Year in Review: Bad Behaviour, Bullies, and Borderline Bosses

Continuing our review of work psychology in 2013, one trend concerned the shadow side of the workplace. Psychopaths, it seemed, were looming around every corner, ruining organisations left, right and centre. The truth? Well it so happened that we covered the biggest review to date of workplace psychopathy research. It tentatively suggests relatively higher incidence of psychopathic traits in senior positions. Psychopathy is associated with more passive leadership styles, more unethical decision-making in business contexts and prioritisation of innovation over nurturing of team members. The overall consequences of this on organisational performance are hard to detect, although the effect is likely to be detrimental rather than beneficial (see link for all these findings).

More recent data suggests that, despite the impressions that you might get from watching too many reality shows, entrepreneurialism isn't boosted by psychopathy - although some elements may overlap. And an overview on bad leadership suggests that, never mind psychopathy, there are all manner of personality disorders that may afflict those at the top and may explain those occasional, but spectacular, high level flame-outs.

Moving away from darkness in leadership, we covered some other areas of antagonism. Qualitative research points to some of the holes we need to plug to make sure anti-bullying policies work. We discovered that in environments where racial slurs are thrown about, those who maintain the culture through their silence tend to be not just avoidant but tacit supporters: they tend to be those members of the majority race who report more investment in their racial identity and in the domination of out-groups.

We discovered how an advisor who declares a conflict of interest may be benefiting from a kind of sneaky psychological trick. Instead of making it easier for the customer to judge the true worth of the options, declaring an interest reveals to the customer that the advisor would lose out if they don't take the recommendation, adding a subtle pressure, especially in a face-to-face discussion with a trusted advisor.

We also found how skewed perceptions lead to premature evaluations of women as combative, when similar conflicts between two men are considered as just part of normal work interaction. This may be the origin of those 'Queen Bee' articles that circulate from time to time, and the lack of corresponding male stereotypes (King Kongs?).  Speaking of perceptions, we were also introduced to the idea of the 'sexual performance' at work – the flirt-for favour, for example - and how common it’s likely to be. Those who are marked out as 'sexual operators' may simply have fallen foul of the organisation's unspoken limits.

How can we challenge these things? The research suggests that a single voice can make a change: for instance, if the seller in a negotiation is aiming for win-win outcomes, both sides will end up better off, even if the buyer is only in it for themselves. And some people are more naturally inclined to make such a difference, such as the subset of conscientious people who put duty, rather than personal achievement, as the priority for how they operate. These people are more likely to speak out to achieve genuine organisational change.

One change that might be fruitful is to reduce the control that controlling people have. Evidence suggests that more autocratic people can dampen down collaboration, but only if their injunctions carry formal weight. Otherwise, people are able to muddle forward.

Regardless of the specifics around psychopathy, organisations should continue to take care with their leadership, mindful of the wealth of derailing qualities that can lead to disaster. Meanwhile, dysfunction in employees can be in the eye of the beholder. And speaking out is key for organisational improvement - on specific, charged issues such as racism, as well as broader concerns.

Implementation is the issue when standing up to bullying

Workplace bullying has been estimated to cost the UK £13.75 billion annually. As a consequence, more and more organisations are putting into place anti-bullying policies to protect their employees and themselves. However, recent research explores potential gaps between policy and implementation in organisations, using a case study that digs beneath the official position.

Chris Woodrow and David Guest investigated a London-based hospital, high performing with strong clinical results. Analysis of the formal policies on bullying revealed them to be comparable to a benchmark that Woodrow and Guest built from a literature review of best practice policy. The organisation endorsed a zero-tolerance to bullying, provided informal routes for managers to deal with complaints together with a formal resolution system, and additional support for victims such as counselling and a bullying helpline. The hospital had even run an anti-bullying initiative to reinvigorate action on the issue a few years before the study commenced. Yet reported rates of bullying were at or above the national average. Between 2005 and 2008 they rose by 20%, a steeper climb than the national average; the invigorating initiative took place in midst of this in 2006.

Woodrow and Guest used data from staff attitude surveys taken in 2006 and 2007, each with around 400 participants. The bullying rates documented in this varied widely by hospital division, with 11% of the staff in one division reporting bullying in 2007, versus 35% at the other extreme. This range showed no obvious relation to the type of work involved, and didn't reflect the quality of bullying policies, as every division fell under those of the hospital. This suggested a factor may be local implementation, and a regression analysis added substance to this: divisions with less bullying reported that their managers offered more support and that they perceived more  effective action from the organisation.

The researchers were interested in going beyond the quantitative data to find out what this looks like in the organisation, so they interviewed twelve individuals with experience of bullying, including managers who were requested to take action in bullying cases. These accounts shed light on how implementation can stall or fail. Individuals with complaints described their desire to take a formal route meeting with discouragement from managers concerned the situation might reflect badly on them. Managers reported being leant on to go-slow the process: one manager commenting 'Do my senior managers think that I’m doing a bad job because I’m sticking to policy?' Additionally, failures could also be the result of poor quality implementation, such as a manager poorly equipped to give evidence in an investigation leading to delays and preventing timely resolution.

This study is part of broader recent research suggesting that HR implementation is currently of more concern than the presence and content of policies. Woodrow and Guest's regression suggests that manager and organisational commitments against bullying have an influence - via their effects on bullying levels - upon employee stress levels, as well as their intention to leave (2006 regression) and job satisfaction (2007). These are crucial organisational outcomes. The authors suggest that organisations ensure that senior management match their behaviour to the words of the policies they endorse, and that line management provides appropriate support, including via the presence of HR individuals such as business partners.

Chris Woodrow, & David E. Guest (2013). When good HR gets bad results: exploring the challenge of HR implementation in the case of workplace bullying Human Resource Management Journal DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12021

Further reading:
Beswick, J., Gore, J. and Palferman, D. (2006). Bullying at Work: A Review of the Literature, Buxton: Health and Safety Laboratory.
 

Workplace psychopathy: what consequences does it have?

Continuing our report on Smith and Lilienfeld's review of workplace psychopathy (part one here), we turn to the consequences it has - for leadership, for the organisation, and for unethical, even criminal behaviour.

Leadership effects

Is psychopathy behind 'dark-side' and maladaptive approaches to leadership? Last post discussed a study by Babiak et al study looking at rates of psychopathy. The study also collected 360 data, and that data suggests that high scorers tended to be seen as weaker in supporting their team. However, they were also seen as more innovative than lower scorers. Some research suggests that start-up entrepreneurs tend to have stronger psychopathic traits, consistent with this, but a recent study counters this, suggesting that once core entrepreneurial traits are taken into account, psychopathy doesn't assist in innovation-related entrepreneurial outcomes.

Turning to research on leadership style, a study with management students suggests those who score higher in psychopathy are more likely to use passive leadership styles rather than transformational leadership. However, monomethod issues apply here. Another interesting study called for presidential historian experts to rate features of various presidents. Poorer presidential performance was associated with the Fearless Dominance subscale, and the Self-Centered impulsivity subscale with problems like tolerating unethical behaviour in subordinates and events like empeachment.

As you can see, a range of effects have been observed, but what the literature could really do with is corroboration of specific effects, preferably via replication.

Organisational consequences

Psychopaths are toxic for organisations, undermining them and making them less effective. Right? The review reaches a surprising conclusion here. Drawing on a meta-analysis looking at workplace performance and counterproductive work behaviours, it concludes that while there may be an effect, it appears very weak. One trend in the data was that psychopathy had an even weaker affect on work outcomes when found in positions of authority, running counter to the concept that 'nasty' traits are survivable but lead to senior derailment.

Recent single studies suggest that aggressive negotiation tactics such as threats and manipulation are associated with psychopathy directly or with dark triad trait scores (this includes psychopathy alongside related constructs such as narcissism and machiavellianism).
Again, these studies (and some of those in the meta-analysis suffer from the mono-method flaw which can artificially inflate findings.

This all suggests that at best, the impact of psychopathic traits on measurable CWB and performance is not as ruinous as popular reports may suggest.

Unethical and criminal behaviour

Ok, maybe not ruinous, but how about unethical? There is some evidence for this. Global psychopathy scores in students are associated with more willingness to take an unethical route in response to a hypothetical work dilemma. And MBAs with lower levels in Kohlberg's cognitive moral development and take a subjectivist approach that places personal values over universal moral ones were on average higher in psychopathy, albeit almost entirely due to a single subscale rather than higher ratings across the construct.

Moving from hypothetical decisions, another study found that employees with managers they rated higher on psychopathic traits believed their organisation showed less social responsibility and committment to employees. However, this again falls foul of mono-method issues.

What about perpetrators of white collar crime? This is where popular accounts really bandy about connections, with prominent criminals such as Bernie Madoff depicted as "poster boys for successful corporate psychopathy".
Studies looking at undergraduates  suggests that willingness to countenance white collar criminal acts is associated with psychopathy traits.

But when it comes to direct evidence, there is very little. One modestly sized sample of encarcerated individuals with either white collar, non-white collar or a mixture of convictions was assessed on a range of psychopathy sub-scales, but none of the hypothesised differences were observed. While other subscores did differ across different combinations of groups (e.g.,  (Machiavellian Egocentricity for the White+Mixed was higher than the non-White-collar) but these non-predicted findings are exploratory.

Conclusion

Smith and Lilienfield conclude that 'current evidence that psychopathy is tied to negative outcomes in the workplace is suggestive, but not conclusive'. I find the review important in reminding us that cruel, selfish or aggressive acts don't require the perpetrator to be psychopathic, and asking us to be a little more careful in attributing the ailments of the business world to one specific condition.

Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 204-218 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007

Workplace psychopathy: the knowns and unknowns

Workplace psychopathy was an obscure, unknown issue prior to the mid-1990s, but hundreds of popular accounts have been published since then. A measured review by Sarah Francis Smith and Scott Lilienfield gets to the heart of what we really know about the phenomenon. There is a lot to cover so we're publishing about it in two posts.

Psychopathy? It's complicated

From the off, the authors raise how complicated the issue is. Many studies rely on psychopathy and outcome data from single sources, leaving open the possibility of both rater bias - the manager whose performance and 'psychopathic tendencies' are rated by the same hypercritical individual - and halo effects, where a rater sees their organisation as ethical because their boss is so personally pleasant. Where possible I've flagged this as a monomethod issue.

Moreover, psychopathy is measured and defined in many ways, using approaches that are variously clinical or occupational. One durable distinction is between primary psychopathy - the emotional and personality traits of an individual - and secondary psychopathy, concerned with behaviours. The primary are arguably key, as a restrained psychopath can choose to refrain from unproductive behaviours.

How common in business and in leaders?

A commonly cited figure of 3% prevalence in managers versus 1% in the general population is based on a single study, so is there other evidence out there to corroborate higher psychopathy in business? Yes, but it's still tentative.

One study compared a small executive sample to larger psychiatric and forensic populations, and did indeed find the executives scored higher on specific scales that were argued to relate to psychopathy. However, the scales were designed to measure other traits like narcissism, not psychopathy per se, using a measure that was not well-validated. Another study reported that commerce majors showed higher psychopathic traits, but not behaviours, than other undergraduates.

Perhaps the clearest support comes from Babiak et al's (2010) finding that psychopathic traits are higher within a corporate sample relative to community controls, and that high scorers tended to have higher executive positions.

So psychopathy may be more common in business and even leadership, although we don't yet have comprehensive indications of how much. But does it matter?

We'll find out tomorrow.
Update: see part two here.

Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 204-218 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007

How disclosing conflicts of interest can pass the burden to the customer

 

We habitually consult experts to advise on personal and professional matters, but their recommendations can be coloured by conflicts of interest. Commonly advisors are required to disclose conflicts: armed with this information, the consumer can account for bias before making decisions. But evidence shows it's hard to make such adjustments. And new research by Sunita Sah, George Loewenstein and Daylia Cain suggests moreover that disclosure may make consumers feel obliged to follow the advisor's best interests.

Their series of studies collected data using a mobile van offering people chances to win prizes - from gift vouchers to chocolate bars - through a dice-roll lottery. They could choose from lotteries A or B, where overall A's prizes were slightly but evidently better. Before comitting, the chooser met another participant, the 'advisor', who handed them a written recommendation of which lottery to pick. In most cases, the advisor had a conflict of interest - they would also get a go on a lottery, but only if the chooser selected the weaker lottery B. The chooser then made their selection, rolled the dice and left; the advisor would then get their turn, if warranted. Participant numbers ranged from 124 to 278 for individual studies.

In the first study, 53% of choosers took lottery B after merely receiving the advice to do so. When the advisor's recommendation also included text revealing their conflict of interest, compliance advice rose to 81%. Yet in both conditions participants rated lottery A as more attractive (this was consistent across studies). A replication examined whether relatively low stakes were driving this abandonment of self interest, by doubling the prizes and recruiting students with presumably lower income as participants. Without disclosure, only 36% took the recommended B, but disclosure took the proportion to 82%.

Was this an altruistic act, choosers electing to be generous and go on with their day? Unlikely: the post-study survey suggested that after compliance, choosers were less happy, sensed more pressure and felt more uncomfortable about the decision, which doesn't suggest general altruism. Instead, the researchers liken this to a 'panhandler effect', where money is passed over due to discomfort over a face to face refusal. A third experiment investigated this: here, when the chooser learned of the conflict from the advisor compliance stood at 90%. When the information came instead from a 3rd party (embedded in the initial instructions) their compliance dropped to 72%; it's less awkward if you're not told directly by the person who hopes to gain, even if they know you know. And if the 3rd party info also stated the advisor was oblivious that you had been made aware of the conflict, the compliance plummet to 47%. This suggests that when choosers comply, it's partly to avoid the perception that they have betrayed the advisor's interests. Without the shared knowledge - I know that you know I stand to benefit - they're happy to disinherit them.

My only quibble with this argument is that in the final, 47% compliance condition, I might personally view the advisor as shiftier. Holding secret information, I may spend the interaction expectantly waiting for them to 'fess up to the conflict of interest - something the experiment actually prohibits. When they don't, I might feel like punishing them by going against their wishes. However, the post-survey scores suggest that there was no significant difference between how much advisors were liked and trusted in this condition and the other disclosure conditions, which goes some way to minimise this concern.

Overall, disclosure leads to more compliance with the advisors interests, especially when disclosure is face to face. This happens even though trust in the advisor drops, and choosers are less happy with the situation. This suggests that the tactic of disclosure practiced simply may be unhelpful for the chooser and ultimately less conducive to the relationship overall. Sah and colleagues agree that disclosure remains important and necessary, but suggest research into smarter ways to deliver it, as well as alternative approaches when conflicts of interest arise.

Sah, S., Loewenstein, G., & Cain, D. (2013). The burden of disclosure: Increased compliance with distrusted advice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104 (2), 289-304 DOI: 10.1037/a0030527

Further reading:

 Paul M Healy, Krishna G Palepu, (2001). Information asymmetry, corporate disclosure, and the capital markets: A review of the empirical disclosure literature, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Volume 31, Issues 1–3, September 2001, 405-440, DOI10.1016/S0165-4101(01)00018-0.
(link to pdf)

The dark side of behaviour at work

(We're reporting from this month's Division of Occupational Psychology conference at the Digest. This post is by Dr Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist, and will also feature in that magazine's March issue. @jonmsutton / @psychmag)

The face that launched a thousand peer-reviewed journal articles beamed down from the stage as self-confessed ‘well adjusted workaholic’ Professor Adrian Furnham (University College London) began his keynote. Quips were in ready supply, but Furnham is much more than a crowd pleaser: this was a talk steeped in history and theory.

According to Furnham, there are 70,000 books in the British Library with leadership in the title. But most leaders don’t succeed, they fail, with a base rate of bad leadership collated from various studies of 50 per cent. This is due to incompetence (not having enough of something, or being promoted beyond the job they are good at), or derailment (having too much of a characteristic, such as self-confidence, or creative quirkiness). It’s this later problem that Furnham focused on, identifying three root causes: troubled relationships, a defective or unstable sense of self; and ineffective responses to change.

Furnham highlighted three fundamental issues. Firstly, organisations ‘select in’, for the traits they think will help an employee be a success, rather than ‘selecting out’ for what is going to cause problems. Secondly, it’s assumed that competencies are linearly related to success. And thirdly, employers fail to see the dark side of bright side traits and the bright side of dark side traits. For example, what if a self-confident leader pursues a risky course of action built on overly optimistic assumptions?

How do we characterise what makes a leader destructive? Furnham feels that the early ‘trait’ approach to leadership failed because ‘the list of traits grew remorselessly, leading to confusion, dispute and little insight’. Trait theory also ignored the role of both subordinates and situational factors. This oversight was rectified in the work of Tim Judge – who Furnham called ‘the best living occupational psychologist’ (see Digest coverage here)– which showed the ‘toxic triangle’ of destructive leaders, susceptible followers and conducive environments. The influence of the model was clear in Furnham’s own consideration of the ‘Icarus syndrome’. High flyers fall through poor selection, flawed personality, no or poor role models, and because they are rewarded for toxicity in the organisation.

Furnham then cantered through some typical personality disorder problems in plain English: arrogance, melodrama, volatility, eccentricity, perfectionism etc. I was struck by the simple, neo-psychoanalytic conception of Karen Horney from 1950: people move away from others, towards them or against them (something covered recently). Furnham outlined some just published research on the differences between private and public sector dark side traits, with private sector more likely to move against others through manipulation or creating dramas whereas public sector managers were more likely to show moving away traits such as withdrawal, doubt, or cynicism.

A series of his own studies, generally with huge samples, elucidated sex differences in dark side traits and their relationships with career choice and success. From all this, Furnham distilled some key implications for selection and recruitment. Consider using ‘dark side’ measures; beware excessive self-confidence and charm; do a proper bio-data and reference check; and get an expert to ‘select out’ for you. As for management, the message was to beware fast-tracking wunderkinds, and to seek a mentor, coach or at least a very stable deputy to keep these individuals on the rails.

‘Just as a good leader can do wonders for any group, organisation or country,’ Furnham concluded, ‘a bad one can lead to doom and destruction. Understanding and developing great leaders is one of the most important things we can do in any organisation.’

Furnham, A., Hyde, G., & Trickey, G. (2013). Do your Dark Side Traits Fit? Dysfunctional Personalities in Different Work Sectors Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1111/apps.12002


Further reading:
Timothy A. Judge, Ronald F. Piccolo, Tomek Kosalka, The bright and dark sides of leader traits: A review and theoretical extension of the leader trait paradigm, The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 20, Issue 6, December 2009, Pages 855-875, ISSN 1048-9843, 10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.09.004.
Pdf freely available here

Psychopathic traits won't give an edge to entrepreneurs

Most people in business would agree that the dog-eat-dog mentality most celebrated in the 1980s has passed its high water mark, giving ground to cultures that value collaboration and mutual benefit. Yet shows such as The Apprentice still depict ruthlessness and uncompromising nature as the hallmark of the business success, and fictional characters from Gordon Gecko to Patrick Bateman further the idea that value-creators are a little psychopathic. Investigation of the 'dark-side' traits of leadership has started to focus on this notion: a recent report describes ongoing research suggesting these traits are present in start-up entrepreneurs, and may even be helpful to their success.  This matters if it were so, and a London-based team of Reece Akhtar, Gorkan Ahmetoglu, and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic have just published research into this issue, canvassing 435 individuals through an online survey.

The research looked at entrepreneurialism both as a personal trait, using the Measure of Entrepreneurial Tendencies and Abilities (META), and in terms of involvement in entrepreneurial activities. In this study, this was defined widely to include achievements and activities that relate to the researchers core definition of entrepreneurialism: innovation, value creation, and taking opportunities. So success included not only selling ideas and inventing products, but organising events and helping create social institutions.

Participants also responded to Levenson's self-report scale on psychopathic tendencies. The team predicted that different facets of psychopathy might mean different things for entrepreneurialism. Primary psychopathy involves narcissism, manipulation of others and low empathy, and was measured by agreement with items such as one beginning 'success is based on the survival of the fittest'. This was predicted to facilitate entrepreneurialism through competition and exploiting opportunities. Secondary psychopathy, meanwhile, involves lifestyle behaviours such as impulsivity or parasitic dependence, and anti-social behaviour such as criminal activity and recidivism. Given how these traits look likely to create more problems than they solve and alienate others in the process, they were predicted to actually impede entrepreneurial activities.

Akhtar and his colleagues built a statistical model of the data (including demographics and other basic controls) to determine what factors mattered when others were taken into account. META had a strong relationship of .72 with the overall entrepreneurial activity of the individual. Secondary psychopathy turned out to have no significant relationships to entrepreneurial traits (META) or activities. Meanwhile, primary psychopathy - that Darwinian 'me-first' mentality - was moderately linked to META ratings. But once META was taken into account, primary psychopathy had little bearing on whether an individual had entrepreneurial achievements or activities. The only exception that was found was in one sub-domain - building and benefiting society - and this relationship was negative, which is in this case makes intuitive sense.

This study suggests that for a broad definition of entrepreneurialism, the perception that psychopathic traits are needed is a false one. It may be that they can occur alongside other more pertinent traits, but their quintessentially psychopathic elements don't make for a better entrepreneur: they can even undermine their effectiveness. It may yet be true that entrepreneurs value getting ahead over getting along, but far from fetishising these dark-side traits, we should treat them with appropriate caution. Apprentice-makers, take note.

Akhtar, R., Ahmetoglu, G., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2013). Greed is good? Assessing the relationship between entrepreneurship and subclinical psychopathy Personality and Individual Differences, 54 (3), 420-425 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.10.013

Driven away by hypocrisy: when endorsing a caring workplace backfires for leaders

Interpersonal justice - treating others with care and respect - is something every organisation seeks to cultivate. Such a climate can lead to favourable team interactions,  better customer service and higher employee engagement, and managers can play their part by communicating standards and the importance of such behaviour. But can an expectation for interpersonal justice backfire? What about when the manager demonstrates they have no interest in following it themselves? This question led Rebecca Greenbaum, Mary Mawritz and Ronald Piccolo to examine the impact when an act of managerial mistreatment is also seen as a hypocritical one.

Hypocrisy has only recently garnered attention in the examination of 'dark-side' leadership behaviours. Also referred to as word-deed misalignment, it specifically denotes occasions where leaders espouse rules that they regularly break themselves - distinct from other types of immoral but at least consistent behaviours. According to Behavioural Integrity Theory, employees seek to predict and control future encounters with the leaders who hold power over them, so a hypocritical manager is a real issue, being hard to predict on the basis of their words.

The team surveyed 312 participants from a range of industries, the questionnaire tackling how much each experienced supervisory undermining (if they 'Talk bad about you behind your back), Leader Hypocrisy ('I wish my supervisor would practice what he/she preached'), and Interpersonal Justice Expectation, such as the extent to which you are asked to 'treat people with respect'. The questionnaire also probed intention to leave the organisation, and collected control data on similar variables such as trust in your leader and psychological contract breach, meaning whether you felt that specific promises made to had been broken.

After controlling for the other variables, higher levels of hypocrisy were associated with greater turnover intentions. Supervisor undermining was positively related to turnover, but close examination of the data revealed that this effect became significant only at a certain level of justice expectations. In other words, when employees didn't feel that their supervisor emphasised fair treatment, their own unfair treatment didn't reliably lead to greater intention to leave. This strongly suggests that hypocrisy is a driving factor here, the concern being less about the instances of undermining but the sense that the leader is hostile *and* unpredictable and therefore the employee has no control.

As the authors conclude, 'the promise of interpersonal justice expectation adds insult to injury as subordinates realise that their leader's behaviour deviates from the dignified and respectful behaviour they promote.' Managers who espouse organisational behaviours they have no intention of keeping may end up chasing employees away quicker than if they made no secret of their severe treatment of others. From the employee point of view, if you're going to work with a devil, better one you know.

Greenbaum, R., Mawritz, M., & Piccolo, R. (2012). When Leaders Fail to "Walk the Talk": Supervisor Undermining and Perceptions of Leader Hypocrisy Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312442386

Ruminative thoughts deepen the long-term impact of workplace violence

Experiencing workplace violence can have negative impacts far beyond the event itself. How do our own thoughts and cognitions influence this? And is there anything we can do about it?  Karen Niven and colleagues from the universities of Manchester and Sheffield suspected that ruminative thoughts may be a problem. Rumination involves returning to a difficult memory or thought over and over without a clear goal-directed purpose. Its generalised nature means it obstructs solutions while maintaining the negative qualities of the thought in time, extending its impact.

 After an initial experimental study, demonstrating that rumination on simulated violence prevents our emotional state from returning to normal levels in the short term, the team took the effect out into the field. This study investigated whether trait rumination - our individual tendency to fall into ruminative thinking, would predict longer-term outcomes following actual workplace violence. The sample of 78 social workers were surveyed on their experiences of violence over the last six months on the job (only 23% had experienced no violence), as well as completing measures of current psychological wellbeing, health complaints, and trait rumination.

Using regression analysis, the team found that individually both violence and rumination led to worsened physical and psychological health, but that violence didn't have an impact on wellbeing for those who tended not people to ruminate. In other words, rumination appeared to be a necessary condition for violence to cast a wider pall upon psychological health.

Existing research warns of the hazards of suppressing our thoughts, which is psychologically involving and can lead to negative outcomes. However, once thinking starts to become ruminative, going over old ground again and again, then finding a means of distraction may be effective in reducing impact both immediately, and in the longer term. Regardless, we shouldn't forget that the onus is on the perpetrators of workplace violence to change their behaviours.

  Niven, K., Sprigg, C., Armitage, C., & Satchwell, A. (2012). Ruminative thinking exacerbates the negative effects of workplace violence Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02066.x

Tendency to 'move against' others predicts managerial derailment

Derailment is when a manager with a great track record hits the skids, often spectacularly. It's highly undesirable, for the disruption and human harm it can involve, and its costs, which after tallying up lost productivity, transition, and costs of a new hire, can exceed twice an annual salary in the case of executive departures.

As a result, organisational researchers have developed measures of 'derailment potential' that consider key suspect behaviours such as betraying trust, deferring decisions, or avoiding change. Work to date has confirmed that managers fired from organisations are judged to be higher in these derailers, but these were post-hoc judgments that could have reflected biased hindsight rather than honest evaluations. 

To avoid this, a new study led by Marisa Carson utilises database information on 1,796 managers from a large organisation to examine behaviours rated during employment tenure instead of on departure. Each behaviour was rated by between eight and ten sources - from subordinates to supervisors – with ratings combined into single potential scores. Drawing on staff turnover data, the study confirmed that individuals exhibiting more derailment potential behaviours were more likely to later be ejected from the organisation. In addition, they were more likely to leave early of their own volition, suggesting they jumped before they were pushed.

The study also looked beyond the behaviours exhibited to the traits that might be behind them, through a personality inventory, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), that all managers had completed. The researchers were exploring the philosophy that derailment isn't caused by a deficit in positive traits such as conscientiousness, but the presence of additional, unhelpful qualities, measured in the HDS, that resemble features of clinical disorders. These traits come in three areas: 'moving away from people' such as a cynical, doubtful disposition, 'moving against people' including manipulation and a tendency to drama, and a third area of 'moving towards people' involving an abiding eagerness to please and defer to others.

Carson's team predicted each of these areas would predict derailment behaviours, but in the analysis only one mattered: moving against people. This factor also predicted turnover of both kinds, and its effect on turnover was brokered by higher derailment behaviours. Conversely the 'away' area turned out to relate negatively, but non-significantly, to the derailment scores, and the 'toward' area didn't emerge as a coherent factor during preliminary analysis so wasn't pursued further. The story here, then, is that qualities that rub up badly against others, such as attention-seeking, idiosyncracy, over-confidence and rule-bending translate into red-flag behaviours that predict early exit from the organisation.

What to be done? This research provides some support for screening for these types of tendencies early in a manager's career, in order to inform decisions about future role as well as identifying priority areas for training and development. These efforts, should they avert derailment, are likely to pay off in the long run.

Marisa Adelman Carson, Linda Rhoades Shanock, Eric D. Heggestad, Ashley M. Andrew, S. Douglas Pugh, & Matthew Walter (2012). The Relationship Between Dysfunctional Interpersonal Tendencies, Derailment Potential Behavior, and Turnover Journal of Business and Psychology , 27 (3), 291-304 DOI: 10.1007/s10869-011-9239-0

Stretching emotional limits leads to bad behaviour at work

While counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs) such as pilfering stationery or hassling colleagues arise through the decisions of individuals, there is an increasing interest in how they may be encouraged by broader working conditions. Incentive schemes or different levels of organisational engagement may deter or encourage such behaviours, and now a recent study suggests that emotional exhaustion may open the door to bad actions. The research, led by George Banks at Virginia Commonwealth University, suggests that emotional exhaustion matters because it makes it harder to form and maintain deep relationships within the organisation, such relationships being the foundation for a sense of organisational commitment.

The research team surveyed 113 South Korean bank employees, and contacted the supervisors of each to get a measure of CWB from an outside source, allowing them to minimise correlational artefacts due to data arising from a common source. All employees rated their emotional exhaustion with items such as "I feel frustrated by my job" as well as their organisational commitment, for instance "I really care about the fate of this organization". Supervisors rated the frequency of CWBs relating to the organisation ("Takes a longer break than is acceptable in your workplace") and that specific to organisational members ("Makes fun of someone at work"). They found that higher exhaustion was related to both lower organisational commitment and higher frequency of CWBs. Analyses suggested that the effect of emotional exhaustion on CWBs is solely due to its influence upon organisational commitment.

It's already well-understood that emotional states can contribute to CWBs. For instance, they become more common when individuals experience negative emotions arising from co-worker incivility. Whereas that finding suggests a reflexive quality to the rise in behaviours - “the employee strikes back” - the current research suggests that they can also increase due to the mechanisms that prevent them being eroded. Banks' team point out that CWBs typically present an intrinsic reward, such as pleasure, personal gain or thrill-seeking, that would normally be resisted using regulatory processes. But exhaustion is likely to tap the resources these processes themselves depend on; moreover, the motivational juice of doing right by your meaningful relations peters out when those relations have deteriorated due to lack of attention. The author suggest that to avoid the substantial costs that CWBs present to organisations, they should act to reduce emotional exhaustion by better work design, or at minimum through availability of stress reduction techniques.

George C. Banks, Christopher E. Whelpley, In-Sue Oh, & KangHyun Shin (2012). (How) Are Emotionally Exhausted Employees Harmful?. International Journal of Stress Management. DOI: 10.1037/a0029249

Self-serving leaders levy an emotional toll on those who aren't getting their dues

How does it feel to work under a self-serving leader? We know how horrendous the extremes can be - dictators or fraudulent CEOs can quickly wreck lives - but more commonly the problem is likely to be bad feeling owing to uncertainty about where you stand. That's the conclusion of research from the University of Leuven, Belgium, which also suggests that people find it easier to make peace with these situations when they feel they are getting their personal dues.

Jeroen Camps, Stijn Decoster, and Jeroen Stouten developed and validated a Self-Serving Leadership Scale, involving just those behaviours that involve advancing the leader's own interests, rather than other toxic qualities such as abusive behaviour. This was given to 134 employed participants alongside a set of items indicating the extent to which they felt harmed by their leader, such as 'my leader has disadvantaged me'. In addition, the participants completed three measures of organisational justice: procedural (are rules applied consistently?), interpersonal (am I treated with respect) and distributive (am I getting the outcomes I deserve?).

Camps and his colleagues predicted that the last measure, distributive justice, would offset the lack of trust in a leader seen as self-serving. Just so: when distributive justice was low, self-serving leadership was strongly related to perceptions of harm, but when it was high, the relationship weakened. The pattern remained even when controlling for other types of justice: what mattered was simply the sense that you haven't been stiffed thus far.

 The team looked at what lies underneath this in a further study which brought new measures into play, specifically looking at levels of uncertainty and of negative emotions. This experimental study used a hypothetical situation, with the 87 participants being asked to imagine that their chances of a potential promotion depended entirely on the decisions of their boss. In one condition the boss was presented as entirely unbiased, whereas the second, self-serving condition, presented the boss as willing to make decisions that directly benefit themselves, such as promoting someone favoured by influences in the company. Participants were then told either that they were offered the promotion or passed over, providing or withholding distributive justice from them.

Participants with a self-serving boss indicated that they were more uncertain about their job, boss and overall situation. Missing out on the promotion led participants to be more upset, measured by ratings of emotion words like angry and frustrated, and that upset was magnified when the boss was presented as self-serving. In this promotion-less, no-justice condition, the high uncertainty and higher negative emotions were bound together. Conversely, when participants received justice in the form of the promotion, levels of uncertainty were decoupled from negative emotions. The boss's motives made no difference to their emotional state.

These studies suggest that when we suspect a leader is working to their own agenda, the resultant uncertainty can be neutralised when we feel we are getting the outcomes we deserve. The authors note that this can be interpreted as participants accepting that 'leaders can act fair and ethically even though their motives are inherently selfish' - but can also be seen as a step away from ethics entirely, into a myopic mentality: I'm alright, Jack. Further research could help us tease these explanations apart.

Jeroen Camps, Stijn Decoster, & Jeroen Stouten (2012). My Share Is Fair, So I Don’t Care: The Moderating Role of Distributive Justice in the Perception of Leaders’ Self-Serving Behavior Journal of Personnel Psychology , 11 (1), 49-59 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000058

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

Onlookers see people who break rules as more powerful

Power relations are a feature of every workplace, particularly those with formal ranks and explicit hierarchies. Holding power means greater freedom to act, and this can have consequences on behaviour such as ignoring societal norms. As an example, one wonderful experiment revealed that powerful people are more likely than others to take more biscuits from a plate, eat with their mouths open and spread crumbs. Gerban van Kleef and colleagues from two Amsterdam universities set out to explore something with implications for how individuals gain positions of power: are people who break the rules considered more powerful by onlookers?

Across four studies, the evidence suggests that they are. The first two studies involved reading about scenarios, one where someone in a waiting room helped themselves to the staff coffee urn, another where a book-keeper overruled a trainee's concerns about a financial anomaly. In each case, a control group were given a matching scenario that lacked the norm violation, and in each case, the transgressing individuals were rated as both more norm violating and more powerful.

A further study showed identical effects in a real situation, where of two confederates sharing a waiting room, the one who violated more norms (arrived late, threw his bag on the table) was perceived as more powerful. This and the book-keeper study also demonstrated that ratings of 'volitional capacity' – the freedom to act as you please – were higher in the unethical condition, and appeared to be the route by which transgression lead to perceptions of power. That is, we consider transgressors powerful because they show more capacity to act freely.

One further study employed video and added an indirect measure of power, based on the observation that powerful people tend to respond with anger, not sadness, to negative events. A film shows a person making an order in a café, either civilly or (in the transgression condition) treating the waiter and café environment brusquely, for example by tapping ash onto the floor. Participants rated the transgressing person as more powerful, and when they were then told that the food that arrived was not what he ordered, were more likely to expect him to react angrily.

I have a quibble with the video study: it's possible that in the transgression condition the actor employed micro-expressions or tone of voice to convey impatience, sternness or other markers that might imply latent anger. The article doesn't provide ratings of emotion prior to the revelation of the wrong order, so this remains a possibility.

Nonetheless the strong evidence amassed here is sobering. In the authors' words: “as individuals gain power, they experience increased freedom to violate prevailing norms. Paradoxically, these norm violations may not undermine the actor's power but instead augment it, thus fuelling a self-perpetuating cycle of power and immorality”. Workplaces might consider how to foster environments where it is safe to call out abuses of power, both major and petty, in order to interrupt these cycles and stop the sour cream rising to the top.

(A freely available copy of the article is available here.)

Van Kleef, G., Homan, A., Finkenauer, C., Gundemir, S., & Stamkou, E. (2011). Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611398416

Psychologically safe teams can incubate bad behaviour

When impropriety or corruption emerges in an organisation, some cry “bad apple!” where others reply “more like bad barrel!” Yet between individuals and organisations we have teams, the context in which decisions are increasingly made. A new study in the Journal of Applied Psychology sheds some light on what it takes for teams to behave badly.

Researchers Matthew Pearsall and Aleksander Ellis recruited 378 undergraduate management studies students (about 1/3 female), already organised into study groups of three who had collaborated for months. Participants were asked to rate themselves on items relating to different philosophical outlooks, the pertinent one being utilitarianism, where the focus is on outcomes. Previous research suggests individuals who highly value utilitarianism tend to behave more unethically, as they are more prepared to bend rules or mislead if they perceive the ends to justify the means. Pearsall and Ellis suspected the same to be true in groups.

Each team was given a real opportunity to behave unethically, by cheating in the self-evaluation of a piece of coursework. Buried within the scoring criteria was an issue that could not possibly have been covered in the assignment, meaning any team that ticked this off was faking it. As expected, teams with a higher average utilitarianism score were more likely to cheat, mirroring the effect found for individuals.

However, there is an protective buffer against acting unethically in a team. You may be willing to bend the rules, and even suspect others share your view... but do you really want to be the first to say so out loud? Pearsall and Ellis predicted that making this step requires a strong feeling of psychological safety, the sense that others will not judge or report you for speaking out or taking risks. It turns out that the cheating behaviour observed in teams with high utilitarianism scores was almost entirely dependent on a psychologically safe environment, as measured using items like “It is safe to take a risk on this team”. Lacking that safe environment, the highly utilitarian teams were almost as well-behaved as their lower-scoring counterparts.

The researchers note that academic cheating involves relatively low stakes, so this may be a constraint on how far we should generalise to other situations. They also emphasise that psychological safety is generally something we prize in teams, and rightly so: through facilitating open communication and consideration of alternate views it can enhance performance, learning and adaptation to change. However, this evidence suggests that it can also incubate unethical behaviour, and the researchers urge that the field continues to look beyond the traits of individual miscreants to consider state factors such as psychological safety, that allow bad behaviour to take root.

Pearsall, M., & Ellis, A. (2011). Thick as thieves: The effects of ethical orientation and psychological safety on unethical team behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (2), 401-411 DOI: 10.1037/a0021503

Organisations, are your citizens impulsive and your deviants emotionally intelligent?

How would you feel about having someone impulsive join your team? It's possible you'd be concerned: all reckless decisions and blurting out sensitive information, they'll hardly help. How about someone high in emotional intelligence (EI)? A better prospect, surely: mindful of others and pretty decent all round.

In a recent study, Doan Winkel of Illinois State University and his collaborators found a different picture. Impulsivity, the degree to which we act spontaneously, was found to lead to more organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs), discretionary behaviours that promote the organisation. Meanwhile emotional intelligence, as measured using an ability-based assessment (a credible research strategy we've noted before), was associated with deviant behaviours that harm the organisation. These findings are based on 234 participants who rated themselves on a series of questionnaire instruments; the participants came from a range of industries, suggesting the effect may be fairly generalisable.

The findings actually aren't so surprising. EI is a useful resource that helps develop networks, figure out hierarchy, and influence others. But the capacity for action that this provides can be put to many uses. The emotionally intelligent may figure out that they can get away with self-interested behaviours such as falsifying receipts, or calculate when a well-timed put-down will serve their interests. By rating items on these and other deviant behaviours, participants with higher EI reported more of these activities.

How can we make sense of the impulsivity finding? Well, OCBs are discretionary and can take time away from assigned responsibilities. “In an ideal world, sure I'd keep on top of organisational developments and help out my struggling colleagues, but now, with this deadline?” reasons the cautious employee. Meanwhile, the rating data suggests that their impulsive colleagues jump in to help more often, less mindful of downsides to doing the right thing. In a sense, impulsivity reflects a 'can-do' spirit, full of motivational energy to act.

The researchers expected to also find more intuitive effects of impulsivity being associated with deviant behaviours and EI relating to organisational citizenship. Surprisingly, these previously reported effects weren't found here, leading the authors to call for a greater understanding of what is needed for them to arise.

This study is not the first to find these kinds of incongruous effects. There's evidence that optimism and cognitive ability, both sought by employers everywhere, also predict deviant behaviour. These counter-intuitive findings are useful; they caution us against viewing individual qualities as forever good or bad, turning organisational people strategy into a game of Top Trumps where we try to collect the 'best'. It's clear instead that a characteristic represents both benefit and risk, is a potential rather than given, and that potential depends on many factors, including the workplace situation itself.


Winkel, D., Wyland, R., Shaffer, M., & Clason, P. (2011). A new perspective on psychological resources: Unanticipated consequences of impulsivity and emotional intelligence Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (1), 78-94 DOI: 10.1348/2044-8325.002001

Arrogant employees are judged poorer at their jobs, even by themselves

We all believed that Neville
was a f f f fine lad
but when we go to know him better
Neville drove us mad.
Neville is a bighead
Neville is a pain
Neville is a pratt without a brain

Toy Dolls – Neville is a Nerd

Most of us can recount work experiences involving people we would call arrogant. However, there's been little research pinning arrogance down, measuring it, or discovering its consequences for the workplace. A recent paper introduces a way to measure it and investigates what sets the arrogant individual apart.

Russell Johnson and colleagues firstly set out their definition: arrogance consists of those behaviours that exaggerate your importance and disparage others. This distinguishes it from narcissism which, although related, includes thoughts and attitudes that don't affect others, such as the physical self-admiration of Narcissus himself.

The authors gathered experiences of arrogant behaviour from employee focus groups to create the Workplace Arrogance Scale (WARS) which they validated through a series of studies. An example item is 'Shoots down other people's ideas in public'. They were then able to turn to the consequences of arrogance, firstly showing that arrogant individuals report fewer organisational citizenship behaviours – acting beyond your job to help others or the wider organisation. They then turned to the biggie: how good are arrogant individuals at their jobs?

To answer this, the researchers recruited eighty-two participants from a number of companies. They provided a range of measures including the WARS, overall task performance and specific performance areas - customers, relationships and development – on which each participant was rated by themselves and by nominated individuals in their organisation. (Getting these other-perspectives was possible as the WARS looks at behaviours rather than hidden thoughts.)

Far from being the most able, arrogant workers were judged weaker in almost every way by one rating group or other. Some of the findings are less surprising: people who think their managers are arrogant grade them as poorer across the board, which may be influenced by a reverse halo effect (overgeneralising a negative feature) or using the rating process to punish those they resent. Some are more compelling: individuals who rate themselves more arrogant rate themselves weaker at relationships and overall performance, with their supervisors and direct reports agreeing.

Another study looked at cognitive ability within another 172 working individuals who completed the Wesman Classification Test, a well-established measure of verbal and numerical reasoning. Weaker performance in either area was associated with higher ratings of arrogance.

There's evidence that arrogant people are aware of these shortcomings, not least in the lower ratings they give themselves. The studies also gathered ratings of more internal features, finding that arrogant individuals report lower self-esteem, greater work-related strain, and are more likely to fixate on minimizing mistakes rather than focusing on success. This paints a picture of the arrogant as anxious to cut it but aware they may be performing at the edge of their ability, preoccupied with failure and trying to survive by cutting others down.

However, as all studies (bar the cognitive ability scores) used subjective ratings, we can't discount the possibility that it is perceived performance that is weaker for the arrogant; perhaps they alienate others and, ostracised, join their critics in discounting themselves. Further research using objective measures of performance (eg sales data) could address this issue. For now we should pay more attention to arrogance in the workplace: it appears the bigheads don't have the capabilities to match.

Johnson, R. E., Silverman, S. B., Shyamsunder, A., Swee, H., Rodopman, O., Cho, E., et al. (2010). Acting Superior But Actually Inferior?: Correlates and Consequences of Workplace Arrogance. Human Performance, 23(5), 403-427. doi:10.1080/08959285.2010.515279