Business travel strain is higher for destinations very different from home

Anyone who's done a reasonable amount of business travel knows the strain it can put you under. According to a recent paper, that strain increases when the norms and beliefs of the travel destination are very different from those at home.

In the International Journal of Stress Management, Jase Ramsey details a newly developed instrument for measuring 'Institutional Distance' for business travellers. Institutional theory sees any environment as composed of three elements: the regulatory rules and laws that restrict behaviour; a set of normative traditions, habits and assumptions; and the cognitive categories that shape how things are perceived. Ramsey built these elements into a scale that probes  business travellers’ perception that their endpoint is different from home. Examples include differences between beliefs in profitability (cognitive) and willingness to put in overtime (normative).

After trialling and refining the scale, Ramsey took his new scale, combined with measures of travel and job strain, to Guarulhos International Airport to survey 457 business travellers, of whom just over half were Brazilian. Participants reported experiencing more strain for more institutionally distant endpoints. The travel strain measure, which covers air travel anxiety and anger together with airline (dis)trust, was most strongly related to perceptions of normative distance. This makes some sense as norms dictate whether to queue or crowd, banter with security officials or keep quiet, and so on. Meanwhile the job strain measure was more related to cognitive distance: this seems to describe the traveller's anxiety whether they are adequately equipped to understand the agendas and priorities of those they are meeting.

Two issues to note. Regulatory distance was actually associated with lower job strain, which was unpredicted and essentially unexplained. Additionally, by drawing all its data from the subjective judgments of  participants, the study is vulnerable to common method bias. For instance it may be that some travellers tend to over-estimate both perceptions of distance and of current stress. Nonetheless, this is strong initial work developing a scale that could be used  fruitfully to help us understand the psychological consequences of business travel. The hallmarks of a stressful situation are high stakes and demands that may exceed our resources to deal with them; I can't think of a better description of a three-stop hop to Singapore.

Jase R. Ramsey (2013). Institutional Distance: A Measurement Validation and Link to Job and International Business Travel Strain International Journal of Stress Management DOI: 10.1037/a0033253

Further reading:
DeFrank, R. S., Konopaske, R., & Ivancevich, J. M. (2000). Executive travel stress: Perils of the road warrior. Academy of Management Executive, 14, 58.

Is it better to enter negotiations with a team? It depends on your culture

Research suggests that negotiating parties tend to benefit when fielding a team rather than an individual. Generally, more heads are better than one, providing more ideas, helping to synthesise new information, correct each others biases and keep each other on target. Evidence suggests that even a single team operating in a negotiation (versus a solo counterpart) is sufficient to produce outcomes better for both parties. However, a research team led by Michele Gelfand has explored how universal this finding is, and provides data that suggests a different pattern in certain cultural contexts.

The research was conducted at universities in the United States and Taiwan. In each location, students (144 US, 100 Taiwanese) were recruited into a standard negotiation task, where parties are asked to decide how a new business will be run by finding agreement on four different factors. Each factor had various possible outcomes that led to different points awarded to the two parties, who sought to maximise this. Each negotiation was either between two pairs of negotiators, or between two single negotiators.

In the US sample, negotiations involving teams reached as positive outcomes as those helmed by individuals. (Note that teams didn't actually do better, as previous research would have suggested. The researchers suggest the anomaly may have occurred because the four-factor task was not cognitively demanding enough to benefit from many heads). But in the Taiwanese sample, worse collective outcomes were reached when groups were negotiating rather than individuals. The paper also presents an initial sample with smaller sample sizes that bears out this finding: specifically for Taiwanese negotiators, teams performed worse.

Neither national culture nor type of negotiation alone influenced performance, but their interaction did. Why? Gelfand's team decided to conduct this research because one effect of groups is norm amplification: a greater likelihood of behaving in line with your culture. This can be in sync with your goals or in tension with them. The researchers believed that individualistic norms found in the US encourage fighting for your corner and thus help push negotiations into hard but fruitful places. But collectivist norms that prize harmony and agreement may mean negotiations are handled tentatively and non-optimally; this is a component of Taiwanese culture. After the negotiation, all participants identified via a questionnaire how much they believed group harmony was important. Analysis showed that in the team conditions, was what was driving the performance difference between US and Taiwanese students was the higher harmony emphasis in the Taiwanese negotiations.

This research is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it helps us tease out the various effects teams have on negotiations. here raising the importance of norm amplification. It may be for instance that negotiations between friends also evoke a harmony norm, regardless of nationality, making teamwork possibly unwise. Secondly, this work illustrates 'the value of shifting the focus from static cultural differences to cultural dynamics'. By looking at behaviour across contexts, we arrive at a richer understanding of how cultures differ.

Michele J. Gelfand, Jeanne Brett, Brian C. Gunia, Lynn Imai, Tsai-Jung Huang, & Bi-Fen Hsu (2013). Toward a Culture-by-Context Perspective on Negotiation: Negotiating Teams in the United States and Taiwan Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (3), 504-513 DOI: 10.1037/a0031908

Predicting leadership young, and a cultural case study

More from the DOP 2012 conference, this time from the pen of Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist and the Digest.

Could C. Moustaka and colleagues, including Ian Bushnell at the University of Glasgow, be pioneering a new field of lifespan occupational psychology? Their poster asked ‘Leadership starts young: Do attachment style, personality and narcissism predict emergent leadership?’ Assessing late primary and early secondary school children during a visit to a science centre, the authors found that extraversion was the best single personality correlate of leadership, but that this was supported by experiences that may well include effective attachment. Aspects of so-called ‘narcissistic performance’, such as ‘I am very good at making other people believe what I want them to believe’, were associated with leadership performance on a ‘build a tower’ task.

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast: the tale of a nomadic storyteller’ was the intriguing title of a talk from Trixy Alberga, Head of Culture Change at the Highways Agency. Based on a comment made to her, the title reflected the belief that ‘culture is more powerful than strategy, since it reveals how things are actually done, whether or not this was intended’.

The Highways Agency, part of the Department for Transport, promotes the more effective use of the strategic road network by addressing the causes of congestion and unreliability. A large workforce, with mixed backgrounds including culture and preferences brought from previous organisations with powerful cultures, led to clear challenges for Alberga. She reported that engagement scores had suggested there is real room for improvement, especially in leadership at all levels; there were persistent rumours and some data about behaviours regarding diversity; and a greater number of grievances, complaints and sickness than desirable.

Alberga recounted her struggle to tackle the ‘multitude of conflicting stories’ around the organisation’s culture and systems. In attempting to agree a new vision, Alberga has worked towards ‘one story to unite all’. The result – ‘we take professional pride in keeping our roads moving safely’ – is currently the subject of debate, but it was fascinating to hear Alberga describe the occupational psychology behind the choice of each word. Supporting this was a range of interventions including a diary study of how people actually feel about the communications they receive; a ‘back to the floor’ scheme for senior management; and new performance data to include cultural features. ‘Still talking’, concluded Alberga, and these stories from someone making sense of a major and complex organisation were well worth hearing.

National culture and personality

Here's another report from the 2012 DOP conference.

If people of different nationalities score differently on a personality test, does this say something about national temperament, or simply that the test is biased? Prof Dave Bartram took us through an interesting approach to unknot this tricky issue: when “national differences” in personality also correlate with other measures, we can be more confident they are the real deal.

Bartram worked with a big data set - one million participants all told – but as the correlations were made between countries, not individuals, they involved just 31 cases, a modest sample in which to detect patterns. Correlating the Big 5 personality factors with the four Hofstede dimensions of national culture, he found that each personality measure correlated with one or more Hofstede dimension; for instance, Emotional Stability tended to be higher in cultures that are less masculine, more individualistic, more tolerant of ambiguity, and have less power distance (meaning less acceptance of unequally distributed power).

The next analysis was neat, correlating the cultural dimensions with the standard deviation of personality scores in each country – whether scores tightly clustered or showed large variation - rather than with their average levels. This made it possible to explore the idea that some countries are culturally “tighter” than others, giving less scope for individual difference. The analysis picked up several such effects. The higher the power distance of a culture, the more uniform its members were in terms of measures like agreeableness, conscientiousness or extroversion; the reverse was true for countries high on another measure, individualism. Even with this small data set (the 31 countries) it was possible to predict large amounts of the variance of Big 5 measures from the Hofstede scores, as much as 76% in the case of Emotional Stability.

Correlation of personality with culture ratings might not strike you as objective enough to produce a verdict; perhaps they are both subject to a common confound. But how about correlations with hard measures such as GDP, life expectancy, UNESCO education index and the UNDP human development index? These measures were all found to correlate with standard deviations of personality scores, for instance high GDP was related to larger ranges of openness to experience in the population.

This study doesn't answer whether national culture shapes typical personality or vice versa, although it's useful in honing hypotheses for investigating such matters. But this cascade of correlations does suggest that personality differences between countries, although they are small, reflect something real, rather than meaningless measurement error.

When self-promoting won't help you get a job offer

Impression management is a tactic often used by interviewees hoping to boost their chances of getting the job. One common tack is self-promotion: emphasising your successes and attributing them to your personal qualities rather than to context or good luck. Research shows this is generally a sound strategy. But not always; a team from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland has shown this is conditional on the culture that your recruiter comes from.

Marianne Schmid Mast and her team gathered 84 recruiters - HR directors, assistants, and recruitment experts – to review a video interview and express how likely they would be to take on the candidate. Half of the recruiters saw a video where the actor used self-promotion heavily: he attributed successes to internal factors and failures to external ones, and used a quick fluent speech style, with plenty of eye contact and relaxed posture. As an example, he used statements like “I think that I am excellent in everything I do”, which makes me think I saw him on The Apprentice a while back.

The other participants saw the actor in modest mode, making the opposite type of attributions, peppering their speech with pauses and disclaimers like “I'm not sure”, and sitting tensely while fidgeting. Unsurprisingly, the participants rated the actor significantly differently in each condition on measures of modesty and self-promotion – the latter pleasingly including a component of 'pretentiousness'. The bare facts of the situation remained unchanged in each script, making the candidate equally prepared for the technical demands of the job in both cases.

Overall, the self-promoting candidate received higher ratings of likelihood of hiring, in line with previous work. But there was a further layer to the study: participants had been gathered from two different countries, Switzerland, which is characterised by features such as diplomacy and modesty, and Canada, which is an 'Anglo' culture composed of people likely to consider themselves as unique, proactive, and forceful. The Canadians were enthusiastic for the self-promoter, on average showing a 54% likelihood of hiring him, compared to 21% for the modest candidate. But the Swiss, generally less eager to hire, were only 29% likely to hire the self-promoter, similar to their 24% ratings for the modest candidate.

The recruiters may have shared a language (French) but were divided by their culture in how they responded to self-promotion, valuing it less if it was discordant with their own norms. This has relevance for two groups: firstly, candidates should consider cultural context before committing to specific impression management tactics. Secondly, organisations that recruit globally should consider that recruitment in one country may be driven by culturally-desired qualities that don't translate to the country where the applicant may end up. The study videos used recommended 'behavioural interview' questioning, yet still these discrepancies were found, suggesting that organisations should ensure a shared sense of what 'good' looks like in candidate style.

Schmid Mast, M., Frauendorfer, D., & Popovic, L. (2011). Self-Promoting and Modest Job Applicants in Different Cultures Journal of Personnel Psychology, 10 (2), 70-77 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000034

Be yourself, or else: how fun is used in high-control workplaces

Call centres are a world of call stats, cubicles, and scripted encounters, yet in recent years some companies have promoted a credo of fun and individuality. A new article investigates one company to see how deep these currents run. It portrays a darker side to the fun workplace.

Peter Fleming and Andrew Sturdy conducted their qualitative study with an embodiment of the new trend, an Australian call centre they dub ‘Sunray’. Its telephone agents, age averaging at a youthful twenty-three, are expected to live by the 3Fs: Focus, Fun, and Fulfilment, and are continually encouraged to “be yourself”. The company strongly promotes diversity, notably regarding sexual orientation, and dyed hair, piercings and sexy clothing are encouraged. The company promotes itself akin to a permanent party, running training events that involve drinking and scoping out sexual conquests, and extends this atmosphere into working hours, via fancy dress events and a culture of dating and flirting.

So far, so fabulous. But Fleming and Sturdy went underneath the exterior through group and one-to-one interviews with thirty-three telephone agents and managers. Though some were positive, with around half endorsing the 3Fs and a be yourself policy that let them feel “free to be who we are”, a dissenting picture also emerged.

The chief complaints were that the freedoms could be limiting, and the authenticity...inauthentic. According to employees “you have to be able to see the lighter side of things… you have to be bouncy and willing to try anything”; failing to make it to the fun away days could result in penalties. Others felt that claims for a lack of hierarchy simply didn't hold up, and wished managers would “simply tell me the truth”.

According to the authors, these tensions emerge because the claims don't line up with the reality of how call centres operate. Like many industries, their roots are squarely in the command-and-control structure of the military. Sunray exemplifies this through its technological controls like call monitoring, bureaucracies such as strictly defined targets, and cultural edicts that specify “how we do work here”.

As Fleming and Sturdy see it, these stringent controls work to alienate and sap employees, which can lead to them disengaging or even resisting. The solution for these workplaces has been to divert attention from these controls with a parade of exciting things: cleavage, piercings, the chance to bring your surfboard into work. As the authors put it, “employees enjoyed liberties mostly around the work task...rather than so much in the task itself”. Indeed, one HR manager made the telling admission that “we need to make up for the kind of work that is done here”.

By this account, the company does alright, having their monotonous, wearing work completed, and escaping any real backlash by buying the employees off with a facsimile of social life. The young employees do less well. As we see, some are disillusioned that the promises don't line up with reality. Others may be drawn into dependency, as they've been encouraged to draw their social world from the same well as their pay-check. Work equals friends, romance, even identity; for the company, it's ultimately 'just business'. And overall, the individuality culture discourages ways of thinking that cultivate solidarity across the workforce.

It would be interesting to see follow-up work to evaluate some of these claims, such as to look at burnout rates and the consequences of overlapping work/leisure social networks. As it is, the authors suggest that organisations should tackle the root issues of alienating work, by reducing controls, introducing some practical freedoms and making the work more intrinsically rewarding. Until then, they conclude, “the 'humanized' call centre remains some way off.”



Fleming, P., & Sturdy, A. (2010). 'Being yourself ' in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control Human Relations, 64 (2), 177-200 DOI: 10.1177/0018726710375481

Division of Occupational Psychology conference report

I'll close up our first full month here at the Occupational Digest with the first of a few reports on the Division's annual conference which ran 12-14^th of January this year.

I was engaged and provoked by Timothy Judge's Myers Lecture, challenging “The illusions under which we labour”. His sights were on the “situational premise”: the idea that environment and context matter in explaining human behaviour, thus allowing occupational psychology to fixate on culture, recommend interventions, and believe in change. Judge examined this assumption via a wide-ranging tour of findings from behavioural genetics, such as the heritability of altruism, together with evidence of how humans quickly adapt to a new status quo; key examples here included how both marriage and lottery wins have only a transient impact on your levels of life satisfaction.
Judge ended by suggesting that because people are difficult to change, we should place more focus on recruiting the right type of people, redesigning jobs to fit people and leveraging strengths rather than trying to fix weakness; all laudable activities, I feel, and each of them currently practised in the profession (the first of those frankly dominates the industry!). The conclusion itself was less convincing, and I think he would have to be armed with a more systematic argument, based on evidence that tied directly to the methods and objectives in question, in order for organisational psychologists (and educators, therapists, army trainers...) to abandon their belief that individuals can change to become more effective at accomplishing goals.
A later talk by Steve Woods looked at ethnic differences in ability test scores. Occupational test users are sensitive to 'adverse impact' - disproportionately favouring people from one group over another – so this topic has been well researched, including using meta-analysis, which looks for patterns over a set of studies. Woods cites Roth et al’s (2001) meta-analysis which suggests a difference in means between black and white test-takers of up to 1D: loosely, this means a squarely average white candidate would score similarly to a black candidate who was sharper than nearly 85% of the black population. Evidence suggests the difference genuinely reflects group differences in ability, rather than issues with testing, with researchers disputing whether the effect reflects innate differences or cultural ones such as access to education.
Meta-analyses tend to collapse all the available data to ensure their overview is as authoritative as possible. Woods points out that by separating out the data instead, we can see whether the difference alters over time. This would give credence to the cultural cause, as genetic changes at that scale would be negligible, but cultural changes, especially for disadvantaged communities often targeted by public policy, can be more substantial. Woods and colleagues were interested in scores that reflected ‘g’, the general factor of intelligence, and considered only scores from tests that measured two or more of its subcomponents (eg numerical and verbal ability). The samples included were healthy Americans over the age of sixteen from ninety-one different samples, resulting in 1.1 million test scores, grouped into four decades from the 60s to 90s.
One unexpected finding was a spike in D, the black-white difference, when you move from the 60s to 70s. This isn't predicted by either distributional or cultural accounts, but makes sense if you think of the period before civil rights as one of limited opportunity for black people. Consequently, test taking would only be available to fairly exceptional individuals, ‘restricting the range’ to those likely to score better. Putting this decade aside, the overall trend was for a shrinking of D, closing down to around .3. Woods argues that this data changes the question from 'if' to 'how much' of the variance is due to cultural and developmental factors.
The talk was interesting especially in the light of Tim Judge’s keynote; here we saw evidence on fixed vs mutable differences in an organisational context, and, here at least, the score was culture one, genes nil.

Details about the 2011 DOP conference: http://www.bps.org.uk/dop2011/