Volunteering supports workplace wellbeing

In Britain nowadays we're all voluntary workers in the making. The government has branded us a Big Society, where voluntary schemes take on traditional state activities, strengthening community and making us feel useful. Research from Germany suggests another reason to run the jumble sale: it can increase well-being in our paid place of work.

Eva Mojza and colleagues from the University of Konstanz identified a number of features of voluntary work they propose could give psychological benefits. By immersing us in non-employment activities, it helps us to switch off from the grind, a valuable recovery process called psychological detachment. It's freely chosen, makes us feel useful, and often involves additional social contact, satisfying core needs of having autonomy over what we do, feeling competent, and connecting to others. And it provides mastery experiences: opportunities to learn and take on challenges.

To test these hypotheses, the research used a survey technique where people recorded their activities and states on a daily basis. The sample was composed of 105 German people who between them surveyed 476 days; participants were all in at least half-time employment and volunteered for at least a day a week. The bulk of the survey was completed at bedtime, when participants recorded how much of their day they spent on voluntary work or other activities such as exercise or childcare, and provided ratings on the psychological variables of detachment, needs satisfaction and mastery experiences.

Usefully, the participants also filled out a one-off survey to look at overall 'trait' levels of the same psychological variables. This allowed the researchers to determine whether volunteering work had any distinct effect on needs satisfaction, once overall need satisfaction and any effects due to activities like exercising were factored in. Just such an effect was found, meaning people felt more connected to others, competent, and in control of their lives after volunteering. Equivalent effects were found for psychological detachment and mastery experiences: volunteering helped to shrug off workplace concerns and gave opportunities to meet challenges.

Did this influence how participants were at work the following day? To answer this, the survey included a section that was completed immediately after work, with participants rating adjectives such as “enthusiastic” or “tense” to report positive and negative mood across the day, and rating how much they actively listened to their colleagues. These reflected aspects of wellbeing the researchers were interested in.

The authors looked for relationships between these and volunteering time and the psychological variables from the previous day. They found that active listening was influenced by yesterday's levels of psychological detachment from work and need satisfaction. Moreover, volunteering reduced negative mood at work the following day, operating through the benefit volunteering has for need satisfaction.

Positive mood wasn't directly influenced by any variable, suggesting that yesterday's volunteering can cushion against today's unhappiness but is less able to provoke happiness (maybe that's down to having cake in the office). As all participants were existing volunteers, we don't know if the observed benefits extend to someone less inclined to volunteering. And these benefits could vanish should voluntary work become mandatory, as some have suggested, or otherwise stripped of its valued features.

Nevertheless, this research suggests that volunteering gives back in many ways. Far-sighted organisations would do well to encourage and support volunteering within their workforce, as it gives back to them, too.



Mojza, E., Sonnentag, S., & Bornemann, C. (2011). Volunteer work as a valuable leisure-time activity: A day-level study on volunteer work, non-work experiences, and well-being at work Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (1), 123-152 DOI: 10.1348/096317910X485737

Two month review: how are you finding the Occupational Digest?

It's coming up to two months since the Occupational Digest was born, which still makes us a young pup in the blogosphere. But it's time enough to have given you a flavour of what it's about, and the perfect time for us to hear what you think about it.

To date we've covered emotional abilities, how arrogant people perform, wellbeing breaks at work, weight and pay, and much more - check the archives in the right-hand sidebar for more. How have you found our coverage, in terms of detail, breadth, style, or any other consideration?

Are there new findings in the psychology of work that you'd like to see covered in the Digest?

If you're a subscriber to the email digest, how have you enjoyed that service?

Later in the year we will start to roll out features to complement our focus on reporting evidence based insights in the psychology of the workplace. What would you be keen to see arriving on the blog?

As always, please feel free to post comments in this post or email me directly at alex dot fradera at gmail dot com. We'd love to get your views.

Emotional Intelligence: What can it really tell us about leadership?

On the heels of last month's post on a possible further component of emotional intelligence (EI), the Academy of Management Perspectives has just published a review of how EI relates to leadership. Is EI the primary driver of effective leadership? Or is evidence of its relevance to leadership “non-existent”?

A team of authors led by Frank Walter of the University of Groningen step in to arbitrate, reviewing past research as three distinct streams, an idea introduced by Catherine Ashkanasy and Neal Daus in 2005. The first stream contains research using standardised tests to measure employee's emotional such as emotion perception. Research within the second uses a rating method to make its measurements, trusting that we can accurately judge these abilities in ourselves or others. The third uses a broader definition, popular due to its power to predict work outcomes, but criticised as “including almost everything except cognitive ability”, which is less useful when we're trying to differentiate components of leadership.

The authors argue that by differentiating the streams we better detect when a case for a particular phenomena is supported by converging evidence – agreement across different streams. And such converging evidence exists for leadership effectiveness, examined through outcomes including higher effort, satisfaction, performance and profit creation within the team managed; all three streams agree on a role for EI. Similarly, there is a general consensus that EI relates to leadership emergence, the degree to which someone can manifest as a leader in situations where they lack formal authority.

The three-streams view also helps expose where evidence is gappy, as it is for specific leadership behaviours and styles. Can EI predict transformational leadership, a charismatic, visionary style that stimulates its followers? Definitely, if we consider streams two and three. But the stream one, hard ability EI evidence is thinner on the ground. For other leadership styles, such as the laissez-faire leader, the evidence is also unclear. For Walter and his colleagues, the jury is definitely out, as they believe that data from stream one is the best foundation for understanding what incremental value EI gives over and above other factors like personality.

The authors conclude that there is encouraging evidence that EI is a useful construct for understanding leadership, but warn that “the pattern of findings reported in the published literature suggests that EI does not unequivocally benefit leadership across all work situations.” They call for more stream one evidence, and insist there is a need to consistently control for both personality and cognitive ability, a step taken in only a single study reviewed.

Finally, the Digest HQ welcome their entreaty that “incorporating EI in leadership education, training, and development should proceed on strictly evidence-based grounds, and it should not come at the expense of other equally or even more important leadership antecedents.”

Happily, the review is freely available to access from the site of Michael Cole, one of its authors.


Frank H. Walter, Michael S. Cole, & Ronald H. Humphrey (2011). Article: Emotional Intelligence: Sine Qua Non of Leadership or Folderol? Academy of Management Perspectives, 25 (1), 45-59

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

Considering how others can help with goals leads us to plan less effort towards reaching them

We can't achieve our goals without making some effort. Summoning the willpower to put things in place and see them through can be tough. A recent study suggests that under certain conditions, we're willing to surrender motivational responsibility in the hope that our support networks will pick up the slack.

Gráine Fitzsimons and Eli Finkel looked at planned health behaviours across several experiments. Female participants were firstly asked to provide an example of their life partner helping them to fulfil a goal, either related to their health or, as a control condition, their career. They then rated how much time and effort they intended to put toward their future health goals. Those that recalled their partner helping with health goals slacked off, committing to less effort for the future. (We could think of this as the Jiminy Cricket gambit.)

To better understand the effect, the investigators evaluated depletion theory, which proposes that our capacity to self-regulate is a resource that is eaten up by use. In one of the experiments, participants completed an easy or tricky typing task before giving their examples and ratings; the tasks were designed to deplete a little or a lot of regulation effort. The slacking-off effect was greater and more significant for those in the tricky task condition, suggesting that being short on resources makes you more willing to let another shoulder the strain.

Another experiment examining academic goals found that considering partner support leads us to throw cautious willpower conservation strategies out of the window. Here, students of both sexes were given a fun puzzle to play before a valuable but taxing task that researchers claimed would benefit future test-taking. Half the participants were warned the puzzle would soak up effort needed for the taxing task, and they strategically spent less time on the puzzle, hoarding their efforts for later – unless, that is, they’d been asked at the experiment start to think about their life partner helping them in academic situations.

Personal goal-setting at work commonly involves identifying others who can support your goal. This is intended to enable and encourage, but this research demonstrates the possibility of perverse effects. However, it doesn't differentiate between support for activities that were possible anyway ( getting up for a 6am run) from support that provides a platform for further progress (sign-off for a work shadowing exercise). I suspect the latter, enabling support is genuinely motivating as it decreases, rather than increases, excuses for inaction.

Regardless, it’s clear that under some conditions we let others act as our conscience while we decrease our motivational efforts. We can resist this, by making it clear from the outset that we alone are responsible for success. Or, like Fitzsimons and Finkel, we could take a more celebratory view, seeing that “partners may develop shared self-regulatory systems” that allow them “to best make use of their limited self-control resources over time.” But we should definitely keep an eye on this tendency. Preferably you, if you have a minute.


Fitzsimons, G., & Finkel, E. (2011). Outsourcing Self-Regulation Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797610397955

Division of Occupational Psychology conference report

I'll close up our first full month here at the Occupational Digest with the first of a few reports on the Division's annual conference which ran 12-14^th of January this year.

I was engaged and provoked by Timothy Judge's Myers Lecture, challenging “The illusions under which we labour”. His sights were on the “situational premise”: the idea that environment and context matter in explaining human behaviour, thus allowing occupational psychology to fixate on culture, recommend interventions, and believe in change. Judge examined this assumption via a wide-ranging tour of findings from behavioural genetics, such as the heritability of altruism, together with evidence of how humans quickly adapt to a new status quo; key examples here included how both marriage and lottery wins have only a transient impact on your levels of life satisfaction.
Judge ended by suggesting that because people are difficult to change, we should place more focus on recruiting the right type of people, redesigning jobs to fit people and leveraging strengths rather than trying to fix weakness; all laudable activities, I feel, and each of them currently practised in the profession (the first of those frankly dominates the industry!). The conclusion itself was less convincing, and I think he would have to be armed with a more systematic argument, based on evidence that tied directly to the methods and objectives in question, in order for organisational psychologists (and educators, therapists, army trainers...) to abandon their belief that individuals can change to become more effective at accomplishing goals.
A later talk by Steve Woods looked at ethnic differences in ability test scores. Occupational test users are sensitive to 'adverse impact' - disproportionately favouring people from one group over another – so this topic has been well researched, including using meta-analysis, which looks for patterns over a set of studies. Woods cites Roth et al’s (2001) meta-analysis which suggests a difference in means between black and white test-takers of up to 1D: loosely, this means a squarely average white candidate would score similarly to a black candidate who was sharper than nearly 85% of the black population. Evidence suggests the difference genuinely reflects group differences in ability, rather than issues with testing, with researchers disputing whether the effect reflects innate differences or cultural ones such as access to education.
Meta-analyses tend to collapse all the available data to ensure their overview is as authoritative as possible. Woods points out that by separating out the data instead, we can see whether the difference alters over time. This would give credence to the cultural cause, as genetic changes at that scale would be negligible, but cultural changes, especially for disadvantaged communities often targeted by public policy, can be more substantial. Woods and colleagues were interested in scores that reflected ‘g’, the general factor of intelligence, and considered only scores from tests that measured two or more of its subcomponents (eg numerical and verbal ability). The samples included were healthy Americans over the age of sixteen from ninety-one different samples, resulting in 1.1 million test scores, grouped into four decades from the 60s to 90s.
One unexpected finding was a spike in D, the black-white difference, when you move from the 60s to 70s. This isn't predicted by either distributional or cultural accounts, but makes sense if you think of the period before civil rights as one of limited opportunity for black people. Consequently, test taking would only be available to fairly exceptional individuals, ‘restricting the range’ to those likely to score better. Putting this decade aside, the overall trend was for a shrinking of D, closing down to around .3. Woods argues that this data changes the question from 'if' to 'how much' of the variance is due to cultural and developmental factors.
The talk was interesting especially in the light of Tim Judge’s keynote; here we saw evidence on fixed vs mutable differences in an organisational context, and, here at least, the score was culture one, genes nil.

Details about the 2011 DOP conference: http://www.bps.org.uk/dop2011/

Booster breaks at work enhance health and energy, and could ripple through organisations

Many of us in developed countries know that our lifestyle gets in the way of achieving a level of health in line with our level of wealth. With around half our waking hours spent in work settings, Wendell C. Taylor recommends an evidence-based workplace policy aimed to boost our health, with follow-on benefits for the organisation.

Taylor's paper, an eclectic review of research and practises including US federal recommendations, yogic techniques and sports science, points out that the modern workplace is laced with health hazards. These include a lack of strenuous physical activity, prolonged bouts of sitting still, weight gain (often due to unhealthy consumption), and of course stress. His solution is to take fifteen minute 'booster breaks' that involve health-promoting behaviours such as physical activity, meditation and breath training.

Fifteen minutes may seem like small beer, but Taylor lays out the evidence that these small efforts may have big effects. The US Department of Health and Humans Services, through a review of hundreds of studies, concluded that having some moderate-to-heavy physical activity in your routine improves health, even when the doses are small; indeed, no minimum level has been identified for producing health benefits.

Sedentary behaviour has serious effects on health - the risk of obesity increases by five percent for every two hours spent sitting at work - and the effects are worse when not interrupted; luckily, that's just what taking a booster break will do. Snacking and smoking, both common ways to use or even to justify work breaks, are suppressed when alternatives are promoted to fill our time. Given that on average we can prevent weight gain by tipping our energy intake-outtake by 100 kilocalories, these small effects matter.

We can also put in time to change our state of mind. Meditation can reduce anxiety and increase clarity of thought, and it can be hacked to fit even the short times of work breaks. Taylor asserts that rhythmic breathing can affect stress and immune function as well as reduce depression, and cites evidence for decreases in blood pressure from three months of practice of a few daily fifteen-minute sessions. Of course, all these types of break can increase blood flow and energy levels, which are both important for work effectiveness.

Taylor recommends sanctioning and promoting these health-enhancing practises in the workplace as booster breaks where employees get together to breathe, work out, or experience Big Mind together. He argues that such a policy can have multiple effects in a ripple-like fashion: the primary impact is at the centre, on individual behaviours; a smaller but profound effect takes place for individual outcomes like health, stress, energy, fun; then increasingly smaller effects occur for organisational morale, productivity, healthcare costs, and even for the organisation's image.

Taylor argues that breaks can enhance daily productivity even if they reduce the total time working, citing research conducted with data entry workers. This might seem strange if we see the capacity for work purely in terms of 'time available', but once we see energy as a major limiting factor this makes a lot of sense. Organisational morale is boosted partly by the group design, which encourages worker cohesiveness and a sense of collective fun.

We all want to stay well at work - the challenge is to know what we can do within our busy schedules. This article argues that even as little as fifteen minutes from our day can make a personal difference, and by taking our colleagues along we can multiply that impact, for ourselves and for the organisation. The full Booster Break methodology is currently being assessed using an ongoing randomised control trial - rest assured we'll bring you a follow-up once it's completed.

Taylor, W. (2011). Booster Breaks: An Easy-to-Implement Workplace Policy Designed to Improve Employee Health, Increase Productivity, and Lower Health Care Costs Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 26 (1), 70-84 DOI: 10.1080/15555240.2011.540991