Gamers find it easier to relax and detach from work

A new study suggests digital gaming during leisure time is associated with better recovery from working stresses, particularly when that gaming involves online interaction with other people. Contrary to prior research, time spent gaming is not an influential factor upon the findings. This suggests that rather than game play steadily replenishing personal resources, the act – or mere availability – of gaming can be beneficial in a range of forms, from a quick zap to longer immersive sessions.

UCL researchers Emily Collins and Anna Cox conducted their study with 491 adults with ages up to 70, approximately half of whom were women. 216 were non-gamers, and the remainder reported how much time they spent playing what type of games, as well as whether it provided access to online social networks. Gamers reported more psychological detachment from, and greater ability to relax after work, which are key components of the recovery experience. Online social support magnified those positive relationships. Note that two other components of recovery, having mastery experiences and a sense of control, were not higher in this sample of gamers; a little surprising, as other studies have predicted and found such relationships

Gamers who spent more time on their hobby did not show differences in recovery, but were more likely to believe that their home life affected their work, in ways both bad (draining or impairing their operation at work) and good (generating skills that have relevance to the workplace). Note that we can't draw conclusions about causality: perhaps more intensive gamers are more likely to have rich and/or demanding home lives aside from their hobby.

A few wrinkles in the study merit a mention. As mentioned, we shouldn’t guess at the direction of effects in what is a correlational study. Adults were recruited from online forums, so an amount of self-selection going on. Also, I haven't given much focus to one of the 'sells' of the study - a breakdown of effects by type of game – because the First Person Shooter (FPS) type dominated the sample, replicating most of the effects described above, whereas the remaining categories had very small n-sizes and consequently non-significant effects that are hard to interpret with any great meaning.

Ubiquitous access to work-related digital technology has a negative association with detachment and recovery from work, but as this study highlights, evidence increasingly suggests that use of recreational digital tech has the reverse effect. Such contrasts shouldn’t surprise us, as digital technology isn’t a single phenomenon but a substrate to our lives, composing manifold activities, experiences and processes that influence us in very different ways. We're in the early stages of understanding how it is transforming our leisure time, and how that in turn influences our readiness and capability to work.

Collins, E., & Cox, A. (2013). Switch on to games: Can digital games aid post-work recovery? International Journal of Human-Computer Studies DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.12.006

Further reading:
Reinecke, L. (2009a). Games and recovery: The use of video and computer games to recuperate from stress and strain. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 21, 126-142. 

How space and time collide for self-employed teleworkers

I'm self-employed and often need to get work done in a variety of locations. In theory, I should be most productive at home, with everything at my fingertips, but sometimes the exact reverse is true (which explains why I'm writing this from a cafe). So it was a treat to read a recent article by Mona Mustafa and Michael Gold on managing 'temporal and physical boundaries among self-employed teleworkers.' The article reports on a number of practices that may be useful to anyone in this situation.

The researchers interviewed 20 self-employed teleworkers – people who work outside a formal office and engaged in non face-to-face work -  from France, the US and UK. Most respondents regarded having a clear separate physical location for work as necessary even though in the main no-one else was in the house when work took place. Respondents who began only quasi-separated soon became dissatisfied: for instance, one interviewee ended up introducing a room divider into her bedroom-work space: 'I did not want to be trying to go to sleep and kind of looking at my work, I wanted to have some kind of physical separation of work from sleep...'

The paper references Alan Felstead's continuum used to describe how work-life and home-life interrelate. At one extreme, these are totally detached and invisible to one another, and at the other they are fully assimilated. Mustafa and Gold found their interviewees’ insights suggest that this continuum might exist for three different features of the work-home divide: equipment, activity, and ambience. For example, a work area may be decorated distinctly from the rest of the house, and all work equipment may be restricted to that area - keeping these areas detached - yet the worker might use the area for chats with a visitor or to go through household accounts, thus blending activities.

Without a remote manager providing external pressure, many of the interviewees found it hard to get it across to family and friends that their hours were sacrosanct and that they were 'really' working. Separating space was important for creating boundaries, essentially consecrating a corner of home as not-Home-but-Work. A more insidious danger was a self-inflicted one: use of mobile technology.

We've reported on how this can undermine work-home distinctions in remote working employees, but the problems are compounded for the self-employed, who rely on client requests to get revenue and so may be reluctant to switch off in the fear of missing the call for a piece of work. Mobile technology therefore breaks down the boundaries that the self-employed may dearly depend on.

Mustafa and Gold conclude that the lack of strong temporal boundaries for the self-employed – working beyond 9 to 5; commissions potentially coming in at any time – makes it all the more vital to get the physical ones in place. They emphasise that a range of strategies may be workable, but that it is important to recognise that your workspace is defined – or left defined – by how you manage equipment, ambience/design, and how disciplined you are in assigning work and non-work to the appropriate locations. Just as their respondents do, 'make choices, experiment and adapt to the environment' that you have to make work, to do your work.

Mona Mustafa, & Michael Gold (2013). ‘Chained to my work’? Strategies to manage temporal and physical boundaries among self-employed teleworkers Human Resource Management Journal, 23 (4), 413-429

Further reading:
Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005). Changing Places of Work, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 

The Family Innovator's Dilemma: how family firms approach discontinuous technologies

The unique properties of family firms are often characterised by four Cs. Continuity, their commitment to longevity; Command, concentrating power within leadership, not across the organisation or with shareholders; Community, the organisation in some ways resembling an actual family; and Connections, with close relationships to suppliers and stakeholders. In a recent theoretical paper, Andreas König and colleagues consider the impact such qualities have on the uptake of discontinuous technologies, game-changers like e-publishing, online news, or biotechnology. They suggest that although family firms are free from typical 'innovator's dilemmas', they trade these off for some profoundly psychological obstacles to taking on the Next Big Thing.

The first trade-off is that family firms are less formalised than other organisations, but more mentally rigid. A formalised business absorbs and processes information using standardised approaches – information-gathering is assigned to certain roles, using prescribed methods, such as visiting trade fairs, or annual audits of business processes. Similar to installing a radar screen, this makes it easier to spot what you are looking for – typically, trends that are likely to have impact on short-term performance – but also easier to miss things that go beneath the radar, such as  discontinuous technologies. Family firms tend not to be formalised, as the community aspect of family firms encourages more informal information-sharing, and its continuity aspect makes it receptive to conversations on wider issues that might turn out to have long-term benefit.

But according to König, family firms end up trading external regimentation for an internal one. Mental models are the ways individuals see and think about the world, and evidence suggests that organisations with less change thanks to long employee tenures – family firms fit squarely in this category – end up with less flexible and diverse models. People tend to see things the same way, and the same way they've always done. This makes it harder to identify new technologies, and if they are implemented, to fully recognise the ramifications for the whole of the organisation.

The second trade-off surrounds the decision to adopt technology after it has been identified as potentially useful. The classic 'innovator's dilemma' describes how established companies, lacking both the family firm's focus on continuity and the oomph of top-down control, prefer to invest in continuous innovations (such as minor process improvements) to fulfil short-term financial obligations to shareholders, even when discontinuous ones better serve its long-term prospects.

The 'family innovator's dilemma' is rather different: an innovation may be best for the future, but can we justify the short-term disruption this will cause to the company – to the family? Adopting new technologies can be painful, involving lay-offs and acquisition of new skills, as well as diverting funds and focus from existing projects. The community focus and desire for employee continuity may paradoxically hamper taking steps in the long-term interest. Successful family firms are hardly sentimental, and accustomed to making tough decisions, but collateral damage due to a break with the old ways may feel like violating a compact made with organisational members.

On the plus side, when a family firm does decide to adopt a discontinuous technology, it is well equipped to get it up and running. This is thanks to its lower levels of formalisation and bureaucracy, coupled with a long-term willingness to sustain investment even when results are not immediately apparent. The study authors suggest that if family firms can learn to widen their knowledge bases and flex the mental models of their members, then they may reap substantial benefits from the discontinuous technologies emerging in our age.

Andreas König, Nadine Kammerlander, & Albrecht Enders (2013). The Family Innovator's Dilemma: How Family Influence Affects The Adoption of Discontinuous Technologies by Incumbent Firms Academy of Management Review, 38 (3), 418-441

Fourth day of Christmas digested: Datahead Devani

Datahead Devani is the person in your life who is technical and loves it. Whether it be gadgets and the internet or science and facts, she loves to get involved. Here are some ways to help her help her organisation,

Give her tips on the impact of their organisation's communication tools. Perhaps she could check out this research examining telephone waiting time factors, and see whether their current set-up is solid? How about internet policy? Evidence suggests that 'cyber-loafing' peaks at certain periods, especially when people aren't getting enough sleep. One example is after the switch to summer time, as people struggle to adjust to the new hours. Perhaps smart teams might elect to employ one of the various programs that limits internet access during these 'risk periods'?

Introduce her to Occupational Psychology. Ok, we're biased here! But research suggests that the work done in our field is pretty solid; for example, experimental work tends to hold up well when examined in real-world situations. We can be proud of the scientific rigour that tends to exist underneath our work, and Devani can too. As we've documented, assessment tests have become more sophisticated and powerful in recent years, so being the go-to person in the organisation on this front could be useful. See also the BPS' resource on psychological testing, which contains research, advice and information on accreditation in the UK.

A gift? A camera. This lovely piece of research outlines the ways in which visual research in organisations democratises understanding, uncovers blind spots and gives a fuller understanding of how things are done, and could be done. Just ask her to turn off that superfluous digital 'click' sound while she's at it - she might actually be savvy enough to find it buried in the Settings somewhere.

Job outcomes and experiences suffer when managers regularly work remotely

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep less and waste more time online: the temptations of cyberloafing

Cyberloafing is when work time is frittered away on an unrelated online activity, whether it be web comics, perusing news sites or watching the 1982 snooker championship final. A new article suggests that we may be more prone to it when we haven't had enough sleep. Its authors, led by David Wagner, began sifting through Google's publically available data for rates of Entertainment-related searches, judged to be a reasonable proxy of cyberloafing. But how can anonymous data shed light on an issue involving sleeping habits?

The investigators recognised an event that affects everyone's sleep: when the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving Time. Prior evidence suggests we lose on average 40 minutes of sleep per night following the switch, as our body rhythms struggle to adjust. (Exploiting a fixed phenomena is an example of a quasi-experiment; another would be the hurricane that occurred within this study on emotional hangovers.) The researchers used data from 203 metropolitan areas in the USA, weighted by area size, across 2004-2009. They found that Entertainment-related searches on the Monday after DST were 3.1% more prevalent than the previous Monday, and 6.4% than the subsequent Monday . It's worth noting that the data isn't segmented by work and leisure hours, so the effect includes extra surfing that might occur later at night, when people are still feeling awake; however, the bulk of online activity occurs during working hours.

A second study took this to controlled lab conditions. 96 undergraduate students wore a sleep monitoring bracelet overnight before attending a lab session to complete a computer task - assessing a potential new professor for the university by watching a 42 minute video lecture. What the researchers were really interested in was the amount of time they would spend surfing the internet instead. Cyberloafing was higher for participants who experienced more instances of sleep interruption or less sleep overall, as recorded by their monitoring bracelet.

This is another piece of research advancing the ego depletion theory of why we fail to effectively regulate behaviour. This states that willpower is a resource that is used up through effortful acts, leaving us susceptible to temptation or laziness. Researchers have previously argued that sleep is a means of recharging our regulatory resources, and these studies confirm that less sleep does indeed make us prey to counterproductive activities like cyberloafing. However, those who naturally exercise self-discipline may be somewhat resistant: in study two, the effect of sleep interruption on cyberloafing was weaker for participants who scored high on a measure of conscientiousness administered beforehand. (The effect of less overall sleep still remained.) This is consistent with ego depletion, as highly conscientious types are more likely to actively use methods to regulate their effort to overcome counterproductive behaviours, rather than taking the path of least resistance.

The costs of cyberloafing have been estimated at around £300m a year, so it's worth understanding when we're more vulnerable to its temptations;  UK employers should remember this when our clocks go forward on the 25th of this month. Aware of its power, I've included only one extraneous, non-work related link in the above text, and it's a niche one at that. But if you're a classic snooker fan with a tricky deadline, I'm so sorry. Just think about all the time I wasted considering the alternatives.

Wagner, D., Barnes, C., Lim, V., & Ferris, D. (2012). Lost Sleep and Cyberloafing: Evidence From the Laboratory and a Daylight Saving Time Quasi-Experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0027557

Black and white applicants more engaged by diversity-friendly recruitment websites

Organisations don't make recruitment websites for their own gratification, but to attract applicants. Ideally, they want informed ones who've gathered a realistic sense of whether the organisation is for them. So recruiters should take note: a recent study has shown that sites that present cues of racial diversity encourage both black and white applicants to browse for longer and encode more information about the organisation.

H. Jack Walker and colleagues had expected that racial diversity cues such as images and testimonials would appeal to black applicants, by indicating that the organisation was sympathetic to their identity. Rather than just surveying attitudes, the team went beyond previous studies by looking at what applicants did during and remembered following site browsing.

In a first study, 141 students evaluated a website of a fictional website, which under one condition included a diversity cue - two of four company representatives on the "Meet Our People" page were black - whereas under the other condition all four reps were white. A second study increased real-world validity by asking 73 students to make judgements about two genuine company sites with high or low diversity cues.

In both studies, the black students (around a third of each sample) were able to recall more details about the organisation when tested two to three weeks after when they had been browsing a website containing strong diversity cues. The first study measured browsing time too, and found the black students spent more time on those websites. But all this was also true of the white students: the effects were slightly less pronounced - there was an interaction between presence of cue and applicant race - but they were there nonetheless.

Straight off, I should emphasise that use of diversity cues needs to be sincere: misselling an organisation as diversity friendly is a clear recipe for disaster for applicant and employer alike. With that in mind, there would be ample reason to put sincere diversity cues in recruitment websites even if the effect had been limited to black applicants. Even neglecting the wider social effects, increasing diversity in an organisation widens its talent pool, can improve its performance and makes it more attractive to a broader customer base. But the current study suggests that for black and white applicants, sites containing such cues "are more likely to maintain applicant interest so that website viewers evaluate and retain more website information". In a world of short attention spans, that's got to be worth a lot.

Walker, H., Feild, H., Bernerth, J., & Becton, J. (2011). Diversity cues on recruitment websites: Investigating the effects on job seekers' information processing. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0025847

Using work technology at home hinders our ability to detach from work

We know that psychologically detaching from work is important, leading to less fatigue, more positive working-week experiences, and higher overall life satisfaction. How you fill your leisure time has a big impact on psychological detachment - for instance, we've reported on the beneficial effects of volunteering on detachment. A recent study confirms what many suspect – it's harder to switch off when technology keeps you plugged in.

In their study, YoungAh Park, Charlotte Fritz and Steve Jex looked at work-home segmentation: how much we partition our domains of leisure and work. Some of this is preference – for example, you might choose not to take a job likely to intrude into your home life. And some is about surrounding norms: if it's typical to take work home, or to call a colleague on a work issue in an evening, it's difficult not to be drawn into these activities.

But the authors suspected that a major factor was technology use at home, and investigated this through a survey completed by 431 university alumni now in full-time employment. As well as measures of detachment from work, segmentation preference eg “I prefer to keep work life at work”; and perceived segmentation norm, they also looked at frequency of use of different technologies (email, internet, phone, pda) for workplace purposes when at home.

As expected, both a preference for and a culture of less segmentation led to less psychological detachment. People who used technologies for work purposes while at home struggled to detach from work, and the analysis showed that this was a major route through which weak segmentation had its effect on detachment. In part, weak segmentation manifests as work-technology behaviours at home.

It's important to note that technology did not explain all of the variance, which means that setting strict rules about technology use is not the only way to help psychological detachment, nor necessarily sufficient; you may want to develop habits that deal with ruminations, develop end-of-day rituals, or establish clearer boundaries with colleagues. But technology certainly plays a part, and so it's worth considering the practices of your own workplace: for instance,are the trends towards shedding work desktops for laptops, and “bring your own computer” programs, helping or hurting us?


Park, Y., Fritz, C., & Jex, S. (2011). Relationships between work-home segmentation and psychological detachment from work: The role of communication technology use at home. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0023594

Hiring by online profile: perils and challenges for the networked recruiter

(This post forms part of this month's focus on younger people in the workforce.)

Whether it's holiday snaps, opinions, or your work history, it's likely that you use a social network site (SNS) to express some things about you. This is especially true for the young; membership of Facebook, the largest SNS, continues to show a skew towards ages twenty and under. It's unsurprising that recruiters might use these sites to find out more about job applicants; a 2009 poll indicates 45% of 2600 hiring managers polled had done just that. Now, a new paper by Victoria Brown and E. Daly Vaughn surveys the risks and consequences of allowing online discoveries to influence hiring decisions.

The attractions are clear: recruiters get free, quickly accessible, and otherwise hidden information about applicants. The 2009 poll suggests that 35% of the managers rejected candidates due to SNS evidence, such as unwanted habits or information that contradicts their resume. The evidence can also support candidates by corroborating resumes; employment-centred sites such as LinkedIn exist partly to perform that function.

The first issue Brown and Vaughn raise is perceived invasiveness: trawling through individual's profiles (and those of their friends, just a few clicks away) can feel like snooping. By harming the candidate's recruitment experience, now recognised as a valuable 'pre-onboarding' phase, this can undermine relations once in post.

Secondly, is it fair? An SNS user who shares freely may be sifted out in favour of a counterpart who is cannier at selecting settings, but no better at the job. Moreover, many SNS's detail non-work behaviour, and generalising from here to the workplace may be unwarranted. We can also fall prey to drawing conclusions on the bases of a small sample of 'recent activity'.

Most importantly, the observed behaviours must relate to job criteria to be justifiable for use in employment decisions. An appropriate case would be assessing uploaded images created by a graphic designer, to establish the breadth and quality of their output. But in other cases, information has to be tied to some higher-order construct.

The good news is that some evidence exists that we can construe personality reasonably well on the basis of SNS profiles. But for areas such as verbal communication, we don't have that evidence. (Personally I'm happy to lapse into Facebook patois when I'm on-site. Sincerely sharing communication conventions, or ironically playing at it? Like the Simpsons, I don't even know any more.) The authors also worry that SNS screening may be very prone to biases, given that SNS data gives ready indication of race, age, disability and other factors that shouldn't be considerations in screening decisions.

The authors suggest organisations should develop policies on SNS use in hiring. They recommend forbidding opportunistic online reviewing of some candidates but not others, and listing appropriate criteria, with standardised rubrics that can be used to evaluate candidates. Even then, where there is no clear evidence legitimising decisions, the authors suggest it may be better for organisations to ban the practice entirely.

Brown, V., & Vaughn, E. (2011). The Writing on the (Facebook) Wall: The Use of Social Networking Sites in Hiring Decisions Journal of Business and Psychology DOI: 10.1007/s10869-011-9221-x