Rebooting Organisational Citizenship Behaviour for the 21st Century

Fans of comics are well acquainted with franchises being 'rebooted', and aficionados of TV and film may have experienced this with the Battlestar Galactica series or Star Trek movies. What seems cutting edge and on-the-nose in one era can begin to look dated and out of touch in another, so a deft hand is needed to sharpen things up. But did you ever consider that psychological concepts get rebooted too? Just like TV media, what makes sense in one era can be anachronistic in another. So, here's an introduction to a reboot of organisational citizenship behaviours for the 21st Century.

In their article in Academy of Management Perspectives, Kathryn Dekas and colleagues explain how Organisational Citizenship Behaviour, or OCB, was developed as a concept in the late 70s and the 80s as a response to the lack of relationship between job satisfaction and traditional measures of performance. Dennis Organ and colleagues had identified that research was narrowly focused on job performance in terms of performance of obligatory activity, and that the consequences of high job satisfaction would instead be for positive acts that are discretionary in nature. So the OCB construct was born, and research over the years has variously defined it in terms of five main components: altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy, and civic virtue.

Dekas' team felt however that in the 21st century things that were once discretionary may be now considered core, and new frontiers of discretionary work may now matter. This may be particularly true for people engaged in knowledge work - 'thinking for a living' - estimated as being the core activity for 25-50% of workers in advanced economies.  To explore this, they conducted 12 focus groups made up of 7-10 participants, principally in the US but with European and Asian representatives. The company? That major epicentre of knowledge work, Google.

Focus groups rated items from the five traditional components of the OCB construct, determining the degree to which their work group saw them as useful and voluntary (as they should be to count as OCB items) or something else. That 'something else' came up a lot: most items were rated as core, expected behaviours by at least one of the groups – for example, attendance at meetings is here seen as expected rather than voluntary - and many items were also rated as simply inapplicable. For instance, "does not spend time in idle conversation" was discarded by many groups: that may be seen as good behaviour on a factory floor, but not at Google.

In a separate task, groups brainstormed behaviours that they did see as discretionary but valuable within their organisation. This data - 615 items in all - was then screened and categorised into new OCB components... eight in all, four that hewed to the original components, together with four further ones. Whereas Helping mapped closely to the pre-existing altruism component, another component of Employee Sustainability referred to helping others - and one's self - to maintain health and wellbeing, an OCB with a much longer-term agenda. Other new components included Administrative Behaviour (such as making sure events happen that could easily slip through the cracks), Knowledge Sharing and Social Participation. Now it becomes clear why 'avoiding idle conversation' didn't resonate as an OCB among these focus groups: employees expect each other to expend discretional effort in conversation, both functional and non-targeted, in order to grease the wheels of exchange and comradeship.

Dekas and her co-authors stress that this is not meant to be the definitive rewriting of OCB, nor that existing measures are now redundant. But it points to the fact that any construct needs to make sense in the context you use it. The team have developed the new components into a new measure of OCB, one that may be more valuable in examining discretionary acts in a knowledge-work environment. Their data - from 300 participants outside of Google – suggests that compared to traditional OCB measures, their measure may correlate better with job satisfaction, fit, and (negatively) with stress. So if you're interested in understanding OCB, watch this space.

Kathryn H. Dekas, Talya N. Bauer, Brian Welle, Jennifer Kurkowski, & Stacy Sullivan (2013). Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Version 2.0: A review and Qualitative Investigation of OCBs for Knowledge Workers at Google and beyond The Academy of Management Perspectives, 27 (3), 219-237 DOI: 10.5465/amp.2011.0097

Further reading:
Podsakoff, N. P., Whiting, S. W., Podsakoff, P. M., & Blume, B. D. (2009). Individual- and organizational level consequences of organizational citizenship behaviors: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(1), 122–141.

Want a spate of good deeds? Confront the ne'er do wells...

Discovering you are racking up more work misdemeanours than the organisation considers acceptable can lead people to perform reparation behaviours to compensate for their misdeeds. The study that reports this new finding did not rely on public or interpersonal shaming for its effect; anonymous feedback that the individual had committed an above-average amount of counterproductive work actions was enough to provoke guilt, and through that, altruism.

On day one of Remus Ilies's survey-based study, 146 university employees recorded the counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs) they got up to, such as playing pranks on others or taking extra-long breaks. The next day, half of them received feedback on their CWB levels compared to the average. The feedback noted that above-average CWBs were harmful to the wellbeing of the organisation. Participants were then asked how much they intended to engage in another kind of extra-role behaviour, positive organisational citizenship behaviours such as assisting others or offering ideas. Three days later, they were surveyed again about how much citizenship behaviour they had actually engaged in.

Above average offenders who received no feedback were least likely to plan or carry out citizenship acts for others. Typical of those lot, eh? But when feedback was provided, the intentions of high offenders, and their actual efforts to do good, shot up to levels similar to those of the well-behaved, low CWB participants. The Day two survey also recorded ratings of emotional guilt, and this was what mediated the relationship between feedback on high CWBs and more citizenship behaviours: the more guilt, the more they tried to make up with good deeds.

Previous work has suggested going the extra mile at work is related to positive emotions, but here we see a benefit from a negative emotion, and one that produces a crossover from harmful work behaviours to constructive behaviours. The authors characterise it as 'a dynamic phenomenon in which negative and positive voluntary behaviours influence each other' until employees find their own balance according to 'their personal level of comfort.' They call for future work to see whether the compensatory behaviours occur in the same domain - teasing a co-worker leading to helping that person out - or whether guilt leads to indirect compensation such as more active work participation, rather than looking the bad deed in the face.

Remus Ilies, Ann Chunyan Peng, Krishna Savani, & Nikos Dimotakis (2013). Guilty and Helpful: An Emotion-Based Reparatory Model of Voluntary Work Behavior Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0034162

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.
 

ADHD at work: helping others over getting the task done?

New research looking at how ADHD affects performance at work. The condition has a high prevalance, with 4.4% of American adults estimated to have it, and a body of research suggests that it can influence work outcomes like productivity, work conflict and turnover. Jonathon Halbesleben, Anthony Wheeler, and Kristen Shanine have just published research suggesting that ADHD may have consequences via two routes: encouraging behaviours that are not pointed at intended goals, and eroding the benefits that workers normally experience when they are in an engaged state.

The research applied its investigations to three samples of slightly different demographics, each numbering hundreds of participants (between 170 and 257). Samples were drawn by different methods and measured on two occasions six months apart using slightly different tools ; this variance made it possible to internally replicate any findings and make them more generalisable. Job performance was partitioned into multiple factors: performance of work tasks, and frequency of discretionary organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) towards either the organisation or other individuals. In the second and third sample, participants' performance was also rated by their coworkers or supervisors, using the same task/OCB measures. ADHD was measured throughout using a standard self-report scale, and used to create three group of low, moderate and high ADHD risk, with about 10% being in the latter across samples, and the rest evenly split between low and moderate. Participants reported work engagement using a scale capturing vigor, dedication, and absorption.

Replicating previous work, ADHD was negatively associated with job performance on all measures in all samples, with the exception of sample two's self-reported task performance. Engagement was shown to be significantly related to performance within all the samples, but greater ADHD diminished the relationship: in fact, for the high ADHD group the relationship was not significantly different from zero. Halbesleben team had predicted this pattern: whereas engagement  normally provides excess work-related resources that can be channeled towards work outcomes, the problems that people with ADHD report in prioritisation and completion of tasks means that they struggle to make the most of these extra resources.

If ADHD leads to attention-grabbing features of the environment triggering behaviours that crowd out goal-directed ones, then we might be able to see this in the types of performance that are more affected. The researchers predicted that as OCBs are often themselves triggered by environmental events, such as a colleague asking for help, they would do fairly well - at the expense of task performance. When these discretionary behaviours involve helping an individual, the short-term incentives, like gratitude or social pressure, can be particularly acute.

The self-report data didn't show this pattern. However, coworkers and supervisor ratings (from samples two and three) showed a stronger negative relationship between ADHD and task performance than between ADHD and OCBs. As the researchers note, 'whereas others view those with ADHD as diverting their attention toward less task-relevant behaviors, the employees themselves do not view themselves as doing the same.'

The paper suggests some clearer mechanisms of how ADHD may influence work performance, and in doing so helps us develop our ideas about how to support people with this condition. Previous ideas, such as time management tools, quieter work areas and reduced clutter (physical and on our computer homescreen) could all minimise the impediments between the state of engagement and productivity. Meanwhile, we can recognise that the possible tendency for people with ADHD to be more likely to put energies into positive discretionary behaviours - similar to research on impulsivity we've reported on - is both a potential organisational asset, but also something that we should be careful not to exploit, as it may be a barrier to effective performance on mandated tasks.

Halbesleben, J., Wheeler, A., & Shanine, K. (2013). The moderating role of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the work engagement–performance process. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18 (2), 132-143 DOI: 10.1037/a0031978

Further reading:

Kessler, R. C., Adler, L., Ames, M., Barkley, R. A., Birnbaum, H., Greenberg, P., . . . Ustün, T. B. (2005). The prevalence and effects of adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder on work performance in a nationally representative sample of workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 47, 565–572. doi:10.1097/01.jom.0000166863.33541.39
 

Adjustment to a new role is influenced by how your supervisor makes you feel

Before every great employee, there was a new employee. Getting newcomers up to speed is crucial for organisations, so it's useful to know how this is supported or disrupted. Competing models suggest the supervisor as the decisive factor in onboarding, or that newcomers themselves are the crucial agent. A new article focuses on the interplay between the two: how a supervisor makes you feel shapes your behaviours that can make or break those early days.

Suhsil Nifadkar, Anne Tsui and Blake Ashforth conducted their survey-based research within the IT sector in India, where growth at around 30% and high turnover means a lot of newcomers and high stakes for their rapid adjustment. Being 'new' can mean different things in different jobs, so the team consulted with HR representatives in the industry to agree on a boundary of the first three months of employment. New starters across a range of companies were contacted and those enlisted sent a survey at the end of their first month, asking about how their supervisor treated them, in terms of levels of support and amount of verbal aggression. Two weeks later respondents were asked to complete a second survey asking how they currently felt about the supervisor, both in terms of positive affect, with items like 'I feel glad to interact with my supervisor', and negative affect, such as 'I feel very tense around my supervisor'. Nifadkar and colleagues constructed their inventories based on Russell's influential circumplex model of emotion, which defines it in terms of valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and high to low arousal, and the team opted to measure positive and negative affect separately as people can experience ambivalence with 'mixed emotions' in response to experiences and individuals. They predicted that feelings towards a supervisor would be driven by how they have been treated in the past, and this was born out, with more support leading to more positive affect and more aggression to more negative affect.

But what consequences do these feelings have? The research team were driven by the approach-avoidance model of emotion, in which emotions direct us towards one of two fundamentals of behaviour: moving towards or away from a target activity or individual. In a workplace environment, they hypothesised this could take two forms: the extent to which they proactively seek supervisor feedback to better understand the workplace, and the extent to which they avoid the supervisor when possible. These were measured in a survey two weeks further into the respondents' employment, analysis of which found positive affect led to more feedback behaviours and identified a particularly strong effect of negative affect upon avoidance behaviours. The consequences of these behaviours were measured in a final survey two weeks on, looking at in-role performance, amount of helping behaviours towards colleagues, and newcomer adjustment outcomes - a combination of social adjustment, understanding of tasks and clarity on their own role. Requesting more feedback was positively associated with performance and newcomer adjustment, and actively avoiding the supervisor was associated with worse performance and fewer helping behaviours.

Organisations can invest substantially in onboarding schemes for new staff, recognising how much a bad start can cost them. As important as these are, this research suggests that the disposition of one individual - the supervisor - can be highly influential on outcomes. Supervisor behaviour triggers emotional responses, which are intended to be protective and adaptive but can lead to counterproductive behaviour, such as refraining from seeking help on a task beyond you because you were rebuked on an earlier occasion. Nifadkar and colleagues suggest that organisations could give more attention to the formative emotional experiences that their supervisors are bestowing on new staff, and even consider that the 'probation period' is really evaluating two people: the new hire and the person responsible for their early days.

Nifadkar, S., Tsui, A., & Ashforth, B. (2012). The way you make me feel and behave: Supervisor-triggered newcomer affect and approach-avoidance behavior. Academy of Management Journal, 55 (5), 1146-1168 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0133

When do people whistle-blow?

Corruption and bad practice remain an issue in institutions. External governance and regulation offers some protection, but issues can remain invisible to outsiders. This is where whistle-blowers come in, but what propels an individual to stand up and speak out? That´s what a new paper by Marcia Miceli and colleagues seeks to understand.

The researchers surveyed a military base, receiving 3,288 questionnaires back from military and civilian employees. Respondents were asked if they had perceived wrongdoing and how they responded: reporting it to supervisors, others internal to the organisation, externally, or not at all. Against these categories, they reviewed a number of variables, to see what effect they had in sorting people into active agents and passive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, proactive personality traits turned out to predict whistle-blowing, but a number of situational factors also arose as important.

Firstly, does the amount of hard evidence of wrong-doing matter? Previous data has been equivocal, and the invitation made to whistle-blowers is to come forward with suspicions, not to turn up with a comprehensive dossier. And motivation to speak out has previously been associated with outrage and moral obligation, tied up with hot emotions rather than cool appraisal of data. Miceli's team tried to get a comprehensive take on evidence by using a formative index, a smorgasbord measure made up of mixed but relevant concepts ('I had physical evidence' and 'the evidence was convincing to me') to go beyond what they perceived as previous narrow measures of evidence. And indeed, the data showed that more evidence, in its various forms, is a driver of taking whistle-blowing action.

Secondly, do the opinions of co-workers matter? It seems so: surveyants who checked items such as their co-workers 'were afraid to report it' or thought 'someone else would report it' were less likely to whistle blow. And thirdly, surveyants were more likely to act when they had situation-specific leverage, such as an expert in finance considering whether to report seeming budget irregularities. Previous research had suggested that generalised power in the organisation might have some effect, but this was a clear demonstration of the importance of context, that the reach of the finance pro may not extend to raising age discrimination issues.

Miceli and her team conclude that this data is consistent with the pro-social organisational behaviour model, in which a perception of responsibility to act (here influenced by innate character and having access to evidence) makes us weigh the costs (signalled by co-worker unwillingness) and benefits (stopping the wrongdoing, more likely if we have leverage and evidence) to reach a decision. They suggest that while organisations are often focused on the aftermath, protecting whistle-blowers from retaliation, they could give more attention to putting these antecedent factors in place: educating on what constitutes sufficient evidence to speak out, encouraging a culture shift to avoid the chilling effect of co-worker invalidation, and increasing perceptions of leverage: perhaps, 'when it comes to speaking out about this organisation, we are all experts'.

Marcia P Miceli, Janet P Near, Michael T Rehg, & James R Van Scotter (2012). Predicting employee reactions to perceived organizational wrongdoing: Demoralization, justice, proactive personality, and whistle-blowing Human Relations, 65, 923-954 DOI: 10.1177/0018726712447004

Monitoring 'self-managing' employees may provoke negative work behaviours

Good things can come when members of an organisation are allowed to manage their own work, such as greater job satisfaction and better adherence with organisational policy. But this involves management doing an uncomfortable thing: surrendering control. Often, organisations compensate by coupling self-management with surveillance techniques of the  close-up or electronic variety. New research suggests that self-management has even more benefits, but that mashing it with surveillance can end up bringing out the worst in people.

Authors Jaclyn Jenson and Jana Raver conducted two studies, the first looking to establish whether people given freedom would use it to perform more positive, discretionary acts, so-called organisational citizenship behaviours or OCBs. By mocking up a fictional consultancy, the researchers could recruit 211 participants (in their own minds, employees on a one-off, very short-term contract) to show up, review investment advice, and write it up in the form of a report. Before starting their short-term shift, they were given Terms of Service both printed and read aloud; these either emphasised self-management or other-management, a promise cashed out by the shift supervisor sitting passively or actively pacing the room. The work involved discretionary elements, such as how long the report and whether to complete or skip some optional questionnaires. The amount of discretional effort  was turned into a OCB score: individuals in the self-management condition scored higher, making efforts over and above what was demanded.

Study two surveyed individuals across a range of organisations, to offer a field replication and extend the investigation to understand how surveillance interacts with self-management. The survey introduced a further outcome measure, counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs), choosing to undermine the organisation in some way, such as deliberately dragging your heels on a task. The data from the 423 respondents suggested that surveillance in itself encouraged CWBs, but this was driven by its interaction with self-management. When individuals believed they were supposed to be self managing - 'It is my responsibility, and not my organization’s, to monitor my own workplace behavior and job performance' - but the reality was that they were being monitored,  their CWBs were markedly higher. Jensen and Raver predicted this finding, seeing it as an example of psychological reactance: when freedom you believe you deserve is seemingly taken away, you will try to recover autonomy through other means, even at the expense of the organisation. Analysing trust in the organisation, also surveyed, revealed that the normally observed relationship between self management and higher trust was severed once surveillance entered the mix.

This research suggests that if you don't want to evoke petty revenges from employees, it's vital that cultures of self-management aren't tempered by close surveillance. By resisting that temptation, you're likely to yield benefits, your people more willing to perform beyond what is expected.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, & Jana L. Raver (2012). When Self-Management and Surveillance Collide: Consequences for Employees’ Organizational Citizenship and Counterproductive Work Behaviors Group Organization Management, 37 (3), 308-346 DOI: 10.1177/1059601112445804

Stretching emotional limits leads to bad behaviour at work

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

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

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

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

What are the pitfalls of moving away from hierarchy?

What's the best way to organise groups of people?  Experimentally-minded organisations have explored the use of 'autonomous workgroups', where teams are led from within rather than being allocated a supervisor. The psychological benefits are apparent: providing workers with more direct autonomy is well-known to promote motivation. Is the relative rarity of such approaches merely down to inertia within the world of work, or are there some challenges that need consideration? 

In a recent article, Jonas Ingvaldsen and Monica Rolfsen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology present a case study detailing 'Tools', a Norwegian tool company that decided to move from a traditional foreman situation to a flatter structure, partly led by an organisational and national culture that is sympathetic to labour empowerment. The investigators took a qualitative approach, using interviews and focus groups to gather information from team members over 13 years. They began as a new approach kicked off, where each week a different team member took on a spokesperson role. Then, the  workforce was enthusiastic: 'The flat structure has come to stay. We won’t return to the foreman system, where someone points the finger and tells you what to do.'

Yet eight years later, interviews and discussions revealed several issues. Although members wanted to do good by their team, the transient nature of the spokesperson responsibility made it possible to skimp on more onerous and seemingly less essential activities like information-sharing. Moreover, the fact that the spokesperson role was crafted around the team needs meant that when tensions between teams or functions emerged, there were few formal mechanisms to resolve disputes. Spokespeople were unable to enforce decisions that were individually unpopular but better for the larger system:  'self-management ends up with what is optimal for each individual, and that is comfort' - meaning that products were put together on a schedule that was efficient for the team but was harmful to the inventory management.

Tools switched it up. The new system involved distributed leadership, where managerial responsibilities were unbundled and made the responsibility of different team members. In this '5-M' model, one person would look after Man (eg staffing), another Machine, and so on. While this appears to have had some powerful benefits - Mileu specialists can get together in their M-meeting, and discuss how to improve air quality across the organisation - real-life problems don't always fall neatly into boxes. The interviews revealed concerns that non-essential issues often got kicked from one M to another without resolution. Concrete and immediate problems did tend to get resolved rapidly and effectively, but anything big-picture called on co-ordination that no-one was equipped for.

This case study encapsulates some of the benefits and challenges of non-hierarchical methods within large, complex organisations. Are all members dispositionally suited to taking on leadership duties over their existing work? How can they develop mastery and hence satisfaction for these duties when only practiced one week in six? Are the domains that we carve the world into sufficiently legible to the human users who have to operate with them? Worthwhile questions to help us toward a 21st century approach to the workplace.

Jonas A Ingvaldsen, & Monica Rolfsen (2012). Autonomous work groups and the challenge of inter-group coordination Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726712448203

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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