What makes ill feeling between work colleagues shift faster?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

Laugh and the workplace laughs with you

How far can a laugh carry? According to Christopher Robert and James Wilbanks, it can reverberate through time, with far-reaching consequences. Their theoretical paper, synthesising research from neuroscience, behavioural psychology and the workplace, suggests that funny incidents can have a cumulative positive effect through a 'Humour Wheel'.

Humour can be understood as a positive emotional state arising from incongruity: a joke puts two elements together in an unexpected way, and sarcasm belies what is said with what is intended  (and appears to facilitate creativity for this reason). It's one of the most intense positive emotions, putting aside triumph, which tends to accompany rare events, and sensual pleasure, typically inappropriate for a workplace. Humour is instead quintessentially social, and can occur frequently; for Robert and Wilbanks this is crucial, as established theories of workplace affective events (situations that change our mood or emotions) suggest that quantity matters more than significance of such events for shaping workplace outcomes.

Moreover, the contagious nature of laughter - we laugh at a laugh even shorn of context, and our brains respond to laughter sounds in a similar way as they do to something funny - means that a single moment of humour can evoke and encourage others - both directly through emotional contagion and also by acting as a trigger to permit employees to breach straight-faced operations with crinkled smiles. As a consequence, an instance of humour can lead to a longer-standing 'humour episode', and it is these that lift mood and have an effect on interpersonal contact, deepening affection and also helping to shape group norms of what behaviour is desirable - including 'humour is ok'. Hence, a positive feedback loop or wheel. Not every humour instance need be joy inducing; a wry comment can be sufficient to seed the ground and make it possible for other moments to follow.

What could be the consequences of the positive affect that humour elicits?  Frederickson's broaden-and-build theory suggests it encourages us to approach opportunities rather than retreat: exploration and playness ensue, allowing us to build positive resources for the future. This is a good way to make sense of the manifold effects of positive affect - on health, cooperation, organisational citizenship, job satisfaction, flow and more. And as negative states can form their own feedback loops, humour can be valuable as a derailer - its disruptive, intrusive quality ringing out over frustration or fear. Getting a 'humour wheel' going in regular work teams is clearly useful, and other contexts suggested by the authors include mentoring, where the importance of satisfying and informal relationships would naturally fit with humorous episodes, and also leadership, where leader affect is known to be contagious to employees, and the oft-desired transformational style is linked to humour usage. They call for deeper research into these areas, as well as how humour may work against tendencies to absenteesim and attrition, and suggest that 'humor might be an unsung hero in peoples’ day-to-day affective lives.'

Christopher Robert, & James E Wilbanks (2012). The Wheel Model of humor: Humor events and affect in organizations Human Relations, 65 (9), 1071-1099 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711433133

How to leverage the diversity of teams for creative outcomes

Received wisdom suggests more diverse teams reach more creative outcomes. Yet research is equivocal, suggesting there may be specific conditions that allow diversity to pay off. Research from Erasmus University in Rotterdam suggests that one such condition is how prepared members are to take each others' perspectives.

The potential benefits of diversity were well-expressed by van Knippenberg and colleagues some years back, in their categorisation-elaboration model. This suggests that diversity is most useful as it offers deeper elaboration: expanding on, exploring and contesting the views of other members to reach richer, more tested positions, providing the opposite of group-think. Elaboration has been shown to depend on the nature of the task and on the members having the necessary ability and motivations. In their recent article, Inga Hoever and her team examined whether the approach taken by the team could be another factor.

The study asked three-person teams to attempt a task to improve a fictional theatre's position by coming up with a creative action plan. Diversity was manipulated by giving some teams assigned roles - an Artistic, Event, and Finance Manager - whereas members of other teams held unnamed, generic positions. All teams received guidance on the key artistic, events and finance goals for the theatre: one concise package for generic members or split out, fleshed out, and handed out to the corresponding specialist manager.

In addition, some teams (both multi-role and generic) fell into a perspective-taking condition, where they were encouraged - both verbally and through an example-filled instructions page - to take each other's perspectives as much as possible during the activity. After an individual preparation period, teams spent twenty minutes together preparing an action plan, which was subsequently coded for novelty and value of ideas; both were necessary to deem a plan creative.

Manipulation checks confirmed that the multi-role teams began with more varied viewpoints (based on what members judged as the biggest priorities, recorded after reading their briefs but just before the discussion began), and teams asked to take perspectives had actually done so (based on ratings at the study close). Alone, neither factor had a significant influence on the creativity of the action plans created. But when teams both were multi-role and engaged actively in perspective taking, they performed better than the rest.

What's more, when the research team used video footage to rate teams on how much they engaged in elaboration - acknowledging and building on suggestions, synthesising ideas - they obtained scores that were also higher for diverse teams that explicitly took perspectives. Moreover, analysis confirmed elaboration scores were a mediator for how diversity influenced creativity for perspective-taking teams. When diverse teams make effort to engage in perspective, this facilitates elaboration during the task, leading to more novel, valuable outcomes.

The useful thing about this study is that having more individual ability to elaborate, or the ideal task, isn't always an option. Here we see evidence that altering the process of a creative task can play a part in unlocking the best that diverse perspectives have to offer.

Hoever, I. J., van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W. P., & Barkema, H. G. (2012). Fostering Team Creativity: Perspective Taking as Key to Unlocking Diversity's Potential Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0029159

Job outcomes and experiences suffer when managers regularly work remotely

Technology gives us the option to work in locations beyond conventional offices, both partially - termed teleworking - or as a full-time 'virtual' worker. We now understand that remote workers experience certain challenges such as isolation and less access to resources. But there is scant research on the consequences of a teleworking or virtual manager. Fortunately, a new article gets us up to speed.

Investigators Timothy D Golden and Allan Fromen surveyed over 11,000 employees from a Fortune 500 company based in the US. The online survey asked each respondent to report - for themselves and for their manager - what their work mode was: traditional (in the office full time), teleworking away for a consistent fraction of the work week, or fully virtual. It also measured a host of work experiences and outcomes. Respondents managed by teleworking managers reported receiving less feedback and professional development, a more unbalanced workload and feeling less empowered. A similar negative pattern was found for those with fully virtual managers. The effect sizes were small overall, suggesting this needn't be a make or break issue, but the trend was there.

The authors interpret this in terms of social exchange theory. Working relationships that are partly virtual have less opportunities for rich exchanges, with communications lacking the face-to-face component and fewer obvious opportunities to 'grab a moment', described by social innovator David Engwicht as spontaneous exchanges. Interactions are likely to be more task-focused and obligatory, as email is more onerous to produce when compared to a quick coffee or moment in the corridor. And professional development and mentoring becomes similarly laborious, always a dangerous place for any 'important to do' but non-urgent activity to be.

How about those respondents who themselves worked remotely? The data suggests they have a similar experience regardless of their manager's work mode. The authors had predicted this group would experience better conditions when their manager also worked non-traditionally: they would both experience comparable challenges and make efforts to find mutually productive outcomes. But in reality, higher scores on the outcome variables were only found in a few instances and were extremely small. This suggests that if you don't share physical space with your manager, it doesn't matter much where they happen to be.

It's worth noting that in the US, rates of teleworking dropped between 2008 and 2010. Perhaps organisations and individuals have begun to appreciate that the attractions of remote working are tempered by modest but genuine drawbacks.

Golden, T., & Fromen, A. (2011). Does it matter where your manager works? Comparing managerial work mode (traditional, telework, virtual) across subordinate work experiences and outcomes Human Relations, 64 (11), 1451-1475 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711418387

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.

Formal mentoring relationships gain momentum over time

The support that mentors offer can have considerable benefits, for both their proteges and the organisation at large. Recognising this, many develop formal mentoring programs to encourage and manage this process. However, such a managed system provides different conditions to an informal one, where parties identify an alignment of person and circumstance. Frankie Weinberg and Melenie Lankau at the University of Georgia decided to explore what this means for mentor contributions within formal mentoring relationships.

Weinberg and Lankau worked with a voluntary nine month mentoring program where mentor-protege pairs were formed by the organisation's executive committee; 110 such pairs joined their research. Questionnaires were used to understand how much time mentors dedicated to the relationship, and how much they felt they were fulfilling various mentoring functions: providing career guidance, psychosocial support, and role modelling good behaviours.

Mentoring relationships are understood to move through phases, so the authors sampled mentors views twice: two months into the program and one month after its end. This allowed study of the initiation phase, where each party gets the feel of the other, and the following cultivation phase, which insight and the relationship deepens. Mentoring activity is expected to be optimised during the cultivation phase, so Weinberg and Lankau investigated the relationship between the time spent on mentoring, and the mentoring functions on offer. Time spent on mentoring increased all three mentoring functions during initiation (time one), but by the cultivation phase, time expended was even more strongly associated with enhanced mentoring function, suggesting an hour of mentoring is worth more during cultivation than during initiation.

Weinberg and Lankau were concerned that mixed-sex pairs may suffer in a formalised context, as weaker resemblance can lead mentors to invest less effort than when working with a 'younger version of me'. Indeed, during the initiation period, mentors paired with proteges of the other sex overall reported providing lower levels of all three mentoring functions. However, once they had reached the cultivation stage, these mixed-sex penalties disappeared for psychosocial support and role-modelling, suggesting that increased familiarity managed to erode some of these barriers.

This study clearly evidences how formal mentoring relationships gain momentum: after the initiation phase, investments into the relationship yield greater dividends and impediments to the relationship tend to be shucked off. So organisations considering formal mentoring should ensure that the relationships they cultivate have the time that they need to blossom.

Weinberg, F., & Lankau, M. (2010). Formal Mentoring Programs: A Mentor-Centric and Longitudinal Analysis Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1527-1557 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309349310

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

MBA early career challenges: handling others and reconceiving yourself

MBA courses are meant to prepare their students to become effective business leaders, and give a lot of attention to that goal. This mid-late career focus makes it reasonable to wonder how MBA graduates are equipped for their earlier career, when they take their classroom knowledge to a managerial role with significant responsibilities. Beth Benjamin and Charles O'Reilly of Stanford University conducted a qualitative investigation into early-career challenges for 55 such “manager-graduates”, to understand the near-term needs of a newly minted MBA, and hence how their course could leave them better prepared.

Their interviews, exploring especially challenging episodes in the early career of these manager-graduates, illustrated how an educational experience emphasising analytical problem solving, graft, and individual success, inevitably shapes a more task-oriented approach. Often knowing 'what' to do, the manager-graduate is less sure on 'how to do it', notably in the social dimension.

Aggressively outdoing his peers to wind up with a promotion, one interviewee entered his role only to have several team members - once his peers - walk out. His learning from this was to “treat your peers as though they might someday be your boss or direct reports.” Another trap was assuming that others share your approach, motivation and skills towards work issues; this can lead to overly relaxed expectation-setting or misjudging how to motivate others for a new direction. One interviewee baldly stated "[Business School] doesn’t prepare you to manage a wide swatch of people", such as those whose life doesn’t revolve around business excellence.

Another theme of the research was the need for manager-graduates to shift mind-set. They needed to flourish when their role didn't provide opportunity for direct personal achievements, by embracing being a "caretaker for something larger than myself". They also needed to cope with, and learn from, personal disappointments, which can be a real challenge for a perennial straight-A student unused to such situations.

All the challenges represented some form of transition point, where the manager-graduate had to drop old assumptions, turn to different skills, renegotiate relationships or take a new approach. Such transitions are vital times for spurring learning forward, but can be problematic if they come before the individual is ready for them.

Benjamin and O'Reilly fear the MBA system doesn't accomplish this preparation, as "teaching leadership principles without sufficient application opportunities runs the risk of making complex leadership concepts appear simple and obvious"; for instance, we should be empathic leaders - but how do we manage that? Although applied learning does occur in MBAs, they feel there is a need for better integration, to understand the how in the context of the what, to provide their students well-practiced strategies to carry them through the situations of stress that will undoubtedly define their early career.

Benjamin, B., & O'Reilly, C. (2011). Becoming a Leader: Early Career Challenges Faced by MBA Graduates The Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10 (3), 452-472 DOI: 10.5465/amle.2011.0002

Social networks of extraverts are bigger but no more intimate

Do extraverts have more numerous and deeper social relationships? Organisations are increasingly interested in social capital, the networks accessed through individuals, so this is no idle question. Thomas Pollet from the University of Groningen, investigated this with University of Oxford collaborators Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar, and their answer is yes, and no.

Recognising that our relationships aren't monolithic, the researchers treated social networks as a set of three layers. The inner support group contains those people (typically around five) that you would turn to in a crisis. Around this are a further ten-odd people, a sympathy group who would be deeply affected by your death. Finally there is an outer layer of more variable size, containing people connected to you by weak ties.

Pollet recruited 117 Dutch adults, who were asked to list their family, friends and acquaintances, and for each one, state the recency of communication and how emotionally close they were. Each network was grouped into layers, the innermost comprising those with past-week contact and over seven out of ten on the emotion measure; the sympathy layer those with past-month contact; and the outer layer receiving the rest. Each participant also completed a measure of extraversion.

The researchers found extraverts had more people in every layer – more weak ties, but also more individuals they contacted frequently. Although larger social networks have been reported before, this study finds the effect after controlling for age, a potential confound in other studies. However, extraversion didn't affect emotional closeness to their network: weak ties with occasional contacts don't appear stronger in extraverts.

The authors scrutinised every layer of the network, finding this same lack of effect throughout, but I'm cautious about interpretation at the inner layers, given that the emotional closeness score is both the variable of interest and the criteria used to determine membership. On my understanding, if introverts had a support group of contacts that they met frequently but gave low emotional closeness scores - fives or sixes - the methodology would never identify this.

It's worth noting the data suggests that regardless of extraversion, it's somewhat harder to keep close to all the members of a very large outer layer, which suggests a practical constraint that extraverts may be more liable to hit up against.

This study suggests extraverts have larger networks that are not simply populated by weak ties, but contain larger sets of close relationships. An organisation trying to tap into its social capital might start by talking to its most extraverted members. However, they shouldn't forget that introverts have equally deep relationships, nor that valuable networks contain the right people, not the most.

Pollet, T., Roberts, S., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Extraverts Have Larger Social Network Layers Journal of Individual Differences, 32 (3), 161-169 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000048

Continually juggling stakeholders can lead to doubting the value of your mission

If your work has taken you into meetings with a partnering company, a cross-institutional committee, or any situation working together with another organisation, you've taken the role of a boundary spanner. Organisations do well out of boundary spanners, who deliver them information about external conditions and increase their reach to broader stakeholders. But Lakshmi Ramarajan and colleagues have demonstrated that there are costs for the boundary spanner, particularly in challenging, multi-party situations.

Social psychology suggests that contact across group boundaries is problematic outside of ideal circumstances. Disparate goals may fuel conflict; unfamiliar patterns of behaviour can be hard to adjust to; outside perspective may cast your own organisation in an unfavourable light. To investigate this, Ramarajan's team surveyed 833 Dutch military personnel, who spent time between 1995 and 1999 engaged in peacekeeping missions. Such missions occur against a backdrop of heavy conflict, and are made more problematic by status and resource differences between the peacekeepers and their non-military counterparts: NGO's, governmental bodies and local authorities.

Each participant detailed their frequency of personal contact with each type of party, and the degree of seriousness of work-specific problems that emerged with that party – a combination of objective severity and their personal involvement. Their responses confirmed that peacekeepers with more frequent contact with other parties had greater experiences of work-specific problems.

Previous research has suggested an inverse relationship between conditions 'home' and 'away', as if a spat with an external partner makes you more grateful for your colleagues. But in the current study, more work-specific problems with other parties led to more negative attitudes towards their own job and doubting the value of their mission. This resembles spillover from one domain to another, due to ruminations or drained psychological resources. The authors attribute the difference to the high demands on peacekeepers, juggling many parties on non-facilitated, difficult issues without the option to walk away, a situation increasingly common for more and more 21st Century organisations.

Boundary spanning activities are certainly useful to the organisation, and can benefit the individual, who tends to be more trusted and gain reputation with other organisations. But we should be concerned with its costs, eroding engagement with the work and faith in the organisation, which are especially likely in complex situations with soft organisational boundaries. As the authors conclude, those in this position may want to weigh these issues up “when thinking about the costs of alliances, joint ventures, or other cooperative mechanisms.”

Ramarajan, L., Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K., & Euwema, M. (2011). From the outside in: The negative spillover effects of boundary spanners' relations with members of other organizations Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 886-905 DOI: 10.1002/job.723

Interview decisions are influenced by initial rapport

Research last year demonstrated that interviewees are judged according to their early rapport with the interviewer, even when a highly structured interview format is followed. The same team have now put this finding to the replication test and dug deeper into its causes.

Murray Barrick and colleagues gathered 135 student volunteers keen to improve their interview skill, and put each through two interviews with different interviewers from a pool of business professionals. Each interview proper was firmly structured with predefined questions on competency areas, but commenced with a few minutes of unstructured rapport building. Each interviewee was rated in terms of initial impressions just after the rapport stage, and their interview responses evaluated at the end of the interview. Just as in the 2010 study, the early impressions and final interview ratings strongly correlated.

The judgements we form from first impressions are rarely arbitrary but capture information about the other person, so it's possible the influence of pre-interview rapport isn't sheer bias. Through personality testing, Barrick's team found that first impressions were strongly related to interviewee extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is generally associated with better job performance, and tied into several of the study competencies such as 'work ethic' and 'drive for results'. The other traits, while not necessarily desirable in all roles, can appear attractive qualities in a prospective organisational member.

Initial impressions also correlated with volunteers' self-perception of how qualified they were for the job, and also with an independent measure of verbal skill. The latter was assessed through a separate task where the volunteers interacted face-to-face with a series of peers who rated features such as articulacy of speech. These findings suggest that the rapport-building stage was giving early insight into some sense of perceived fit to the specific role, as well as genuine candidate ability, in addition to personality factors. By careful analysis, the researchers found that all of these factors influenced the final interview ratings, and that this was due to the way they shaped first impressions: after those first few minutes, there was little extra influence of these qualities across the rest of the interview.

As social animals we're reluctant to do away with rapport altogether, and impressions can form even in snatches of seconds. The researchers suggest – with the caveat of more research - that interviewers may as well embrace the first impression, explicitly evaluating some relevant criteria, such as those identified in this study, once the rapport stage is over. And candidates shouldn't unduly panic: this study reveals that the first impression is partly down to an accurate appraisal of some of your true qualities, things you can't do very much about.

Barrick, M., Dustin, S., Giluk, T., Stewart, G., Shaffer, J., & Swider, B. (2011). Candidate characteristics driving initial impressions during rapport building: Implications for employment interview validity Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02036.x

Help on tasks boosts creativity for the seeker but impedes it for the giver

Seeking help from others gets us to more creative solutions, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology. However, there's a rub: being a help-giver may impede creatively solving your own problems, and seeking and helping turn out to be intimately related.

In a collaboration between the Indian School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania, Jennifer Mueller and Dishan Kamdar surveyed engineers at a refinery in central India, who work in teams that try to find creative ways to improve operations. The 291 mainly male participants assessed themselves on help-seeking by rating items like “I frequently ask team-mates for assistance in creative problem solving”. They also completed a complementary measure of help-giving, together with measures of motivation and a control measure of 'creative personality'.

The study found that individuals who sought more help were rated as more creative by their team leaders. The investigators suggest two reasons for this. Firstly, help-seekers receive new information to form a broader base to construct solutions from. Perhaps more importantly, seeking help requires you accept that you don't have all the answers, making you more open to new perspectives. As such, it wards off that major obstacle to creativity: locking into a 'perceptual set' that obscures any alternative view.

The authors felt that help seeking might shed some light on an issue in creativity research: whether being intrinsically motivated to solve a problem leads to more creative solutions. They felt that rather than firing up some creative centre, motivation might operate by making you do something you wouldn't otherwise: admit your limitations by seeking some help. And the data corroborates this, suggesting creativity is enhanced by motivation partly through an increase in help-seeking.

So far, so good. But the research found that people who received help tended to reciprocate it back on other occasions, and, crucially, that giving more help was associated with a cost to creativity. Why? Well, working on others' problems may restrict the time available for your own, and we know that creativity suffers under high time pressure. The authors also suspect an attitude shift: just as the help seeker humbly surrenders their suppositions, the help provider can be flattered into believing their perspective is objectively better, reinforcing fixed ways of thinking.

On balance, help-seeking did lead to more creativity, even when the reciprocal demands were high; a culture of help is ultimately superior to a lone-wolf one. Organisations may want to think about ways to inoculate their members against putting their viewpoint on a pedestal, even when others seem to value it. And help-seekers may want to ensure that their requests don't swamp an accommodating help-giver. Yet we have to face facts: for creative help-seeking to flourish, that help needs to come from someone prepared to pay the cost.

Mueller, J., & Kamdar, D. (2011). Why seeking help from teammates is a blessing and a curse: A theory of help seeking and individual creativity in team contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (2), 263-276 DOI: 10.1037/a0021574

Drinking habits of freelance musicians are a response to job demands

When we pore over biographies of Cobain, Mozart, or Shakur, are we getting a true insight into the psychology of musicians? Doubtful; dealing with rare figures whose musicianship is confounded with celebrity, the psychological autopsy is inadequate for understanding this ancient and valued profession. The stereotypes it can reinforce, such as the 'mad genius', are often dispelled by more rigorous investigation: a study of psychopathology in a sample including artists, writers and scientists revealed that composers had almost the lowest rate.

And how about the other stereotype, that musicians love to get trashed? It's true that jazz greats often got high, but their reasons were more varied than simply hedonism; many used drugs to deal with pressure from the job and from peers. A recent study suggests our current jazz and string musicians, in a similar spot, find themselves deep in the drink.

Melissa Dobson from the University of Sheffield conducted interviews with eighteen freelance musicians, half string players and half jazz musicians. Reviewing these reveals that a key professional capability for these musicians is social expertise with peers. If looking to draft in a cellist for an event, differences in talent between candidates may be too minor to matter for the audience, so the job may swing to whoever's a better laugh to hang with during the breaks. In their informal economy, musicians know the power of these fickle decisions and do what needs to be done to maintain a reputation that they “get on with people”.

Typically, that involves drinking. Partly a generational legacy, as hard drinking is tied into the subcultural furniture, it's also a fact of the environment, as venues for live music typically serve alcohol. It fills dull gaps between sets in unfamiliar places, and after the show offers a form of psychological detachment from work. Ultimately, it's socially self-perpetuating: if everyone drinks, then you need to develop a habit too. Some interviewees had mixed feelings about this: “lots of players that haven't been offered jobs.... [are those who] won't really go out for the whole sort of socializing thing... a bit sad, but that's sort of the way it works”.

As well as alcohol, the interviews revealed the highly political nature of the freelance music world, where musicians both compete against and depend upon each other for work, and can find themselves trading disparaging judgements on absent peers to shore up their in-crowd position - another form of social currency.

Melissa Dobson concludes that the professional training that musicians undertake focuses on technical development over the challenges of navigating a freelance career, leaving them to figure out how to maintain reputation through a 'hidden curriculum' that operates out of sight of the convervatoire. Is this the only form of professional training that this critique applies to?

Dobson, M. (2010). Insecurity, professional sociability, and alcohol: Young freelance musicians' perspectives on work and life in the music profession Psychology of Music, 39 (2), 240-260 DOI: 10.1177/0305735610373562

Influencing others by showing emotion: a new emotional ability?

Many workplaces recognise that besides more cognitive notions of intelligence – our capability to solve problems, use logic, process and judge factual information – they also need Emotional Intelligence (EI): the capability to recognise, make the most of and manage emotion. Now a new theoretical paper makes the case that we should be expanding this concept of EI to include the ability to influence others through emotional displays.

EI currently focuses on spotting, dealing with and making sense of emotions. Can I figure out why I was feeling increasingly uneasy through the meeting? Spot how you are feeling right now? Guess what might cheer you up? Authors Côté and Hideg focus their attention on another feature of emotions: that we display them physically to others in emotion displays. This insight goes back to Darwin, and has since been extensively researched notably by Paul Ekman (whose work is popularised in the TV series Lie to Me) with the field now recognising that the face, voice and touch are all used for this purpose. Emotional displays, even subtle ones, can cause our heart rate to rise, our skin to sweat, and our emotions to swell, often to then be displayed onwards in ripples of emotional contagion, such as when laughter gathers any within earshot.

Côté and Hideg draw attention to the workplace consequences of these displays. Anger at those who have neglected their duties can provoke them to redouble their efforts, guilt displays increase the likelihood of forgiveness, and positive emotions can result in more pro-social behaviour. Clearly there is an advantage to being adept at these displays, and the authors point out at least two ways in which one can be better. One is displaying the right emotion for the situation; considerations include the communication medium, as some emotions, such as anger, are displayed more strongly via the voice than the face (and the reverse can be true). Another is displaying that emotion effectively, facilitated by approaches such as 'deep acting' which tries to change the emotion itself, contrasting surface acting, which just acts on behaviour and can be perceived as inauthentic. (You can decide for yourself what's going on in the photo above.)

Côté and Hideg amass research showing genuine variety in how well people can influence others through displays, for instance the ability of bill collectors to communicate urgency to debtors. They argue that all this evidence suggests a real human capability that shows individual differences, concerns emotions, and can result in better or worse outcomes. On this basis, they call for it to be considered as a new emotional ability within the Emotional Intelligence framework.

In an illuminating section the paper explores how influencing others through emotional displays also relies on another: the intended recipient. They may fail to recognise the display if they come from a different culture with different cues. They may be unmotivated to give their attention to your display, because they don't trust you, because they hold the power in the interaction and are blase about how you may feel, or because they don’t see the value in trying to understand the situation (what the authors refer to as epistemic motivation). There is evidence for each of these factors moderating the effect of emotion displays.

We all know that people are influenced by the emotional reactions of those around them. But it’s valuable to recognise the ways this does and doesn’t work, know its genuine workplace consequences, and be aware that this may be better treated as an ability, rather than an unaccountable influence in the workplace. This paper does a fine job of this, drawing together a wealth of evidence, and because this research is clear, readable, and released in the freely-accessible Organizational Psychology Review, I'd encourage having a look yourself.

Côté, S., & Hideg, I. (2011). The ability to influence others via emotion displays: A new dimension of emotional intelligence Organizational Psychology Review, 1 (1), 53-71 DOI: 10.1177/2041386610379257