Conference roundup: Cultures of test-taking, a life less stable and how family helps you cope at work

To complement our coverage on the DOP conference, here's a roundup of some of the short presentations that offered food for thought.

Danny Hinton (Aston Business School)  presented another fascinating foray into racial bias in selection tests, an area where two positions dominate the debate. ‘Hereditarians’ insist that test difference reflect some real ability difference due to genetic variation, whereas the ‘culture-only’ view charges that tests are not culture fair in terms of their content or processes. ‘Culture-only’ proponents point out that the gap between cultures has closed over the decades, suggesting a non-genetic origin.

Hinton's sophisticated theory charts a slightly different course. He suggests that however culture-fair test content may become, we may still see racial differences. However, these don't reflect innate differences, but rather another cultural layer. This is related to how people approach tests: how familiar they are with completing them, and how anxious they feel about them.

His ongoing research uses IRT techniques to understand how people perform on tests given their true ability – how they ‘deserved’ to do. The data so far suggests a chain of influence where higher social status leads to test-taking familiarity, which influences test-taking style, leading to some people doing better than others even when they have the same level of ability. As we know that in most societies race and class factors are highly interlinked, it looks very possible that this can explain one component of racial differences on test performance, and give us some tools to break this: increasing accessibility of ability tests across society.

I also found fascinating Nicola Payne and Gail Kinman's presentation on work-life factors in the fire service, specifically because of the way it foregrounded work-life enhancement. We hear a lot about how work can disrupt home-life and vice versa, but this study (a collaboration between Middlesex and the University of Bedfordshire) of around 200 staff in three fire services showed that fire fighters who identified their work as something that gave sense to their home life reported higher work wellbeing. And those who saw their home life as enhancing their work had better quality of sleep.

Payne and Kinman also found disruptive effects, but the benefits of enhancement were stronger than the penalty of conflict. Work can provide skills, status, and psychological energy that feed into how you are at home, and the support and fun in a family can make you a better worker. These enhancement effects have been documented in other samples but it's useful to be reminded of the positive potential of the multiple roles we can hold in life

Finally, Rob Bailey and Tatiana Gulko of OPP took us on a whistle-stop tour of various ways in which a lack of emotional stability presents difficulties. One data set of over 1,200 people suggested that individuals whose personality profile includes a lower emotional stability tended to see themselves as unluckier, unhappier, less healthy, and more prone to taking time off. A study looking at 4,500 couples suggested that satisfaction with your romantic partner is lower if they are less emotionally stable. And a smaller study suggested that less emotionally stable people are also likely to feel more helpless, more defenceless, and less powerful in general.

As always, the conference was a feast of ideas, investigation, and debate. Plenty of things to tackle in the year to come.

Year in Review: Finding the Balance

Our final roundup focuses on making tangible changes to find a better balance for your working life.

How is your office arranged? Research suggests that open-plan offices aren't delivering the expected benefits to productivity. In particular, workers feel even less able to freely communicate, thanks to noise and lack of privacy making the exchange of sensitive information more difficult. How might we better organise the workplace? A recent review recommends that we align how we work with fundamentals of human nature. An active species with most of its evolutionary history spent firmly in natural surroundings, we thrive in sunlit, plant-filled environments, and operate better when not forced to spend the day in a sedentary seated position - hence the advent of standing desks. Moreover, our bodies are built for napping, and for non-human companionships, so workplaces with a crash-out room or a canine team member may be ahead of the curve.

For the self-employed, you might imagine that the work environment is a non-issue - after all, home should already be a nice and comfortable place! In fact, it's even more important for home-workers to find a way to shape their environment and ensure that its separate functions - work and home – are given appropriate forms. Often, blurring between the two seems to lead to frustration and makes it harder to maintain productivity. Research shared in a 2013 symposium suggests that many academics may also need to improve their ‘boundary management’ and find ways to switch off, such as avoiding work emails in evening times. However, the symposium also presented a model of work-life balance with a range of functional strategies. Whereas many people seek separation, others can find flow in an 'always-on' state where home and work life are integrated together.

Then come the times when you’re not at work, but you certainly aren’t off-duty. Business trips bring their own stresses, and we now understand more about what is likely to heighten them, such as travel that involves a destination very different from your home culture. This is because culturally unfamiliar contexts rob you of many of the tools and tricks you normally use to navigate setbacks, obstacles and crises. This will resonate if you've ever stood in line at passport control, or sat in a lounge surrounded by furious delayed passengers, and realised that you have no inkling of the etiquette for queuing, complaining, or simply asking for help.

What happens when you're looking for a broader change, one not covered by reshaping your office or an evening email curfew? At such a point we often turn to others for help. Looking at the evidence base for coaching, we see that although it is substantial in some ways, it still lacks a body of systematic science demonstrating comparative benefit compared to other methods of development. Researchers are busy trying to change this situation - see our upcoming post on strengths-based coaching.

Meanwhile there are other more self-directed approaches for clarifying your wants, needs and priorities. Within your job, try reviewing your current situation and then redesigning it to look more like a job you'd jump at if you saw it advertised. Evidence suggests that you may find it easier to introduce more of what you like in the job than to get rid of what you don't, but keep an open mind and be inventive. And if you're not comfortable with where you are, researchers are currently exploring the power of narrative and creative writing as a method of self-career counselling.

In sum, to balance your working life, don't neglect the importance of place. Recognise your own ways of juggling work and home demands and see what's working and what isn't. And use coaching or self-counselling to empower yourself to make the changes that will benefit your career.

How do you avoid your problems? Different strategies, different outcomes

Is it a good idea to disengage from things that stress you?  In occupational psychology, it it seems to depend on who you ask. The work coping literature describes Avoidance Coping as a generally counter-productive strategy. Yet literature in the field of work recovery has shown that taking steps to detach from stress can be helpful and health. To dig deeper, Bonnie Cheng and Julie McCarthy have published a study looking at how disengagement affects the negative impact of inter-role conflict, such as when work commitments hollow out home life. By unpacking avoidance coping, they find a way to make sense of the conflicting findings.

The study investigated 178 university students with a history of employment over the previous 12 months. Participants completed surveys measuring biographical and behavioural information, together with measures of how much conflict occurred between not only work and family life, but scholastic demands as well. Taking a steer from recent models, Cheng and McCarthy predicted that when work interferes with family life, it's work satisfaction that should fall, as we perceive the problem to lie with the interfering domain. Satisfaction surveys taken a month later generally bore this out, but what's interesting is how these effects were influenced by the use of  behaviours that ordinarily are lumped together as avoidance coping.

Instead, avoidance behaviours were split into two groupings, with behaviours like 'I refuse to think about it too much' labelled cognitive avoidance, and others - such as  'I hope a miracle will happen' – representing escape avoidance. The data showed that the drop in school satisfaction when school conflicted with other domains was amplified by escape avoidance, but dampened by cognitive avoidance. Similarly, work and family conflict only eroded satisfaction when escape avoidance was high. This was in line with the authors's predictions: cognitive avoidance resembles psychological detachment and implies low levels of rumination, whereas the fanciful thinking of escape avoidance distorts reality and may drain resources that could otherwise be invested in improving conditions. It's worth noting that the study also measured psychological detachment separately, but was involved in no effects besides low detachment interacting cognitive avoidance to make work conflicts even more punishing. This may be a methodological effect or may reflect how psychological detachment is framed as a short-term tactic - detaching for a while this afternoon - whereas coping strategies are more of an abiding disposition.

This research takes a knife to avoidance coping, and unearths two constructs that actually stand against each other. Cognitive avoidance is  a case of taking agency over the contents of your mind rather than letting it be annexed by ruminative thoughts, known to exacerbate psychological problems. Escape avoidance casts agency aside, letting unchecked desires clog up mental territory, instead of examining them and when necessary putting them to rest.


Bonnie Hayden Cheng, & Julie M. McCarthy (2013). Managing Work, Family, and School Roles: Disengagement Strategies Can Help and Hinder Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18 (3), 241-251 DOI: 10.1037/a0032507

Further reading:

Thompson, C. A., Poelmans, S. A. Y., Allen, T. D., & Andreassi, J. K. (2007). On the importance of coping: A model and new directions for research on work and family. In P. L. Perrewé & D. C. Ganster (Eds.), Exploring the work and non-work interface: Research in occupational stress and well-being (Vol. 6, pp. 73–113). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi:10.1016/S1479-3555(06)06003-3

Junior doctors squeezed by working conditions

How do junior doctors experience current working conditions? Pressures on public sector spending in many countries have put the squeeze on their health services, and this strata of the workforce - already renowned as being under pressure - seem to be feeling extra strain. This is the suggestion of a recent study that investigates the experiences of twenty junior doctors in the Irish medical system.

The participants provided their experiences through qualitative interviews with the researchers, working from the ground up to collect their perspectives and identify the common themes that emerged. Those interviewed were just about to transition into roles as clinical tutors, a hybrid role that involves both clinical practice and academic teaching of medical students. The shape of these individuals' careers to date mirrors what is typical for junior doctors: working as temporary employees on a 3-, 6-, or 12-month basis.

The first theme that emerged was one of staffing shortages. The interviewees saw shortages as contributing to longer hospital stays for patients, whose problems were not getting detected as quickly. In addition, they complained that lean workforces often meant that a senior perspective was not available as much as they would like, which would normally provide an expert viewpoint to benefit both diagnosis and the junior doctor's understanding. Because of staffing shortages, there were also fewer opportunities to take leave for training. As one interviewee remarked, 'Training isn’t the best. It’s very much ‘see one, do one, teach one’'

The next theme was how unrealistic workloads had become. Some of this was due to wider societal factors: as healthcare developments both extend lifespan and increase detection of multiple conditions, patients' problems can be more acute and involve multimorbidity (multiple diagnoses), making treatment a more complex matter. But workload issues also related to the first issue of shortages, which contributed to long hours, interrupted breaks, and pressure to complete tasks quickly: 'I have a sense of dissatisfaction with being able to give each patient on a round just 90 seconds on average.' Another interviewee noted the personal consequences of this overworking: 'When you do something wrong, not out of malice or incompetence, because you’re too tired, then you have to live with it.'

As well as these themes, interviewees reported issues with unpredictability of their work. Their schedules as well as lengthy (80-90 hour weeks) were subject to change, leading one to comment 'It is the not knowing. I have missed christenings and birthdays and let people down'. The high workloads also forced the work-home divide to become porous, with paperwork often taken home to be completed outside of 'work'. And within the hospital,  cuts meant doctors could not rely on having the needed equipment to hand, but at times had to devote time to hunting it down elsewhere.

Despite all these challenges, respondents tended to give less attention to how the conditions affected their own wellbeing, framing issues more in terms of problems for patients or the smooth running of the system. The authors reflect that this tendency to soldier on may be because doctors see their role as evaluating stress and illness in others, and so are reluctant to see themselves as the ones who may at times be in need. Previous research also suggests that doctors are reluctant to seek health care from other doctors due to embarrassment, especially for less-defined illnesses such as stress. This is despite the fact that doctors display higher levels of stress than those found in the general population.

'The challenges currently faced by junior doctors in Ireland identified within this study are likely to be illustrative of problems faced by junior doctors in many countries where government spending is decreasing and deficits are rising.' Overextension of this layer of the medical profession is bound to have consequences for patients - US figures estimate medical error contributes to 180-195,000 patient deaths annually - and also, whether they like to admit it, to the wellbeing of the junior doctors on whose shoulders so much rests.

McGowan, Yvonne, Humphries, Niamh, Burke, Helen, Conry, Mary, & Morgan, Karen (2013). Through doctors’ eyes: A qualitative study of hospital doctor perspectives on their working conditions British Journal of Health Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.12037

Further reading:
Kay, M., Mitchell, G., Clavarino, A., & Doust, J. (2008). Doctors as patients: a systematic review of doctors’ health access and the barriers they experience. British Journal of General Practice, 58 (552), 501–508. doi:10.3399/bjgp08X319486
 

Intention to leave job driven by partner's perception of how work disrupts home life

We know that levels of work-family conflict can cross-over from an employee to their partner, loading them with their share of the stressors produced by such tension. Now new research shows how employee attitudes to work are influenced by cross-over from the other direction: their partner's perception of how much work is getting in the way of family life.

A team led by Marla Baskerville Watkins approached individuals in a large sample of US government agency workers to identify those who were willing to be involved alongside their partner. 102 couples completed the data collection which consisted of two phases: the first collected demographic data from the employee and asked each partner to rate the amount of disruption that the employee's work posed to family life. The second phase one month later asked the employee how they perceived their own levels of work-family conflict, and additionally the degree to which they were looking for another job.

Employees were more likely to be engaged in a job search when their partners had higher perception of work-family conflict, even after controlling for the employee's own perceptions. I may feel the late hours and weekend work is reasonable, but if my other half doesn't, I may find myself looking for other options. Baskerville Watkins and team remind us that many organisations already recognise the importance of engaging with their employees' partners in a specific context: expatriation to an unfamiliar country. But they suggest that it may be more worth more broadly for organisations 'to consider family members in employer retention endeavours.'

Baskerville Watkins, M., Ren, R., Boswell, W., Umphress, E., Triana, M., & Zardkoohi, A. (2012). Your work is interfering with our life! The influence of a significant other on employee job search activity Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (3), 531-538 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02050.x

Resolutions to take the harder edges off work

Work can be engaging, social, and fun. It can also be draining, lonely, and stressful. So let's kick off with resolutions that can reduce these hassles.

Actually, let's be specific: our debut post examined how some work hassles are hindrances of no benefit. But others - often more initially intimidating - are actually challenges that can transform and educate. So our byword should always be avoid hindrances, or eliminate them once and for all - but arm yourself to take on challenges.

Reducing work-life conflict

Work-life conflict dampens engagement and increases burnout, leading to illness and days lost at work - and it can spread to affect your co-workers too. Any steps that can be taken to manage these hindrances benefit the person and the organisation. Here are some steps you might take:

1. Introduce a leisure hours switch-off policy for work technology. It's harder to mentally disconnect from work, especially when technology keeps you plugged in, so introducing a formal policy, or simply taking personal initiative to power down your Blackberry at 6pm (as I decided to do), can pay dividends. The call for more offline time is likely to increase this year, both for leisure and working periods, but why wait to put a good thing in place?

2. Give shift employees more say in when they work. Or if you're that employee, start to demand it. After all, such autonomy - allowing people to coordinate work and home activities - makes more of a difference than the financial incentives that tend to accompany awkward shift patterns such as Sunday working.

3. Lobby for family-friendly policies in science, engineering and technology organisations. In all organisations, really; but women in SET careers, in academia and the private sector alike, experience a leaky pipeline that winnows out many before reaching seniority. If you're serious about this, men could cultivate more welcoming atmospheres whereas women might offer mentoring and support to more junior colleagues.

Role-specific issues

Particular responsibilities come with particular problems.

4. Reduce bureaucracy and other demands on time for academics. For example, burnout is now comparable in higher education to that in other sectors, and particularly high in younger staff. This is an institutional problem, so those with influence might want to think about how to help them keep their head above water.

5. Offer support to those who work at the edge and defend them from internal critics. It's often an unpopular duty to work at the interface between two functions, or between one organisations and another: you end up distrusted by both home and away sides. Try and break that habit, and offer some solidarity.

Meanwhile, newly minted MBAs can struggle in the transition from conceptual classroom to hands-on management. Perhaps you know one?
6a. Apply a little patience with new managers, and offer feedback on their blind spots where possible.
If the new manager is you, remember that the climate and attitudes of your MBA class is no model for the wider world:
6b. Get to understand how your team operates and what motivates them.

And finally...

Coming out of this holiday period, I'm taking a month off from overindulging. If you're a musician, you could choose to act as a drink-free buddy for your musician peers (7). Evidence suggests the muso boozing lifestyle isn't always one of choice but due to peer pressure, boredom, and habit. Be a haven for others who might want to shift down to soft drinks and save some cash - and their liver - for a while.

When work and home collide, your take on time matters

Tension between work and family life is an understandable concern for organisations. As research on how it affects organisational commitment has been equivocal, many researchers are looking for individual differences that may mediate these relationships. A recent article suggests one such difference may relate to how you answer the question: what does the future hold?

A research team led by Darren Treadwell drew on the sociological theory of socioemotional selectivity, proposing that a person's motivations are partly guided by their take on the future. If you regard time in your position as expansive or limitless, you possess a deep time perspective, and are more likely to use your time instrumentally to build for the future. A shallow time perspective means you see the end of your tenure as imminent, and are keener to get those rewards you can in the here and now. The team reasoned that these different perspectives may mediate how we feel when work and home collide.

The researchers constructed a survey that looked at two facets of organisational commitment. Questions like "This organisation has a great deal of personal meaning for me" covered the affective facet, whereas the more pragmatic one, called 'continuance commitment', established whether for example "Too much in my life would be disrupted if I decided I wanted to leave my organisation". They also included items on time perspective and degree of inter-role conflict - both work-family conflict (WFC) where work clashes with family responsibilities, and its mirror, FWC.

Survey data was collected from a sample of 291 staff from a retail firm. For participants with a shallow time perspective, continuance commitment was eroded by higher WFC - they were sensitive to disruptions of their out-of-hours 'good life', and more likely to consider the costs and benefits of shipping out. But the attitude of their deep-time colleagues didn't waver under the same conditions.

Affective commitment suffered when WFC was prominent, with participants falling out of love with the job when it hurt their home life. But participants with a deep time perspective also disengaged when family duties impacted work. This seems to reflect a frustration that work ambitions have become difficult to accomplish, leading to disenchantment and a shift to treating the workplace even more instrumentally.

This type of research is crucial in revealing the complex shape of important phenomena like inter-role conflict: why it may lead some employees to withdraw into a transactional relationship, and others to question their very presence in the organisation. As workplace engagement remains high on the agenda so these questions will continue to be front of mind.

Darren C. Treadwell, Allison B. Duke, Pamela L. Perrewe, Jacob W. Breland, & Joseph M. Goodman (2011). Time May Change Me: The Impact of Future Time Perspective on the Relationship Between Work–Family Demands and Employee Commitment Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41 (7), 1659-1679 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00777.x

CEOs weather personal problems better by turning to each other than to friends and family

Who can the boss, the person at the very top, turn to when personal problems arise? A recent article alerts us that the answer is often 'other leaders', examining what prompts a CEO to support another, and how this matters for the organisation.

It's understandable that people from similar circumstances may provide each other valuable support, through advice, validation or needed perspective. But what impels busy, driven people to offer it? Researchers Michael McDonald and James Westphal took an observation from social identification theory: we like to help other members of a group we identify with. They decided to explore whether CEOs help peers when they perceive themselves as members of a shared social category: the “leadership cadre”. Their study used surveys year-on-year to investigate CEO personal circumstances, their attitudes towards identity, and a range of behaviours – both towards other CEOs and within their organisation.

Because of the study's fairly complex recruitment methodology, which used their initial 300 respondent CEOs to identify informal CEO support groups to further recruit from, we should be aware that the sample is more focused on CEOs disposed to offer help. With that in mind, the average participant offered support eight times in a year, either to another member of their company board over a round of golf, or through the informal groups. And, as predicted, participants who identified themselves as part of a leadership group were more likely to then offer their fellows support: if their identification grew by a standard deviation, this would lead them to provide social support on an extra eight occasions.

The study shows how such support matters. Each CEO reported any personal problems such as strained marital relations, things that are likely to distract and deplete the energy available for work. These problems, especially when severe, led to a reduction of non-obligatory but vital leadership behaviours, such as mentoring subordinates, over the twelve months that followed them. However, availability of social support from other CEOs substantially mitigated this. In fact, their support had beyond double the impact of that of support from family and friend networks.

Given the amount of research on leadership, it's surprising how little focuses on the person within the suit. This research outlines how home-life can take a toll on leadership effectiveness – especially those activities that can be put off to tomorrow – and how sometimes the solution is for leaders to turn to each other.


Michael L. McDonald, & James D. Westphal (2011). My Brother's Keeper? CEO Identification with the Corporate Elite, Social Support Among CEOs, and Leader Effectiveness Academy of Management Journal, 54 (4), 661-693

What ingredients sweeten Sunday working?

I hope you're having a relaxing weekend. If so, spare a thought for those busy at their jobs, serving in shops, making our meals, or mending wounds. Lacking a sacrosanct day of rest – in much of the West at least – we expect this work to get done... but are reluctant to be the ones doing it. Sunday is the day most workers avoid if they can help it; now, a new study suggests ways to sweeten this bitter pill.

James Martin and colleagues contacted union members working in a retail food chain that often requires Sunday shift-work, using a survey to gather responses from 2000 employees. The researchers were interested in how an employee's satisfaction with their current work schedule relates to other factors, after taking into account considerations such as base pay rate and hours worked.

They found that unsurprisingly people were happier to work Sundays when this came with a salary premium; however, the premium needed to be at least moderate in scale ($2/hour extra, rather than $1/hour). In addition, Sunday workers with more control over their overall schedule were more acceptant of their schedules, as were workers with longer organizational tenure. The latter probably reflects the fact that time in a job offers more opportunities to get out of, negotiate, or make peace with schedules that pose inconveniences.

Martin's team also explored what future benefits could entice Sunday workers into taking further Sunday shifts, and found that this depended on how the workers currently felt. For those already satisfied with their working pattern, the notion of a raise in the Sunday premium was attractive; those currently fed up with their current schedule were much harder to please financially. These individuals thawed towards future Sunday shifts when it came with the prospect of more power over the rest of their schedule: to flex and amend it to fit circumstances, or simply to have more say over it in the first place. It's worth noting that these analyses give insight into how to handle incremental change – working more or fewer Sundays – but have less to say about the introduction of wholly new working schedules, as they did not assess attitudes in non-Sunday workers.

Organisations that depend on work completed in non-standard schedules have to account for the fact that we prefer to do other things with our nights, evenings, and weekends. This research reminds us that although financial incentives do still appeal, we would do better to provide employees more say in when they work. And if you're working today, I hope you have some time off soon when it suits you.



Martin, J., Wittmer, J., & Lelchook, A. (2011). Attitudes towards days worked where Sundays are scheduled Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726710396248

Hey co-worker, your family stresses affect me, too

Kim is a little worried about her co-worker Greg. She hears all about his home issues: young kids, ill mother, and a house sale turned ugly.

You hear that his mammoth project has been stuttering recently - unsurprising.

It seems to have affected Kim a little too...

wonder how she is finding work right now?

Greg is experiencing family-work interference (FWI), where an individual struggles in the workplace, home, or in both domains, due to the conflicting demands they make. These include time demands and stresses, together with required behaviours - a workplace may expect an objective and cool style, whereas a family wants your openness and warmth. We vary in how we experience this: men are most likely to perceive the problem as family obstructing their work, rather than the reverse, and ‘Type-A’ traits are associated with more FWI. All in all, though, these clashes cause problems.

Now a new study by Lieke ten Brummelhuis and colleagues suggests that an employee’s levels of FWI affects not just themselves, but their co-workers too. They studied 1,430 pairs of employees from a Dutch policing organisation, and measured whether the FWI of one employee correlated with more sick days and stronger intention to leave the organisation for both members of the pair. They discovered it did: higher FWI produced worse outcomes on both measures for the employee themselves, and somewhat more weakly for their co-worker as well.

The team provide evidence that the negative outcomes are due to the transmission of emotional states from one co-worker to the other, a process called crossover. They measured states commonly associated with FWI: burnout, where exhaustion and doubts stack up to make daily responsibilities a struggle, and low levels of engagement, an attunement with your job, organisation, profession. The study showed that both crossed-over, and also showed that each appears to have a distinct effect. Burnout was more likely to lead to sick days, whereas lack of engagement, by eroding loyalty, increases intention to leave.

How the feelings caused by FWI cross-over isn’t fully understood. It’s likely to be a combination of negative banter, atmosphere, and displaced tasks from the overloaded employee. As such, it's premature on the basis of this research to recommend how to reduce the cross-over; some may be due to too much sharing between colleagues and some due to too little. But we can clearly see the benefit in seeking to reduce FWI for each and every employee, as the consequences can be far spreading. When Greg is feeling the strain, Kim may be feeling it, too.

---

Ten Brummelhuis, L.L., Bakker, A.B., Euwema, M.C. (2010). Is family-to-work interference related to co-workers' work outcomes? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(3), 461-469, DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2010.06.001