women act more tactically to redress power imbalance. For instance, women working in highly masculine industries adopt more instrumental forms of sexuality.

But sexual performances aren't a fail-safe strategy.  The existing literature on workplace ingratiation shows how behaviours  perceived as excessive and insincere end up hurting the performer's status. Here, this may involve being pigeonholed as 'that kind of girl', or for a particularly clumsy man, spill over into harassing behaviour. The paper argues that we shouldn't act as though sexual behaviour in the workplace is binary – you're not doing it or you are doing it wrong – but that there is a continuum of unremarkable behaviour filling in the gaps. A woman judged for being a sexual operator may only be magnifying what her co-workers – women and men – are already doing in moderation.

The authors are aware that their analysis is heteronormative – that is, it focuses on heterosexual norms and interactions – and point out that sadly in many environments sexual performance towards people of the same gender is tacitly or actively discouraged, meaning that it is fairly invisible in the literature and would benefit from more active research.

There may be a benefit to sexual energy at work, and in any case it would be hard to eliminate it entirely: “the reality is that humans are sexual beings and that simply joining an organization does not magically extinguish their desire to express their sexuality.” Rather than taking a zero-tolerance approach, Watkins instead recommends ruling only on behaviours that are clearly out of bounds and letting local culture and individual judgment sort out the subtleties.

Marla Baskerville Watkins, Alexis Nicole Smith, & Karl Aquino (2013). The Use and Consequences of Strategic Sexual Performances The Academy of Management Perspectives, 27 (3), 173-186 DOI: 10.5465/amp.2010.0109

Further reading:
Hearn, J., & Parkin, W. (1995). Sex at work: The power and paradox of organization sexuality. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
 

Want a spate of good deeds? Confront the ne'er do wells...

Discovering you are racking up more work misdemeanours than the organisation considers acceptable can lead people to perform reparation behaviours to compensate for their misdeeds. The study that reports this new finding did not rely on public or interpersonal shaming for its effect; anonymous feedback that the individual had committed an above-average amount of counterproductive work actions was enough to provoke guilt, and through that, altruism.

On day one of Remus Ilies's survey-based study, 146 university employees recorded the counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs) they got up to, such as playing pranks on others or taking extra-long breaks. The next day, half of them received feedback on their CWB levels compared to the average. The feedback noted that above-average CWBs were harmful to the wellbeing of the organisation. Participants were then asked how much they intended to engage in another kind of extra-role behaviour, positive organisational citizenship behaviours such as assisting others or offering ideas. Three days later, they were surveyed again about how much citizenship behaviour they had actually engaged in.

Above average offenders who received no feedback were least likely to plan or carry out citizenship acts for others. Typical of those lot, eh? But when feedback was provided, the intentions of high offenders, and their actual efforts to do good, shot up to levels similar to those of the well-behaved, low CWB participants. The Day two survey also recorded ratings of emotional guilt, and this was what mediated the relationship between feedback on high CWBs and more citizenship behaviours: the more guilt, the more they tried to make up with good deeds.

Previous work has suggested going the extra mile at work is related to positive emotions, but here we see a benefit from a negative emotion, and one that produces a crossover from harmful work behaviours to constructive behaviours. The authors characterise it as 'a dynamic phenomenon in which negative and positive voluntary behaviours influence each other' until employees find their own balance according to 'their personal level of comfort.' They call for future work to see whether the compensatory behaviours occur in the same domain - teasing a co-worker leading to helping that person out - or whether guilt leads to indirect compensation such as more active work participation, rather than looking the bad deed in the face.

Remus Ilies, Ann Chunyan Peng, Krishna Savani, & Nikos Dimotakis (2013). Guilty and Helpful: An Emotion-Based Reparatory Model of Voluntary Work Behavior Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0034162

How space and time collide for self-employed teleworkers

I'm self-employed and often need to get work done in a variety of locations. In theory, I should be most productive at home, with everything at my fingertips, but sometimes the exact reverse is true (which explains why I'm writing this from a cafe). So it was a treat to read a recent article by Mona Mustafa and Michael Gold on managing 'temporal and physical boundaries among self-employed teleworkers.' The article reports on a number of practices that may be useful to anyone in this situation.

The researchers interviewed 20 self-employed teleworkers – people who work outside a formal office and engaged in non face-to-face work -  from France, the US and UK. Most respondents regarded having a clear separate physical location for work as necessary even though in the main no-one else was in the house when work took place. Respondents who began only quasi-separated soon became dissatisfied: for instance, one interviewee ended up introducing a room divider into her bedroom-work space: 'I did not want to be trying to go to sleep and kind of looking at my work, I wanted to have some kind of physical separation of work from sleep...'

The paper references Alan Felstead's continuum used to describe how work-life and home-life interrelate. At one extreme, these are totally detached and invisible to one another, and at the other they are fully assimilated. Mustafa and Gold found their interviewees’ insights suggest that this continuum might exist for three different features of the work-home divide: equipment, activity, and ambience. For example, a work area may be decorated distinctly from the rest of the house, and all work equipment may be restricted to that area - keeping these areas detached - yet the worker might use the area for chats with a visitor or to go through household accounts, thus blending activities.

Without a remote manager providing external pressure, many of the interviewees found it hard to get it across to family and friends that their hours were sacrosanct and that they were 'really' working. Separating space was important for creating boundaries, essentially consecrating a corner of home as not-Home-but-Work. A more insidious danger was a self-inflicted one: use of mobile technology.

We've reported on how this can undermine work-home distinctions in remote working employees, but the problems are compounded for the self-employed, who rely on client requests to get revenue and so may be reluctant to switch off in the fear of missing the call for a piece of work. Mobile technology therefore breaks down the boundaries that the self-employed may dearly depend on.

Mustafa and Gold conclude that the lack of strong temporal boundaries for the self-employed – working beyond 9 to 5; commissions potentially coming in at any time – makes it all the more vital to get the physical ones in place. They emphasise that a range of strategies may be workable, but that it is important to recognise that your workspace is defined – or left defined – by how you manage equipment, ambience/design, and how disciplined you are in assigning work and non-work to the appropriate locations. Just as their respondents do, 'make choices, experiment and adapt to the environment' that you have to make work, to do your work.

Mona Mustafa, & Michael Gold (2013). ‘Chained to my work’? Strategies to manage temporal and physical boundaries among self-employed teleworkers Human Resource Management Journal, 23 (4), 413-429

Further reading:
Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005). Changing Places of Work, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 

Transformational leaders craft the right emotional states. Positive people are already in them

At their best, leaders get something from their workforce that would have been impossible otherwise. Research on this 'transformational leadership' style suggests that it can inspire employees to more creative performance - such as coming up with new and useful products – as well as encouraging helping behaviours. However, these benefits aren't seen across every study. A new paper suggests one reason is that some people simply don't need what the transformational leader has to offer.

Phillip Gilmore's team proposed that transformational leaders are effective partly through influencing their followers’ feelings . This leadership style is defined by an 'intense emotional component', and its associated behaviours include offering personalised care and concern, demonstrating selflessness, generating optimism for the present and future,  and making people feel safe to think dangerously.

The researchers argue that these behaviours help get followers into a state of positive affect (PA), and that this is the reason for more creative and proactive actions. This is consistent with Barbara Frederickson's Broaden and Build theory, and widespread evidence that we explore, act more prosocially and find more possibilities when in a positive state.


But Gilmore's team asked a simple question: what if followers are feeling good already? They invited their sample - 212 employees in the research department of a China-based pharmaceutical company – to rate their trait positive affect: i.e. their day-on-day tendency to see the world positively and bring energy and curiosity to it. The sample also rated their supervisors in terms of their transformational leadership style, and in return supervisors rated their employees’ creative performance and tendency to perform citizen behaviours like helping others.

The researchers predicted that low PA trait scorers - those 1 SD below the average - would benefit from the emotional lift and encouragement to be open that sits at the heart of the transformational leader's focus, leading to more creative and citizen-like behaviours, but high PA trait scorers wouldn't need this, so their outputs would be unaffected. Analysis confirmed this pattern for creative performance. For organisational citizenship, the pattern was in the right direction but while low PA people showed more behaviours under a transformational leader, it didn't reach statistical significance.

The authors suggest that the employees who may benefit most from transformational leaders are those with lower trait PA, characterised by 'low energy, sluggishness, and melancholy.' But given that the transformational style is commonly adopted by extraverted types likely to have higher trait PA themselves, it's probable that they gravitate toward the like-minded, meaning they may spend more time preaching to the converted. Such leaders may need to roll up their sleeves and engage with those who share their mindset least, seeking to lift them into states of higher PA and reap the dividends this provides.

Phillip Gilmore, Xiaoxiao Hui, Feng Wei, Lois Tetrick, & Stephen Zaccaro (2013). Positive affectivity neutralizes transformational leadership’s influence on creative performance and organizational citizenship behaviors Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34, 1061-1075 DOI: 10.1002/job.1833

Further reading:
Wang, G., Oh, I.-S., Courtright, S. H., & Colbert, A. E. (2011). Transformational leadership and performance across criteria and
levels: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of research. Group & Organization Management, 36(2), 223–270.
 

Not getting much out of meetings? You may be masking your feelings too much

Organisations invest up to 15 per cent of their personnel budget on meetings, yet their ubiquity is a common source of frustration, partly validated by evidence that as many as a third of meetings simply aren't productive. As research catches on to the importance of this area, we are beginning to understand how practical factors like agendas and refreshments influence meeting quality. So what about the emotional side to meetings? According to a new study, meeting attendees who feel the need to mask their emotional reactions get less from the meeting itself, and are more likely to experience negative long-term outcomes such as burnout.

The phenomenon we are talking about is surface acting: managing emotions by expressing the 'right' one, even though you may be feeling the opposite. Surface acting is mainly studied in interactions with customers, but Linda Shanock and colleagues suspected that the quasi-public nature of the meeting makes it a perfect venue within which surface acting can manifest. After all, meetings involve a variety of events and decisions that can potentially affect your work future even more profoundly than a grumpy customer can.

Shanock's team predicted that because surface acting demands self-control and puts pressure on our resources, it can restrict the attention we put towards the actual goals of the meeting, making it less likely to get a satisfactory outcome than if we were not so distracted. Their data, collected online from 178 participants from a variety of roles with a range of meeting regularity (mean 2.5 per week, some less than once per week), suggested such a relationship existed. Participants rated items like 'I tend to fake a good mood when interacting with others in the meeting’ to produce a surface acting score, and this score was negatively associated with their rating of typical meeting effectiveness, in terms of networking, achieving work goals, or learning useful information.

Long term effects were also measured three months on. Participants who indicated higher surface acting had higher emotional exhaustion (or burnout) scores. The authors interprets this as consistent with previous findings that surface acting is frustrating and emotionally draining, and also consistent with the subjective feeling referred to as 'meeting recovery syndrome'. In addition, habitual surface actors were more likely to have an intention to quit the organisation entirely. Again this is linked to the harmful effects of surface acting.

We might conclude then, that individual tendencies toward employing surface acting during meetings harm meeting quality – at least in terms of meeting their own goals – and have long term negative consequences. However, I wouldn't go quite so far yet. The study authors advise caution before we attribute causality, while arguing that their two waves of data collection allow more confidence that surface acting is causing exhaustion and not vice versa. My concern, however, is that a hidden variable could be driving all of these factors. An organisation, team or employee in crisis is likely to be subject to more emotional exhaustion, higher turnover, ineffective meetings and more frequent incidents of breaking bad news that may call for stiff upper lips. Shanock’s team conducted one analysis that demonstrated a single factor explanation being a poorer fit to the data, but ‘in crisis’ is a catch-all for a collection of situational influences. I would like to see more work looking within organisations – even within teams – to see if two individuals in similar circumstances experience meetings differently due to their tendency to surface act.

Nevertheless the link between surface acting and negative outcomes in meetings draws our attention to this unremarked-upon phenomenon. Organisations should be concerned about members habitually holding in their feelings. As this study suggests, this may make them unhappy and even lead to their organisational exit, while getting less from meetings than they would do if not preoccupied with hiding their emotions. And more generally, openness is important for the frank and free exchange of information, making meetings more efficient and productive.

Linda R. Shanock, Joseph A. Allen, Alexandra M. Dunn, Benjamin E. Baran, Cliff W. Scott, & Steven G. Rogelberg (2013). Less acting, more doing: How surface acting relates to perceived meeting effectiveness and other employee outcomes Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 86, 457-476 DOI: 10.1111/joop.12037

Further reading:
Leach, D. J., Rogelberg, S. G., Warr, P. B., & Burnfield, J. L. (2009). Perceived meeting effectiveness: The role of design characteristics. Journal of Business and Psychology, 24, 65–76. doi:10.1007/s10869-009-9092-6

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