Never the earner, always the bride: How male breadwinners view women in the workplace

Across a series of studies, a new article demonstrates that married men who have a more traditional 'breadwinner role' at home tend to have more negative views on women in the workplace.

Across their studies, Sreedhari Desai, Dolly Chugh and Arthur Brief defined traditional marriages as those where the wife was not employed, contrasted with couples that were dual-earning.  Firstly they employed data from US national surveys. In the first data set - 282 married men in 1996 - those in more traditional marriages showed some discomfort with a gender-mixed workplace, being more likely to disagree with statements such as 'if a mother chooses to work, it doesn't hurt the child.' Does this abstract opinion dissolve when it meets the reality of the workplace? The second dataset from a 2002 survey suggests it does not, as of the 89 men analysed, traditionalists were less likely to see their workplace as running smoothly when it had a higher composition of women.

Turning to experimental work, Desai's team showed that compared to those in a dual-earning marriage, traditionally married undergraduate students rated recruitment literature intended to attract job applicants as less effective when it contained cues of high female involvement in the company, such as all-female (vs all-male) recruiter names and an equal opportunity reference that included the note 'For example, representation of women on our board of directors far exceeds the average representation of women in Fortune 500 companies.'

The next experiment found managers just as susceptible; when traditionally married, managers were less likely to recommend a fictional candidate for an MBA program if they were a woman. This is noteworthy because managers wield substantial influence, Interestingly, dual earners as a group gave higher ratings to the female than the male applicant.

Returning to survey data, the researchers were able to gather data across two data points of the British Household Panel Survey. 304 men were surveyed in 1991 prior to marriage, and 1993 following marriage, using the same scale as study one used on attitude to women in the workplace. Desai's team didn't find these attitudes to predict the marriage structure men ended up in - other factors appear to have more real influence, with older and more educated men more likely to end up in one-income marriages (this may reflect opportunity rather than preference). But the type of marriage did affect subsequent attitudes to women at work, with a traditional set-up leading to less sympathy for women being represented in the workplace.

This last study gives the strongest evidence of causality in this relationship. So why might marriage be shaping these attitudes? Status construction theory suggests that we tend to use our own social conditions to extrapolate how the world works more generally. If every day you engage in work duties while your wife focuses on home life, not only are you incentivised to believe that this is a sensible division of labour, but increasingly it will seem true to you, as your differential experiences give you more work-related resources such as contacts, influence, knowledge and competence. This can lead to the false conclusion that 'men are just more suited to work.'

Desai emphasises that the bulk of their studies don't speak to this causality argument and that more research is needed. Also, we should bear in mind that some of the survey data is now fairly odl, and attitudes may have shifted somewhat. However, the repeated finding is clear: men in traditional marriages have a smaller appetite for women-heavy workforces. The researchers conclude that as well as seeking a diverse workforce, where traditional views do not crowd out other perspectives, attention could be given to "the challenging psychological position that men in traditional marriages face when alternating between their two daily realities", and find ways to illustrate to these people that their personal life decisions may be driving their workplace attitudes, possibly in an unconscious fashion.

Desai, S., Chugh, D., & Brief, A. (2014). The Implications of Marriage Structure for Men's Workplace Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors toward Women Administrative Science Quarterly DOI: 10.1177/0001839214528704

Further reading:

Bolzendahl, C. I., and Myers, D. J (2004). Feminist attitudes and support for gender equality: Opinion change in women and men, 1974–1998. Social Forces, 83: 759–789.

Racial slurs: who suffers and who speaks out against them

A recent article investigates racial slurs in the workplace, an important issue that is under-researched. Across a series of studies, Ashley Rosette and colleagues presents data from US samples that show different quantities of racial slurs experienced by white and black people, how gender and race interact with producing them, and how these factors influence willingness to speak up when a slur is witnessed. Tying this all together is a theoretical model based around who benefits when a workplace denigrates a group.

The first study asked 471 participants recruited via online survey to detail their experience of being targeted by a racial slur. The researchers controlled for socio-economic status and household income - both markers of status that reduce the likelihood of suffering abuse - and also for the degree that the individual's work interactions are same-race versus other-race, as this may provide different opportunities for abuse. Holding these factors constant, black people were subjected to a larger quantity of slurs than whites were, and the most common situation was white-to-black slurs. When gender was considered, a richer picture emerged: black men were far more likely to be targeted by slurs than white men, but for women, the difference was much slighter and did not reach significance.

Rosette and her team understand these findings in terms of social dominance and gendered prejudice. Essentially, slurs function to sustain social inequality, keeping one group down so a dominant one will prosper. In this US context, those who have most to gain from this are whites, and specifically white men, as they are both the greatest material beneficiaries of hierarchy and the gender more socialised to seek and defend status. The team predicted that observers of slurs are also more likely to be white men, as previous research has indicated that people are more likely to be interpersonally aggressive when amongst like-minded individuals. Their second study looked at this by harnessed existing telephone survey data, accessing information on 2480 participants which included the question: "Did you hear one or more colleagues at work use a racial slur?". Far more white men answered affirmatively than black men, with no differences seen in the women respondents; in fact, the overall effect of race, collapsing across genders, did not reach significance.

The final study investigated the individual differences that prompt some people to act and others to remain silent when they witness a slur. Conventionally, the background reasoning around these situations (such as whistleblowing or the bystander effect) looks at risk and cost to individuals who act. Rosette's team flip this by considering who benefits from silence. They measured social dominance orientation (SDO), "the desire for generalized, hierarchical relationships between social groups, and ingroup dominance over out-groups", in their sample of 133 students. The study asked these students to observe an online chat meeting between two simulated co-workers  discussing who to include in a task force.

After each candidate was discussed, participants were invited to record feedback on the decision-making process that would be sent on to the CEO. However, each candidate discussion included a racial slur derogating black people. Who was less likely to use the feedback to speak out? White people, who were twice as likely to remain silent. Moreover, a one-unit increase on the (7-point) SDO scale increased the odds of remaining silent 1.5 times. Finally, the race and gender interaction remained, but the black-white differences for men all but disappeared when comparing men who did have a strong component of race in how they saw their identity. In sum, those most  likely to be silent were white men for whom whiteness was important to them, and who are comfortable with, if not eager for, ingroups to dominate out-groups.

Slurs matter. Quite aside from the substantial harm they can produce in their targets, their use within groups can shape attitudes and mobilise environments against those they denigrate. Their function of keeping hierarchy in place is a contradiction to the stated meritocratic aims of most organisations. But if we want people to speak out and unmask the aggressors, it may not be sufficient to encourage safe routes. Instead, as Rosette's team conclude, 'managers should be aware that the establishment of a climate that prevents discrimination and prejudice may need to begin within socially dominant groups' who may view slurs as in their interests, or at least not against them.

Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, Andrew M. Carton, Lynn Bowes-Sperry, & Patricia Faison Hewlin (2013). Why Do Racial Slurs Remain Prevalent in the Workplace? Integrating Theory on Intergroup Behavior Organization Science DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0809

Further reading:

Graumann CF (1998) Verbal discrimination: A neglected chapter in the social psychology of aggression. J. Theory Soc. Behav. 28(1):42–61.
 

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

Do we make too much of workplace conflict between women?

This month, the Women's Business Council released a report revealing that underuse of women's workplace potential costs the economy £160 billion.

As well as structural issues, such as inadequate workplace childcare, psychological factors can also provide obstacles to an unrestricted workplace.  A recent paper by Leah Sheppard and Karl Aquino suggests one may be the tendency to overstate the consequences of female-female workplace conflict.

 There is a pedigree of research into female-female conflict, sometimes framed in terms of the 'Queen Bee', and the data is explained through plausible psychological mechanisms. For instance, social identity theory predicts that when a group has a low status in its social environment its members will partly inherit that status, unless they distance themselves from the group and define themselves by other means.

Men tend to hold higher status roles in organisations, so women are incentivised to minimise identification with their gender, focusing on their non-feminine attributes and distancing themselves from other women. When in a position of power, these attributes are often described in the literature as hallmarks of a 'Queen Bee', and there is interesting research (reported by our Research Digest) on how such an attitude can be the consequence of workplace conditions.

However, Sheppard and Aquino highlight that there is very little data showing behavioural consequences - that women in power are more likely to actually deny positions to other women, for instance. In fact, data from a related field points the opposite way: female mentors with female proteges tend to put in more mentoring effort than men with male ones. And this points to a second critique: the lack of attention to whether male same-sex conflict has a similar incidence or severity. On an evolutionary account,  same-sex competition is likely to be more commonplace for either sex. But it is specifically tensions between women that get communicated as a phenomena, possibly because it is in violation of gender norms – women are supposed to be nurturers – and hence both more salient and judged as more negative.

Sheppard and Aquino looked at this systematically through an online experiment, where an even mix of male and female participants were presented with a single account of a fictional conflict between either two men, two women, or one party of each gender. In their feedback, the 152 participants in the various conditions saw the conflict as comparably bad for the organisation, long-term. However, those in the female-female condition believed it was less likely that the parties would reconcile, and that the personal consequences for each - in terms of satisfaction, emotional identification with the organisation and willingness to stay in role - were also worse. Both effects were statistically significant.

Such perceptions have implications: as the authors note, 'a manager might decide against assigning two female subordinates to a task that requires them to work together if he or she suspects that they cannot set their interpersonal difficulties aside'.  The message to take away is that scientific findings matter, but baselines do too. Research in a vacuum can be counterproductive to understanding the true nature of things, and as things stand it's not clear whether workplace conflict between women deserves a special status in public perception. Most of all, we need research that goes beyond attitudes to what actually happens in the workplace, in all-male relationships as well as all-female.

Sheppard, L., & Aquino, K. (2012). Much Ado About Nothing? Observers' Problematization of Women's Same-Sex Conflict at Work Academy of Management Perspectives, 27 (1), 52-62 DOI: 10.5465/amp.2012.0005

Further reading:
Epstein, C. F. (1980). Women’s attitudes toward other women: Myths and their consequences. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 34(3), 322–333.
 

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

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

Leader evaluations draw on different racial stereotypes depending on leadership performance

We may think of stereotypes as fixed entities, but research suggests they are applied under certain conditions, often to make sense of situations. A new article applies this theory of 'goal based stereotyping' to leadership, specifically the stereotype that 'black' people (the term used in the article) possess less leadership competence, in terms of qualities like intelligence, determination, or decisiveness. When a black leader performs poorly, the incompetence stereotype can be applied to easily explain the situation. It's less useful – and hence less likely to be used - when a black leader succeeds. Instead other, positive stereotypes can come into play, such as the stereotype that black people are especially warm or have 'survival instincts'. The success of the leader is justified on the basis of such qualities, seen as handy in some contexts but essentially compensatory, rather than core to the critical characteristic of leadership competence.

This argument was put to the test by investigators Andrew Carton and Ashleigh Rosette using a very specific example of leadership: US college football quarterbacks. These, considered leaders in their field*, are repeatedly publicly evaluated by the media, making possible an archival study which looking at weekly reports from newspapers on the games of top-league university teams in 2007. The study focused on accounts involving each team's key quarterback; 31 of these were black and 82 white. Coders - blind to the purpose of the study - sought out 'evaluative phrases', where adjectives or adverbs were applied to the quarterback or his actions. These were then coded according to their valence (positive or negative) and meaning: competence statements were those that referenced the relevant leadership qualities such as intelligence or decisiveness, whereas compensatory statements were those that referenced a specific non-leadership quality that could have a bearing on quarterback performance: athleticism, which is a positive stereotype associated with black people.

How did race influence quarterback evaluation? As per predictions, it depended on performance – in this case, match outcome. When black quarterbacks suffered a loss, they were more likely to be painted as an incompetent leader than a white peer, but there was no difference on this measure when they won. The exact opposite pattern was found with athleticism, which was attributed to black quarterbacks more frequently, but only when they won.  Each stereotype leapt out as needed.

Carton and Rosette point out the obvious lesson for organisations: "success may not be credited to the leadership ability of blacks, but instead to attributes that are perceived to compensate for incompetence." They suggest vigilance in identifying compensatory stereotyping and combating it through challenging broad stereotypes (for instance, through examples of successful black leadership) and encouraging specific black leaders to circulate 'individuating' information such as track record and skill sets, in order to contextualise their endeavours and makes it less useful to reach for the sense-making, broad brush explanation.

Carton, A., & Rosette, A. (2011). Explaining Bias against Black Leaders: Integrating Theory on Information Processing and Goal-Based Stereotyping The Academy of Management Journal, 54 (6), 1141-1158 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2009.0745

National culture and personality

Here's another report from the 2012 DOP conference.

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

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

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

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

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

Impediments to private sector careers for women in science, engineering, and technology

More than ever, women are taking advanced degrees in SET subjects: science, engineering and technology. Yet a 'leaky pipeline' means women are significantly under-represented at higher levels in academia. What's the experience of those who take their expertise into the private SET sector? A recent study investigates.

Authors Lisa Servon and M Anne Visser surveyed 2,493 women who hold or have held SET management positions in private companies, following up with focus groups. Many women experienced a grind in SET roles, with 8% of the sample working 100-hour weeks, compared to 3% of women in the general workforce. Yet only 9.6% of STEM corporate roles were held by women, worse than the 15.4% in the general workforce. As 41% of junior SET roles in private companies are held by women, this suggests the private pipeline is as leaky as the academic one.

What specific problems are women facing? 23% feel that women are actively held in low regard in their sector, notably in Engineering and Technology. Over half of respondents reported experiencing sexual harassment at work. Balancing work and family life remains a challenge. And a third of the group felt extremely isolated at work: these individuals were 25% more likely to view their career as stalled, presumably because they lacked support systems such as mentors helpful for progression and managing tough times.

Part of the isolation relates to the expectation that a good engineer (scientist, technologist) acts and thinks a certain, often stereotypically male way. One reaction was for women to act more male, even distancing oneself from other women by putting them down or disavowing their work. Another strategy was to find a 'pocket of sanity' in the organisation where being a woman wasn't an impediment to getting on with the job. But such a strategy can undermine career progression: 36% of interviewees reported making lateral job moves, and 29% down-shifted to lower positions at one point. Once a safe space is found, it may feel difficult to leave.

To address these obstacles, Servon and Visser suggest changing organisational culture, developing more diverse career routes and introducing family-friendly policies. Women at the top make a difference too: when women held at least 10% of the top roles, respondents reported higher levels of support and feeling valued. Changes could be of wide benefit as "some factors causing women in management to leave SET careers...may eventually drive men away as well", especially if they disagree that blunt criticism or living in your lab epitomise a functional SET culture.

Servon, L., & Visser, M. (2011). Progress hindered: the retention and advancement of women in science, engineering and technology careers Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (3), 272-284 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00152.x

Onlookers see people who break rules as more powerful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consumers behave differently when they suspect staff will stereotype them

Organisations recognise that people respond to stereotypes, and make merry use of them in their marketing strategies and advertising schemes. But we also respond to being stereotyped by others, an experience called ‘stereotype threat’ which can affect our feelings and behaviour. Do organisations recognise this too?

If not, they’d be advised to check out an upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, where Kyoungmi Lee and colleagues explore the phenomenon. Their series of experiments asked male and female participants to evaluate hypothetical purchases of technical services and goods, reasoning that these purchases could be influenced by the stereotype that women fare poorly in the so-called STEM domains: science, technology, engineering and maths.

In their first two experiments, half the participants were cued for stereotype threat. The first experiment involved a financial service product, and cued the STEM threat using mathematical symbols inserted into the promotional materials they were asked to evaluate. At the start of the second experiment, meanwhile, participants were simply asked to record their gender, an act shown previously to be sufficient to alert the risk of stereotype threat.

The promotional materials depicted the service providers as either male or female, using photographs or more elegantly in the second study - evaluating car repair services - by amending the hairdo on an otherwise identical cartoon mechanic. The investigators found that in both experiments female participants were significantly less prepared to purchase when the service providers were male, but only when the stereotype threat was cued.

In experiments one and two, female participants in the stereotype threat conditions had rated their anxiety as slightly higher, and accounting for anxiety levels seemed to explain the change in purchasing behaviour. If so, then lowering anxiety should erode the effect. The investigators employed vanilla scent as their means of chilling consumers out.

In this study all participants were cued for the threat through recording their gender before evaluating a potential car purchase. Under normal conditions, the threat effect duly emerged, but for those female participants whose study materials were infused with vanilla scent, no difference in purchasing emerged: they were just as happy to buy a car from a man.

Gender discrimination really does happen in the marketplace, so it makes sense for people to be wary. Organisations ought to be mindful of unnecessarily triggering stereotype threat, whether by unbalanced promotional material or clumsy service providers. We can also see another good reason for diversity in workforces: it gives customers more opportunities to avoid any perceived stereotyping. Your organisation really may be a stereotype-free zone, but you can hardly blame a customer for wondering.

Lee K, Kim H, & Vohs KD (2011). Stereotype Threat in the Marketplace: Consumer Anxiety and Purchase Intentions. Journal of Consumer Research (38) : 10.1086/659315

When it pays to weigh: different effects of weight gain on income for men and women

Weight matters to boxers, jockeys and gymnasts, but for the rest of us it's not high on our radar during work hours. However, increasing evidence suggests that consideration of body size affects how employees are evaluated in the workplace. A study from late last year tells us more about the troubling relationship between weight and pay – and how it works differently for men and women.

While much previous research on the “wage penalty” of obesity has been in the economics literature, Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable take a psychological approach. They acknowledge that the stereotyping literature provides some plausible psychological mechanisms: for instance, people who are obese are judged as less agreeable, less emotionally stable, less extraverted, and less conscientious than their lighter peers, despite this being untrue.

However, they point out that how these stereotypes come in to play may be different for men and women. Cultivation theory – the idea that what we see as desirable is shaped by media images – suggests that we may be relaxed about larger men, because being robust and solid is an image depicted more attractively than that of being thin. In contrast, 'average media woman' weighs much less than average real woman. Therefore, what we deem as overweight may be wildly different across sex.

Judge and Cable took these insights to two data sets taken from census studies: a German one of around 11,000 people, and 8,000 in a US sample involving data from fifteen reporting occasions, taken biannually. In both cases, participants were from a variety of jobs, and a ream of control variables were accounted for - from height to having kids to self-esteem. The US data had the additional advantage of allowing within-individual analysis: by looking at how losses and gains of weight affect a person's pay, we avoid the issues of whether both weight and financial destiny were determined by a birth variable that wasn't accounted for.

In line with hypotheses, the study found that for women the penalty of being heavier was twice as great when moving from very thin to average weight, compared to a move from average to heavy. The researchers see this as cultivation theory in action: women are punished if they deviate from the media ideal of skinniness, and even average weight represents betrayal. Any further deviations are almost academic. Meanwhile for men, the opposite was found: more weight actually means more pay, until a certain point where the weight finally begins to exact a cost, but one much smaller than that of being underweight.

The findings generalised across both sample groups, suggesting that this relationship isn't specific to a single national culture. Part of it could be that ideal-sized people have a genuine edge in some work situations (eg being judged as reliable or persuasive by their clients) but the broadness of the effect suggests an influencing factor common to most jobs: being recruited by and working alongside others who favour you more or less.

The authors conclude by acknowledging the troubling nature of their finding, but suggest that “it may be possible and competitively advantageous for employers to try and recognize – and then reduce – the role that weight plays in their employment decisions.”

You will be delighted to know that the paper is freely available on Timothy Judge's homepage.

Judge, T., & Cable, D. (2011). When it comes to pay, do the thin win? The effect of weight on pay for men and women. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (1), 95-112 DOI: 10.1037/a0020860