Year in Review: Lead Well, Follow Fairly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Autocratic people dampen group collaboration... when the group lets them

New research suggests that formal leaders with a strong sense of personal power have a negative impact on the performance of their team. The work by Leigh Tost and colleagues outlines how feeling powerful leads to a sense of entitlement within group discussions that can crowd out other voices and lead to less valuable information-sharing. This happens only when the powerful-feeling person has a formal leadership role; if they don’t, other group members don't allow the domination and therefore healthy information transfer is maintained.

The research is based on a trio of experimental studies with a total of 400 university students, gathered into groups of between three and six to tackle business simulations and problem-solving tasks. The tasks favoured information sharing. For example, in one task, briefings containing different information were given to each participant, such that the right decision could only be reached if participants combined what they knew. This made it crucial that all group members were involved in discussions.

In an initial study, certain teams were placed in a condition where, before the task began, one member privately wrote about a past situation where they felt powerful. This is a standard way to induce feelings of power, and manipulation checks showed these were successful, compared to a control involving writing about a recent neutral activity. When individuals in this power condition were also given formal authority - right down to a name tag saying 'leader' - they were perceived by other team members as talking disproportionately during the discussion. Team members also rated these discussions as poorer in terms of openness towards different perspectives, and these factors contributed to poorer performance at the task overall. Yet a second study showed that  the power induction task had no effect on discussion or on task performance for teams that had no formal leaders.

This study found that participants who took the power induction tended to display a more autocratic communication style, characterised by wanting to impose discipline or take control. This was true regardless of whether they had a leadership position. But they only influenced the group dynamics measured – speaking time and the climate of openness – when they had this leadership role.

Without this data, we might have imagined an additive effect: that feelings of power would make a person want to take control, that formal authority would do the same, and that when the two come together the person’s controlling influence on the group would be at their greatest. But in fact formal leadership didn't make those who felt powerful any more autocratic; instead, formal leadership affected the rest of the group, such that they deferred to a controlling person instead of resisting them. Formal leadership doesn't change the psychological state of the leader, it changes the reactions of the led.

The theoretical explanation for why we treat others differently when we feel powerful is that the state leads us to objectify others and see them as less useful. Why should I listen to them when their opinions don't matter and they have nothing important to tell me? Another study investigated this by providing formal leaders in one condition with an additional instruction, suggesting that  “everyone has something unique to contribute in this task” and advising them to make best use of it.  When this instruction was in place, formal leaders didn't speak more or limit openness when they felt powerful, and their teams performed as well as for formal leaders without the power manipulation. So this suggests a potential mechanism to counter the stifling effect of power, by presenting open communication as being in the leader's self interest.

Tost and her colleagues conclude that “leaders’ subjective experience of power increases their attempts to dominate team interactions,” which others are more likely to defer to, leading to less-than-optimal outcomes. Leaders whose roles naturally provide high subjective experience of power, such as those in highly hierarchical organisations, could focus on cultivating openness to the perspectives of others, possibly by reflecting on the value that team members provide to discussion. Similarly, we can break the habits of deference to leaders by encouraging healthy dissent and the sharing of opinions amongst team members.



Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino, & Richard P. Larrick (2013). When Power Makes Others Speechless: The Negative Impact of Leader Power On Team Performance Academy of Management Journal,, 56 (5), 1465-1486 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0180



Further reading:
Halevy, N., Chou, E. Y., & Galinsky, A. D. 2011. A functional model of hierarchy: Why, how, and when vertical differentiation enhances group performance.
Organizational Psychology Review, 1: 32–52.

Women leaders don't get a free pass for acting tentatively - but men do

Women seeking leadership have historically been hampered by stereotypical beliefs that they don't - and shouldn't - behave actively, confidently, with agency. Leaders need to be agentic, shaping an organisation toward a desired vision. But traditional gender roles demand that women take a more nurturing, passive stance, and when they do not, as copious research from the 1980s and 1990s found, they are met with disapproval.

However, society has changed over the decades, to the extent that agency in female leaders may no longer be an impediment. However, researchers Renata Bongiorno, Paul Bain and Barbara David suspected that the lifting of this barrier may reveal another, more subtle one for women leaders: that non-agentic behaviour is unfairly punished.

Why might this be? Real-life demonstrations that women can demonstrate agentic behaviour enter into culture (and are propagated through media and narratives) and change baseline beliefs. But these successes may be considered curious exceptions, with the associative link between 'leader' and 'male' still largely intact. This means that women may be considered as possible leaders, but scrutinised much more carefully for any evidence of non-leadership behaviour - scrutiny that men, as 'leaders-in-waiting' - may escape. There already exists some evidence that men have a freer hand in leadership - they receive positive endorsements for a wider range of leadership styles than female leaders do.

Bongiorno and her colleagues' first study presented students with manuscripts that detailed a speech on action on climate change. In a first condition the speech was designed to be assertive, with unapologetic speech and italicised components to denote emphasis. The other was tentative, containing hedges, hesitations and qualifiers. The speech was attributed to a male or female politician, who participants then rated in terms of likeability, perceived influence and agency. After controlling for communality (a measure of the speaker's warmth and sensitivity), the sample of 167 partcipants rated the male politician's likeability and influence the same regardless of the agency of his speech. But the female politician was rated more poorly on both measures when her speech was tentative rather than assertive. When acting assertively, the male and female leaders were rated the same way, but when the male example became tentative, he received a free pass that his female counterpart didn't.

A second study replicated this using audio speeches and a topic more personally relevant to their student sample, tuition fees. The only difference in findings was that in this case the assertive female leader was rated as even more likeable than the male one. My one nit to pick with this is that  having the audio produced by four different actors (two men, two women) introduces a lot of variance. Perhaps the agentic and non-agentic women have vocal attributes that really set them apart in terms of likeability, whereas the men were much of a muchness.

As the authors note, this is a subtle form of prejudice. It is legitimate to hold your leaders to certain standards of agency - it is part of the job. But observers – both men and women in this study – are far more forgiving of men when their behaviours deviate from this. We still need to understand why, or the many whys: there may be unfairly high expectations that women demonstrate 'female capability', whereas others may use this as a safe outlet to express sexism. And while leadership is still dominated by men, the curiosity factor of female leadership may draw attention and disproportionate scrutiny. It's on us to be aware that successful leaders can operate in many different ways, whether they are male or female. 

Bongiorno R, Bain PG, & David B (2013). If you're going to be a leader, at least act like it! Prejudice towards women who are tentative in leader roles. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 23509967

When is it better to be a directive or an empowering leader?

In its early existence, a team led with a clear, directive approach outperforms one with a leader who is hands-off and emphasises empowerment. Over time, however, the empowered team forges insights and patterns of working that lead it to improve performance at a higher rate than directed teams. This is the finding from a new article by Natalia Lorinkova, Matthew Pearsall, and Henry Sims Jr, that aims to help solve the uncertainties about which leadership style is better. For them, the question is not which, but when.

The researchers investigated this issue using a computer strategy task undertaken by 60 5-person teams, each composed of undergraduates. Team members had distinct roles and had to coordinate actions to verify the accuracy of intel produced by Intelligence players to identify 'sweet spots' where their surveillance was highly accurate, traverse the battlefield safely and destroy enemies. My criticism of this study is that this kind of activity is very far from typical workplace activity, and the time-scales - one 3-hour session - out of proportion from the normal maturation of a work team. With that out of the way, the methodology is interesting, and the results notable.

The study required teams to be led by directive or empowering leaders. The directive style involves clear directions, explicit feedback, and minimises ambiguity on what you are supposed to do, similar to the 'tough leadership style'. An empowering style encourages followers to take ownership for tasks, and find their own norms of how to work well together. When they were recruited, participants completed measures of each style. The 30 highest scorers in directive leadership were each assigned leadership of a team, and additionally provided with pre-session training: 30 minutes including watching a clip from Apollo 13 showcasing the desired style and roleplaying out its behaviours. They were then provided with a 'cheat sheet' of advice to give, and a short speech to give at the outset of the task, that all reinforced their directive status. The other 30 teams were led by those scoring highest in empowering leadership, who received comparable training and resources.

After orientation and explanation of the task, teams completed 10 rounds of the task, with a break half-way through. The researchers predicted that the clarity of directive leadership enhances team performance within a stage of team development called 'role compilation'. Meanwhile, empoweringly-led teams use this stage to invest effort into figuring each other out, which pays off for them during a subsequent stage called 'team compilation' when the unit should be purring along. This is based on a four-stage model of team development by Kozlowski et al. (1999), but the mapping of role compilation onto rounds 1-5 and team compilation onto 6-10 seems a little arbitrary to me. Lorinkova's team do point out that risk-taking behaviour dropped between 1-5 and 6-10, suggesting they had moved to more routinised action.

Directive leaders earned higher performance in the task during rounds 1-5, but over stages 6-10 the empowered teams improved at a higher rate, leading to comparable performance by the end. The analysis confirmed several reasons behind this: the empowered groups learned to coordinate better, felt psychologically more in control, and after the study end were more accurate at characterising their colleague's capabilities and focus in a separate task. When entered into the analysis beforehand, the effect of empowered leadership could no longer be detected, suggesting that these were the routes through which empowerment was having its effect.

The authors would like to see this research conducted over longer time-scales, using set-ups more reflective of the workplace. However, this study already raises an important angle on leadership style: its impact may be profoundly tied to context, in particular the developmental stage of a team. Existing models emphasise the need for individual follower readiness for empowering leadership to work - some people may not expect nor desire ownership of tasks and the freedom to choose methods. But this research points to the dynamical processes within a team - where members stand in relation to one another and the team as a whole. The reliance on cross-sectional methodology in many leadership style studies may explain the controversy between studies: measuring at round 4 or round 9 would have produced very different conclusions about the relative benefits.

In conclusion, Lorinkova and colleagues offer a warning of taking these findings too simplistically: 'Although there may be some advantage to employing a combination of the two leadership approaches (e.g., Gratton & Erickson, 2007), our results suggest that the benefits of empowering leadership in teams tended to manifest because team members initially engaged in role identification and learning processes during the role compilation phase. Empowered teams, therefore, may not be able to reap the benefits of improved performance over time without first suffering the initial performance delays.'

Natalia M. Lorinkova, Matthew J. Pearsall, & Henry P. Sims Jr (2013). Examining the differential longitudinal performance of directive versus empowering leadership in teams Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 573-596 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0132

Further reading: 
Seibert, S. E., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. H. 2011. Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96: 981–1003.
 

Employees don't feel obliged to pay back managers who support them emotionally

The offering of emotional support from a manager at times of need is perceived very differently by managers and the recipients of that support. According to a new paper, while managers see such efforts as over-and-above their expected responsibilities, employees see it as just part of the manager's job. This clash of expectations can lead to problems.

Researchers Ginka Toegel, Martin Kilduff and N Anand drew their data through interviews and network analysis of staff at a recruitment agency. The network analysis asked the 67 employees to detail who they relied on when experiencing negative emotions. Those lower in the company hierarchy tended to turn to more senior colleagues for emotional support when stressed, angry or fatigued. There was little traffic in the other direction, as senior staff typically sought support from peers rather than subordinates. (We've covered leadership responses to challenges here.)

Interview data suggested that as well as responding to direct requests for support, managers often actively scanned their environment for brewing issues, and engaged with subordinates to offer venues to discuss emotional issues. And the ways in which managers helped ranged from simple listen-and-advice to more involved interventions, such as reframing and transforming the employees perspective.

What are the managerial motivations that lie behind such patterns of helping behaviour? Some managers expressed a fairly-hard nosed attitude: 'I don’t want that people leave, or I don’t want them to be really low or down at work, because this will have negative impact on me.' These individuals expected their efforts to pay back in terms of renewed commitment to the team. Other managers were more pro-social, acting because they are interested in people and concerned for their feelings. Still, they also expected reciprocity in terms of warmth and appreciation for their efforts. As one manager expressed, 'what I am doing [by way of emotion help] is over and above my responsibilities as a manager', and this view emerged as a consistent theme across the 14 managers interviewed: emotional support is an extra-role activity.

But employees saw things differently. 'If it is a work-related emotional problem, then it is my manager’s job to support me.' From their perspective, emotional support is simply a feature of the managers job, and saw little or no obligation to reciprocate. Employees did sometimes perceive that a manager was doing an excellent job in emotional support and consequently saw them as exceptional leaders, attributing them experience, wisdom and even referring to them as father- and mother-figures. The authors speculate whether putting the manager into such roles is a way to remove the need to actively reciprocate, just as children are rarely expected to match the efforts of their parents. While this can be flattering to a manager, the lack of a quid pro quo led to some managers feeling 'let down and disappointed', such as when an employee supported through a difficult episode went on to abruptly quit the company for a better position.

Neither the employee nor manager is wrong, but this study suggests that they can commonly be on different pages with regard to the role of emotional support. Being a 'toxin handler' of other people's negative emotions can be challenging and have knock-on effects for those who intervene. The authors conclude that 'our model suggests the paradox that helping behavior designed to ameliorate negative emotions may itself generate negative emotions on the part of managers waiting in vain for employees to repay their kindness with personal loyalty.'

Toegel, G., Kilduff, M., & Anand, N. (2012). Emotion Helping by Managers: An Emergent Understanding of Discrepant Role Expectations and Outcomes Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 334-357 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0512

Further reading:
Elfenbein, H. A. 2007. Emotion in organizations. In J. P. Walsh & A. P. Brief (Eds.), Academy of Management annals, vol. 1: 315–386. New York: Erlbaum.
 

Accountability provokes more team-focused behaviours in leaders who are outsiders

Sometimes leaders epitomise the group they seek to lead, such as a former trucker heading a transport trade union. In other cases leaders are less prototypical; while they may have the attributes for the role, they 'come from outside'. How might leaders from these two moulds respond when the workplace demands more accountability for their actions?  A team led by Steffen Giessner of Erasmus University set out to know more, investigating the team-oriented behaviours that leaders engage in when they know they will be scrutinised by followers.

At first blush, the prototypical leaders might be highly responsive under conditions of accountability. After all, it's harder to justify treating yourself as special and above a group when you resemble them so closely; better to act for 'your people' and cement your position as 'one of them'. But a first experiment with 152 students suggested otherwise.

Here each participant was led to believe they were leading a virtual team of three followers, and had been selected on the basis of either being very group prototypical or group non-prototypical, according to their answers to a questionnaire. They were then to complete decision-making tasks by assigning analysis work to their followers and making the final call on what answers to provide. Better answers would score points - some for each follower, and more for the leader - with group combined scores and individual scores both leading to possible financial reward.

What the researchers cared about was how the leaders would carve up the points-pie when they were given the authority to do so themselves. Just before this decision, half the participants were told they would need to justify their reasons to the team, and meet with them face to face before the end of the experiment. In this high accountability condition, the non-prototypical leaders dropped the proportion of points they kept for themselves to a level significantly lower than the baseline set by the experimental rules up to that point. Without the accountability, they held on to the baseline number of points, or even a little more.

 Meanwhile the prototypical leaders showed an intermediate level of generosity across both conditions. Their team-oriented behaviours didn't alter when accountability was put on the horizon.  Giessner's team believed that this reflects the relative security that prototypicality provides: by nature part of the in-group, there is less pressure to try and prove it when under scrutiny.

The investigators followed this with a field study  of 64 leaders and 209 followers. Leaders self-rated their prototypicality and how much accountability was present in the job, as well as another factor: team identification. Giessner's team suspected that in reality, accountability may not motivate non-prototypical leaders when they don't care about being part of the team, such as an interim manager aiming to get their job done before parachuting out. This hypothesis was borne out: followers' ratings of their leaders team-oriented behaviours (such as willingness to sacrifice own time for the benefit of the team) were high for non-prototypical leaders under accountability, but only if team identification was also high.

To make sense of this, I think of the postgraduate-trained specialist leading the salt-of-the-earth law enforcement team: at the end of the day, do they consider themselves police too? If so, they are likely to respond to increases in accountability with visible team-focused behaviour.

Of course, this research doesn't address other reasons why you might demand scrutiny of leader decisions, such as keeping them honest or providing transparency to a wider audience and thus helping information exchange. But as a tool for encouraging team behaviours, this evidence suggests that accountability may be most potent when aimed at outsiders who care about being included.

Giessner, S., van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W., & Sleebos, E. (2013). Team-Oriented Leadership: The Interactive Effects of Leader Group Prototypicality, Accountability, and Team Identification. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0032445

Further reading:

Rus, D., van Knippenberg, D., & Wisse, B. (2012). Leader power and
self-serving behavior: The moderating role of accountability. The Lead-
ership Quarterly, 23, 13–26. DOI:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.11.002 

 

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

Your boss's expectations shape your performance - but only if you trust them?

The Pygmalion effect is the much-observed finding that a leader's high expectations for their subordinates, if clearly communicated and followed up by supporting behaviours, translate into higher achievements for those subordinates. The leader paints the possibility of another possible self that the subordinate could become - 'be all you can be' - if they apply themselves and follow the path. Thus inspired, the subordinate fixes themself on the new horizon, and with guidance, surpasses themself. The leader keeps the horizon visible, a function termed 'the maintenance of hope'. As you can see, the orthodox view of this is rather unidirectional - leader transmits, others receive. In a theoretical paper, Leonard Kararkowsky, Nadia DeGama and Kenneth McBey unpack how the subordinate is likely to be a crucial factor in this effect: for them, it all comes down to trust.

Trust involves at its base a willingness to be vulnerable and put yourself in anothers hands, believing they will not let you down. Clearly the Pygmalion effect involves risk, as it calls for individuals to abandon old behaviours and strive for something currently beyond them. So it's reasonable to believe trust plays a part. Just how might it do so?

Firstly, the authors note that for trust to occur, the individual has to believe that the trustee has the ability to deliver. This is a cool, cognitive component of trust. Does this leader have the nous to get me from the present to the new possibility? And even before this, do I believe they possess good enough judgment to spot talent? If this trust is present, then the manager's high expectations can raise the subordinate's self-expectations, and with it self-efficacy and motivation to perform.

Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. So trust also relates to beliefs about a person's integrity: how reliable they are, whether their words meet their actions. Coupled with this is an even more important factor: benevolence. While integrity and capability are concerns to coolly appraise, benevolence involves emotional feelings of loyalty and attachment, the sense that this individual cares for you and will go beyond obligations to see you right. When leader Pygmalion behaviours - goal setting, feedback, advice - are viewed through the prism of integrity and benevolence, the subordinate can view them as one side of a social contract, where the leader is delivering effort (integrity) for the subordinate's good (benevolence). This calls for reciprocity from the subordinate, in the form of renewed efforts and changes in their own behaviour.

Karakowsky and colleagues note that the effect has been most deeply researched in educational and military settings - settings where respect for the other's authority and integrity is taken for granted.  The military setting in particular is heavily masculine, which may explain why the research often fails to find the effect with female leaders, who may be perceived through social stereotyping as less capable due to misfit to masculine activities. The authors conclude that for Pygmalion to be fully understood, we need to understand the influence of trust and the active role that subordinates need to take for change to occur.

Karakowsky, L., DeGama, N., & McBey, K. (2012). Facilitating the Pygmalion effect: The overlooked role of subordinate perceptions of the leader Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (4), 579-599 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02056.x

Further reading:

White, S. S., & Locke, E. A. (2000). Problems with the Pygmalion effect and some proposed solutions. The Leadership Quarterly, 11, 389–415. DOI: 10.1016/S1048-9843(00)00046-1 

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

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

Are leaders judged more harshly for mistakes that break with gender stereotypes?

We all make mistakes. A recent piece of research investigates how our feelings about leaders are affected when they slip up, and asks whether we are more forgiving when the error is 'to be expected' because of gender stereotypes.

Researchers Christian Thoroughgood, Katina Sawyer and Samuel Hunter produced a series of sets of emails describing how fictional employees perceived their leader. The leader - male or female, in either a masculine (construction) or feminine (nursing) industry - was presented in one of three error conditions. In the first they were revealed to have made three task errors such as badly managing resources. The second involved three relationship errors such as losing their temper, and the final was a 'no error' condition. The 301 student participants, primarily female, rated how competent the leader was at tasks and relationship, and how much they would want to work for them. Thoroughgood's team predicted that women leaders would be judged more harshly when they make a relationship error, and men for task errors, as these violate expectations of where each gender should be competent. In addition, they predicted this would be compounded when working in a same-gendered industry: a female nursing head has no business being bad with people...or so the story goes.

In fact, the results were a little different. Making errors certainly led to lower ratings, with task competence being hit harder by task errors, and vice versa. But the kind of errors that men and women made didn't seem to matter, neither overall nor when effects in the specific industries were examined. They key gender difference that was established was that for both kinds of errors, men received more severe judgements than women, but only in the construction industry conditions. It appears participants have unequal expectations for men and women's competence, holding the highest bar for men operating in a comfort zone environment. It's worth noting that the gender of participants was evaluated as a co-variate in the analysis, ensuring that the preponderance of women didn't lead to systematic bias.

The authors reflect that the relationship/task errors could have been more sharply gendered; for instance, accurate email planning (a task error) may be seen equally as a female managerial trait as well as a male one. But on the face of this evidence, people expect men and women to be competent across domains if they want to be seen as a competent, desirable leader.

Christian N. Thoroughgood, Katina B. Sawyer, & Samuel T. Hunter (2012). Real Men Don’t Make Mistakes: Investigating the Effects of Leader Gender, Error Type, and the Occupational Context on Leader Error Perceptions Journal of Business and Psychology DOI: 10.1007/s10869-012-9263-8

Emotional Intelligence helps manage team issues - but not in every context

Past research has confirmed that emotional intelligence (EI) is more important in jobs such as teaching or nursing because it provides resources and methods for personally managing the high emotional loads common to such positions. A new paper demonstrates that jobs that involve high managerial demands benefit from EI for a different reason: the specific ability to detect emotional cues helps smooth over issues and keep team relations positive. However, in some cases, EI could be doing harm rather than good.

EI can be conceptualised in many ways, and lead researcher Crystal Farh and her colleagues chose to focus on Mayer and Salovey’s model, a purely ability-focused scheme that comprises emotional perception, the use of emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions. They asked 212 early-career managers to complete web surveys that measured personality together with managerial work demands, defined by items such as "This job is a dramatic increase in scope". Managerial demands were of interest because they reflect work situations that are challenging and involve degrees of stress and intense emotions to deliver ambitious outcomes; Farh's team believed that emotional cues in these contexts need to be picked up quickly by managers. EI was measured through a series of standardised ability tests, and participants' supervisors contributed ratings of overall job performance together with perceptions of how effective the participant's team was.

 When managerial work demands were great, higher EI was associated with higher teamwork effectiveness, but the relationship disappeared when the managerial demands were at or beyond one standard deviation below the sample average. EI made a difference in busy, complex and multi-layered managerial contexts, not when managing single teams under less pressured conditions. Farh's team predicted that the first EI component, emotional perception, would be the most crucial component, because noticing emotions is a precondition to acting upon them. They duly found that when each component was analysed separately, only emotional perception maintained the effect under high managerial demands; moreover, when those demands were low, emotional perception was actually associated with a penalty to teamworking. Why? The paper conjectures that being hypersensitive to emotional cues in a low-stress environment may actually be counterproductive, leading to 'reading too much' into situations and rocking the boat unnecessarily.

Does teamworking matter? An analysis demonstrated that in this sample, higher EI was associated with better job performance, and this was due to the positive relationship between EI and teamwork effectiveness. All analyses controlled for personality, as in particular conscientiousness tends to be tied to meeting specified work outcomes.

The research adds to the literature that EI matters in a range of work roles, acting as a solution to specific problems rather than acting as a global resource that improves every situation.  The authors conclude that 'managers should recognize that selecting emotionally intelligent employees or training employees’ EI may not lead to higher performance outcomes in all situations, but that investing in the EI of employees working in jobs characterized by high managerial demands may be a worthwhile endeavour.'

Crystal I Chien Farh, Myeong-Gu Seo, & Paul E. Tesluk (2012). Emotional intelligence, teamwork effectiveness, and job performance: The moderating role of job context. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97 (4), 890-900 DOI: 10.1037/a0027377

What's so special about family firms?

Family firms are a significant phenomena on the business landscape. Estimates suggest they account for approximately 90% of all firms. Yet their unique qualities are often ignored by organisational research, or otherwise ghettoised into specialist conversations. According to a new review article in the Journal of Management, this means missing out on insights that can inform organisations of every stripe.

Eric Gedajlovic and colleagues raise some of the unique features of a family firm. The first is they are necessarily run by their owner, which has consequences for the motivations, intent and effort put in by leadership. Deep ties to personal reputation, the use of personal finances for investments, and obligations to future generations (literally, in the form of family descendents), make such owner-managers more likely to operate ethically, prudently, and for the long-term.

Another feature is informality. Businesses that rely on formal governance can't get away with handshake deals and overt, personal reciprocity, but family firms operate more personally, finding quicker ways to get things done that lower transaction costs, such as bypassing a laborious tender process. As a further edge, this is an effective way to cultivate strong, trust-based personal networks. Finally, long-standing family members and other loyal lifers offer a wealth of tacit knowledge: things you know but don't necessarily know you know, that makes things run more smoothly. Family firms can leverage such information, free to use gut and rules of thumb for rapid responses.

There are downsides too. In general, the model is in some tension with meritocracy, and there is evidence that CEOs who get their job through primogeniture tend to under-perform compared to the market. Dishonest or slack managers may be forgiven due to personal ties or outright nepotism. And finally, the strong in-group formed may carry a failure to trust outsiders, and make these firms slower in keeping up, particularly with fast-changing trends such as in technology.

These features of family firms are often magnifications of things present in any work organisation, which makes them worth exploring. Take the tensions, so evident in family firms, between the decision that makes financial sense and the one that 'feels right'. Owner-managers may want to cement power, crave a high status, risky deal, or be unwilling to deviate from the founder's vision, and investigating them has been helpful to prospect theory, looking at the roots of seemingly irrational business decisions. Another perspective looks at how these non-financially driven decisions can help organisations in the long run; such 'mixed motives' in businesses help encourage collaboration and the sense of a mission bigger than any bottom line. As a result, the risks and benefits associated with the way business is done in family firms can be understood and used to develop ways of working for organisations in general.

Eric Gedajlovic, Michael Carney, James J. Chrisman, & Franz W. Kellermanns (2012). The Adolescence of Family Firm Research: Taking Stock and Planning for the Future Journal of Management , 38 (4), 1010-1037 DOI: 10.1177/0149206311429990

How do people perceive dominant behaviour by black female leaders?

For women in managerial positions, taking behaviours that are too overtly dominant or coloured with emotions can incur penalties: their leadership skills may be questioned and expressing anger frequently may lead them to lower status and salaries. Black leaders walk a similar line, with male black CEOs benefiting from having non-threatening, 'babyfaced' features where white leaders with more rugged features thrive. You could expect black women who are dominant and agentic to be especially penalised, subject to some kind of 'double jeopardy'. But the truth seems to be much more interesting.

In a US study led by Robert Livingston together with Ashleigh Shelby Rosette and Ella Washington, 84 non-black participants were asked to evaluate fictional leaders. Participants were assigned to conditions which changed just a few elements of the information they received: the skin colour (white/black) and gender of the leader, and glossing a directive or collaborative approach over an account of how they dealt with a poorly performing employee - for instance, whether they 'demanded' or 'encouraged' an improvement in performance. The directive approach suggested personal dominance which might turn participants against a leader. To measure this, participants responded to questions on leader effectiveness, gathered into an overall score, and rated whether the treatment of the employee owed more to the situation or to the leader's personality: an attribution to personality suggests poor judgment and inability to control themselves.

The data showed that white males received similar attributions of behaviour whether they were collaborative or directive. In line with previous work,  when they were dominant female leaders' decisions were attributed more to their personality, as were those of the black bosses. But there was a significant interaction between race and gender: black women leaders escaped the penalties, receiving similar attributions to the white male in both conditions. The same story was found for leader effectiveness: black or female bosses were penalised for agentic behaviour, but black and female bosses were not.

What's going on? Livingston's team believed that black women are receiving a perverse benefit from a particularly marginalised position. Their reading is that women are expected to conform to proscribed gender roles centring around soft emotions and minimal agency. Similarly, black 'others' may represent an out-group threat that is validated by expressions of dominance. Under this account, however, the prototypical idea of being 'black' evokes a black man, and 'woman' a white woman, at least in American society. As a consequence, black women are to some degree an anomaly - neither the classic black threat nor the threat to the established gender status quo – and so escape the associated penalties due to a kind of stereotype invisibility.

Livingston's team emphasise that this study does not suggest that black women escape prejudice in the workplace. There are many ways you can be differentially judged, for instance, evaluation and attribution of failures (on which we've written before). But this study suggests that when it comes to showing what you feel and getting things done, black women don't suffer a backlash when, as white males are able to, they get things done in an agentic fashion.

Livingston, R., Rosette, A., & Washington, E. (2012). Can an Agentic Black Woman Get Ahead? The Impact of Race and Interpersonal Dominance on Perceptions of Female Leaders Psychological Science, 23 (4), 354-358 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611428079

What makes a maverick?

Who are the mavericks who take the path less travelled and bring organisations along in their wake?  We can point to individuals, such as the British entrepreneur Richard Branson, but there has been little empirical work to establish the personal profile that predicts maverickism.

Enter Elliroma Gardiner and Chris J. Jackson, who gathered data online from 458 full-time workers within a range of sectors, seeking to map a range of personal variables onto their measure of maverickism. This measure captured the tendency to behave in disruptive, bold, risk-taking ways to achieve goals. It was also constructed to capture only functional maverickism, on the basis that when these behaviours lead to failures rather than successes the instigator is labelled a misfit or deviant, not a maverick; a typical item was "I have a knack for getting things right when least expected."

What predicted maverickism? After accounting for the predictive power of maleness - associated with maverickism - the  regression analysis revealed what was contributed by personality. More extraverted participants tended to be mavericks, reflecting the energetic, sociable side needed to push new ideas. Mavericks were also open to experience, the personality trait that reflects willingness to try new things and act against the status quo. Those with high maverickism tended to be lower in agreeableness, which the investigators had predicted: you may need some social skills to be a maverick, but you also need to be comfortable with people resenting your approach and with upsetting people.

Gardiner and Jackson found two other measures mattered after personality was taken into account. One came from a computer task of risky behaviour, where participants gained in-game money by inflating balloons bigger - but lost cash when they burst. In a condition where balloons became very sensitive in a second stage, raising the risks markedly, those who finished with more ruptured rubber had higher maverickism scores. The final measure was of laterality: the degree to which we rely on one side of our body over another. Participants with a stronger left-ear preference were more likely to report maverick behaviour... if they also scored low in the personality variable of neuroticism. Why? Left body laterality implies right brain laterality, and some lines of evidence suggest this is associated with creativity. Creative ideas can make a good maverick - but not if we're too anxious to act on them, as high neuroticism would imply.

The research suggests that maverick behaviour originates from individuals who are extraverted, curious, tough toward others, and fairly inured to punishing risk. The data also suggests that a combo of an emotionally stable personality with a creative capacity facilitates maverickism, although we might want to see this measured directly using measures of creativity.  I'm left fascinated by what differentiates the maverick from the workplace deviant. It could be about picking the right risks, but note that our functional mavericks stuck to their bold (but non-optimal) balloon strategy even in the face of feedback (bursts) that led others to cool off.   Are the mavericks just the lucky ones?

Gardiner, E., & Jackson, C. (2011). Workplace mavericks: How personality and risk-taking propensity predicts maverickism British Journal of Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02090.x