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.

A non-native accent makes it harder to get hired or funded

One in 33 people work in a country other than their birth country. In most cases, these people's communications carry a mark of their foreignness, in the form of a non-native accent. In a new  study, Laura Huang, Marcia Frideger and Jone Pearce investigate how accent amounts to a glass ceiling for high performing non-natives that prevents them from obtaining elite positions.

In a first experiment , 179 principally White and Asian students were asked to listen to audio recordings of a candidate interviewed for a middle management role, where the script was always the same. However, the photo on the candidate CV showed the candidate to be either White or Asian in appearance, and the accent of the actor playing the candidate on the audio was either native US, or non-native: Japanese-sounding for the Asian photo, Russian-sounding for the White photo. Afterwards participants rated the candidate on a number of measures, including their recommendation of whether to hire.

Participants gave stronger hiring endorsements to candidates with native accents, regardless of race. This alone could reflect a perception that the speakers were hard to understand (although their words were identical), or a gut animosity toward an outgroup member. But Huang’s team believed that people make a specific attribution about non-native accents – that the person lacks political skill. After all, past evidence suggests people associate these accents with lower social awareness and levels of persuasion, both necessary for politicking. And prejudices are safer expressed by criticising something as nebulous and subjective as political skill. As predicted, native-accent candidates were ranked as having more political skill, and this mediated the hiring recommendations. No such effect was found for ratings of communication, nor of collaboration, which one would expect to be affected if participants were generally denigrating outgroup members.

In a second experiment, the authors showed the effect to extend to investment decisions. Participants coded 90 videos of genuine pitches made by entrepreneurs at a funding event, only 30 of which led to offers of funding. Entrepreneurs with non-native accents were less likely to receive funding, with race again having no bearing. True to form, political skill as judged by the coders tracked the success of the pitches, whereas communication and collaborative skill did not. This study is especially important considering that ambitious non-natives anticipating glass ceilings in organisations may decide to start their own; this result suggests they may still face similar impediments.

The researchers conclude that  'the ambiguity and importance of political skill make it an attractive ostensibly meritocratic reason to block non-native speakers from executive positions'. They suggest that those faced with these impediments could anticipate, name, and allay these concerns, highlighting their political skills to decision-makers. And those decision-makers should themselves become conscious of this bias to prevent hasty attributions.

Huang L, Frideger M, & Pearce JL (2013). Political Skill: Explaining the Effects of Nonnative Accent on Managerial Hiring and Entrepreneurial Investment Decisions. The Journal of Applied Psychology PMID: 23937299

Further reading:
Gluszek, A. & Dovidio, J. F. (2010). The way they speak: A social psychological perspective on the stigma on nonnative accents in communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14: 214-237.
 

Resolutions 2012: Working together

In our final set of resolutions for 2012, we look at the foundation of any organisation, the need to work together.  The workplace has always lived or died by the ability of its members to  communicate, collaborate, and navigate tensions. Even oft-maligned areas like middle management make contributions by helping different parts of the organisation make sense of others, translating grand concepts to the practicalities of the shop floor and vice versa.


Get smarter about being creative together.

1. Encourage helping on creative tasks, but avoid that responsibility falling to the same people. Evidence suggests that soliciting and obtaining help can lead individuals to more creative outcomes. The catch is that help-givers show reduced creativity, perhaps because helping behaviours eat into their own time for exploring possibilities, or they become increasingly sure of their own perspective, narrowing their horizons.

2. Bring ideas up-front to a collective brainstorm. This isn't a new idea: there is substantial evidence that ideas can get lost in the mix of a freewheeling conversation driven by social factors. Recent research suggests another issue: early suggestions in the brainstorm can activate related concepts, leading to a domination of one class of suggestion at the expense of others. Ensuring you have surveyed your own mental landscape before exploring those of others' makes it more likely you can cover all the bases.

Responsibility and collaboration

3. Avoid diluting responsibility when setting goals. Research suggests we put in less effort to plan and monitor progress towards goals when we contemplate how others will step in if we fail. In this sense, strong support networks can have counterproductive effects: they let us off the hook. It's a good idea to make it clear that sources of support shouldn't be burdened with keeping things rolling, but are there to provide help with problems or when things are truly stuck.

4. Address lack of trust and bad feelings in teams to prevent things turning toxic. Evidence suggests that a key precursor to teams fracturing into subgroups is a low level of liking or trust. A group in this situation could continue to function as long as members nonetheless understood each other's perspectives; however, the factionalism would still persist, as this comes down to how people feel, rather than think, about each other.

5. Prevent teams going rotten by pairing members with non-team buddies. The dark side of trust: too much within a morally flexible team gives them the freedom to embark on dodgy behaviour. If trust isn't absolute - the team isn't fully "psychologically safe" - then such suggestions are more likely to be suppressed. One way to produce this might be to ensure team members have regular individuals outside the team that they are encouraged to speak to and confide in; peer mentoring or buddy systems would mean that unscrupulous ideas are never safe from some sort of exposure.

Ethics and power

6. Role model better moral perspectives to followers. When your team chuckles over that customer who couldn't get the hire car out of the garage you could join in, or stand apart and draw attention to the responsibility they should be feeling. Standing apart can be risky; being typical of the group helps leaders retain sympathy, especially after failures (external link, abstract only). But it's only by doing so that you are able apply influence to shift people to a new perspective. And the evidence shows that leaders who take this different perspective are accepted as more ethical by their teams.

7. Call out abuses of power to prevent bad seeds rising. It seems that casually breaking rules makes you appear more powerful to others, probably because the converse is true - powerful people can afford to break rules. As positions of power are apt to be given to those who appear ready for them, this attitude can help the wrong people to the top. If organisations encourage employees to challenge personal rudeness, skipping lunch queues, and the like, we can put the bad behaviour back in its box.

Leader support

If you're towards the top of your organisation, there's good you can do within and beyond it.

8. Commit to longer mentoring relationships to give the most to mentees. It can take time for mentoring relationships to yield value to those involved, especially when there are impediments to the relationship quickly forming, such as coming from different backgrounds or being a different gender. A few months isn't enough to get over that hump, so put yourself in the picture for longer.

9. Offer support to other leaders. According to one study, a CEO receives twice as much work-related support from having access to a CEO network as they do from their friends and families. Offering this support, through one to one conversations or informal groups, enables other leaders to engage in more critical leadership behaviours, such as mentoring their own subordinates; the help gets paid forward, so to speak.

How mixing work incentives put us on the horns of a dilemma

To encourage collaboration, many organisations structure incentives so that whole groups are rewarded – or not - based on their collective output. However, the groups-eye view allows for social loafing, where people shirk duties and assume team-mates will carry their load, so it's tempting to keep everyone accountable by adding incentives to individual performance too. Christopher Barnes and his colleagues set out to see just how these mixed incentives turn out in practice.

The researchers used a computer warfare simulation that examines behaviour in tight, demanding circumstances, where teams of four protect their territories by correctly identifying enemy intruders and then quickly destroying them. Team-mates used separate monitors, but shared a room and could freely converse. They recruited 304 management undergraduates, half of whom were given straightforward group incentives:  $10 each if their group outperformed a specified rival group.

The other teams were given mixed incentives: group performance could lead to $5 each , and individually outdoing a specified member of another team garnered another $5. Participants who were individually incentivised were hungrier for scores, being significantly faster at destroying intruders. However, heavily penalised illegitimate attacks ('friendly fire') were more common in these teams. This slump in quality suggests a drop-off in the flow of information typical in close teams, making it harder to detect and ward off errors as attention was turned towards delivering immediate personal objectives.

The study also examined direct helping behaviour, in terms of the efforts made to destroy intruders in team-mate territory rather than your own. This mattered, as each team had a high workload member who was constantly swarmed with as many radar blips as the others had put together. Participants with pure group-level incentives showed more helping behaviours than their mixed incentive counterparts.

Barnes and his colleagues suggest that mixed incentives  present a conflict between maximising individual interests and that of the collective, and the temptation is to focus on your own priorities, letting others hold the fort for you. Moreover, if you doubt that they will, you'd be even more of a sucker to vainly do so yourself. This amounts to a social dilemma akin to the prisoner's dilemma, which pressurises players towards self-serving behaviours.

I felt - and the authors do note - that the experimental paradigm relates best to 'task forces' whose urgent tasks necessitate trade-offs between different behaviours. I'm skeptical about generalising to workplaces which are more elastic: I may forgo reading my book over lunch in order to help you out, feel rewarded by this, and spend the afternoon contributing just as much or more to my own goals. Nevertheless, by plugging social dilemmas in to the research on incentives, this article highlights that tweaking incentives can result in tradeoffs, not simply the best of both worlds.

Barnes, C., Hollenbeck, J., Jundt, D., DeRue, D., & Harmon, S. (2010). Mixing Individual Incentives and Group Incentives: Best of Both Worlds or Social Dilemma? Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1611-1635 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309360845

Cynicism is bad for business

When someone we trust takes us for a ride, the bump back to earth is something we're unlikely to forget. But when we suspiciously reject an offer from someone else, we may never know what we've missed out on due to too little trust. Over time, such asymmetries in feedback can tip us toward an unwarranted cynical stance. It's clear that cynicism is as unhelpful a bias as naivety: it leads to guarded communication, reduced  sharing, and more self-serving biases, all of which may cause interactions to nosedive. A recent review by Chia-Jung Tsay and his team from Harvard Business School may help us understand cynicism and how it develops.

The review identifies some key triggers that enhance cynicism, including:

• Being new to negotiation - novices are more likely to believe that negotiation is always competitive;
• Thinking about the power of influence; for instance, knowledge that another party is a sales expert leads negotiators to suspect their offers more;
• Inclusion of a shady character - negotiating groups take the least trustworthy individual in the other group as the best indicator of group trustworthiness;
• Clear power asymmetries - people expect more misrepresentations from authorities with access to hidden information.

The authors point to a range of studies where participants reject offers that are in their rational best interest because of lurking cynicism that puts them off the whole venture. They warn us that the consequence is that "cynicism regarding others' motivations may become a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves both sides worse off than would otherwise be the case." Happily, the review concludes with some advice we might take on to chart a better course:

• perspective-taking to recognise your 'opponent' is an active party in negotiations, cultivating a "healthy skepticism" that considers a full range of motives on their part;
• act with integrity - it increases the likelihood the other party will;
• encourage a level playing field that minimises hidden information;
• foster repeated exposure to specific negotiators to build a history of trust that is costly to undermine.

Try the techniques out, you won't regret it. Trust me.

Tsay, C., Shu, L., & Bazerman, M. (2011). Naïveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts The Academy of Management Annals, 5 (1), 495-518 DOI: 10.1080/19416520.2011.587283

Offering pseudo opportunities for expression to employees leads to conflict and withdrawal of voice

Giving organisational members a say on work-related issues is well understood to heighten a sense of trust, respect and fairness. But a manager who invites opinions may not be planning to consider them. They may want to increase employee engagement through paying lip service to 'dialogue'; they may be an autocrat who feels obliged to appear consistent with the organisation's ethos; they may be reflexively doing something they were told to do at business school. So what happens when the opportunity to express is a case of 'pseudo voice' ... and the employees know it?

Gerdien de Vries, Baren Jehn and Bart Terwel investigated this issue by collecting survey data from 137 workers in a Dutch healthcare institution. Each participant rated the presence of two facets necessary for pseudo voice: did they have opportunity to express their voice? and did they believe their manager would disregard it? When the interaction between these was high, employees tended to give low scores to another measure, the extent to which they took opportunities to voice their opinions. In other words, perceiving deceit led to employees keeping their perspectives on issues to themselves.

The participants also rated the amount of intragroup conflict they experienced. De Vreis and colleagues suspected that when employees withdraw voice because they perceive the opportunity as a sham, conflict may increase: employees respond to this 'organisational illegitimacy' by refusing to play by the rules themselves, or squabble with colleagues in a displaced attempt to reclaim some kind of control. The data duly demonstrated this: participants who perceived pseudo voice experienced more team conflict than those who believed their managers were sincere.

Providing employees with voice is important; as well as its cohesive effects, it provides the organisation with a diversity of perspectives. As its authors note, this study is useful as it "provides a better understanding of the conditions under which offering voice opportunity to employees is likely to backfire" - namely, when they are seen as insincere and deceptive. It's notable that in this study, managers indicated a disregard for voice higher than employees suspected, suggesting if anything the employees were credulous rather than cynical towards management contempt for their opinions. But Machiavellian managers who think an unread suggestion box is a worthwhile gamble should beware; as this study shows, the costs to organisational functioning can be substantial.

(Thanks to reader Chris Woock for bringing this article to the Digest's attention.)

Vries, G., Jehn, K., & Terwel, B. (2011). When Employees Stop Talking and Start Fighting: The Detrimental Effects of Pseudo Voice in Organizations Journal of Business Ethics DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-0960-4

Managers in the middle shape change their own way

The middle child can be an awkward position in a family, and this is just as true in the workplace. Middle management juggle responsibilities to their reports and their managers, a feat trickiest when leadership decide that the organisation needs to change. Do they dutifully implement the bosses' plans, or cling to the manageable status quo? A recent qualitative study suggests this group take a third role, of ambivalent change agents.

Edel Conway and Kathy Monks of Dublin City University conducted interviews in the Irish Health Service, a 93,000-strong organisation, then undergoing a large top-down change. They asked 23 middle managers to talk about a major change event that they had experienced recently; around half chose the top-down strategic initiative while the others recounted a change they themselves had initiated.

The strategic initiative came in for criticism, with middle managers quick to point out issues like increases in workload, uncertainty about direction of travel, and a lack of ownership. Yet the same cohort were enthusiastic when discussing their own change ideas. They revealed a set of pragmatic tactics, such as beginning with a small number of enthusiastic staff as a catalyst within their department. They understood the importance of communications, reflecting the frustrations they felt when they were left in the dark. The general philosophy was noted by one participant:

I think the difference was that we said "we have an idea, can we talk to you about how it might work" Whereas with the other [top-down] one, it is: “we have an idea and this is how it is going to work.”

Some of this may simply reflect a tendency to prefer our own ideas to those imposed on us. But it certainly contests the idea that middle management are simply resistant to change. Through the nature of their in-between position in the organisation, Conway and Monks see them as ambivalent agents, able to see the many facets of a process of change, critiquing problematic ones and finding concrete ways to realise others.

The authors note that middle manager initiatives “were in many cases providing the solutions that the top-down change was intended to enforce: reductions in waiting lists, improvements in patient care.” And they warn that though the middle manager layer is a tempting target for reducing salary costs in pinched public services “wholesale elimination of such positions may have negative repercussions for the success of change initiatives.”

Conway, E., & Monks, K. (2011). Change from below: the role of middle managers in mediating paradoxical change Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (2), 190-203 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00135.x

Why do subgroups emerge? And how do groups stay productive if they do?

Group working can be sociable, fulfilling and effective, yet there are many ways for it to fall short of the ideal. A mass of similar opinions can lead to groupthink, rushing to agreement without questioning a line of thinking. But a group splintering into subgroups can also lead to problems. Subgrouping doesn't take much, as minimal group research has revealed, and it creates barriers across which information struggles to flow, due to confusion or outright hostility. A new study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior explains how two kinds of group integration – cognition and emotion – influence the impact of subgroups in rather different ways.

A team of researchers lead by Matthew Cronin looked at performance of MBA students in teams of five or six participating in a 14-week business simulation exercise. They surveyed the 321 participants twice, once about three weeks before the end and again at the close of the exercise, determining the extent to which the team had formed subgroups and how satisfied individuals felt about being part of the team.

The researchers also took two measures of integration: affective integration, probing how much they liked and trusted the rest of the team, and cognitive integration, how much common ground members share in terms of how they look at the world. They were interested in how these variables ultimately affected the group' satisfaction, measured in the final survey, and its performance, determined by the final company earnings it achieved.

The data revealed a vicious circle: less affective integration made it more likely that subgroups would emerge later, and more definite subgroups led to subsequent lower integration. Falling into this pattern meant team members felt less satisfied about being part of the team at the end of the event. Moreover, as subgroups emerged, team performance also suffered. But this effect was dampened when there was good cognitive integration. That is, when members are divided, possess diverging agendas and may not particularly like each other, they can still get the job done if they share a framework for looking at the world.

This study is valuable in untangling some of the distinct processes that contribute to healthy team working. In the words of the authors, cognitive integration can “prevent the harm that subgroups can potentially create”. But to stop the subgroups forming in the first place, it comes down to preventing that slide into us-vs-them and the lack of trust that it feeds and is fed by. Stakeholders who want a group to succeed should consider interventions, and make them early to avoid the rot setting in.

Cronin, M., Bezrukova, K., Weingart, L., & Tinsley, C. (2011). Subgroups within a team: The role of cognitive and affective integration Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 831-849 DOI: 10.1002/job.707