Leaders considered more ethical when their moral horizons are wider than their followers

Ethical leadership is defined through its actions, by communicating ethical messages, applying sanctions to wrong-doers, and role-modelling appropriate conduct. Employees who perceive their leaders as ethical put in more effort and are more prepared to speak up and report issues at work. Now, some fascinating research suggests that judgements of ethical leadership themselves depend upon the level of cognitive moral development: not only in the leaders, but the employees as well.

Cognitive moral development is a concept originally devised by Lawrence Kohlberg that concerns our moral horizons: is 'right and wrong' merely about how we fare in life, or can it mean more? Kohlberg suggested our moral cognition begins at a 'pre-conventional' stage where all we value is self-interest, then potentially develops to a law- and norm-centred 'conventional' stage, and finally can climb to a 'post-conventional' perspective, that is driven by universal principles of right and wrong. In a recent article, Jennifer Jordan and colleagues recognised that this quality could have something to say about perceptions of ethical leadership.

Their research recruited 28 executives and 129 of their direct reports, who all completed a standard test of moral development. The direct report also gave their opinion of the executive's ethical leadership. The data was then combined into all possible pairs, where each pair comprised an executive and one of their reports.

How did those executives seen as ethical do on the moral reasoning test? They scored highly; specifically they scored higher than their direct reports. That is, when leaders thought with somewhat bigger moral horizons than their followers, they were seen as most ethical. Jordan's team had predicted just this, based on an observation from social learning theory that the best way to model behaviours to others is to stand out from the crowd: sophisticated, novel moral reasoning can grab attention in a way that dutiful consistency will not.

How do the followers appreciate these perspectives if they don't make sense to them? Well, the leader has to find a way to make them sensible. Luckily, post-Kohlberg researchers agree that individuals at higher levels can choose to speak 'the same ethical language' as others when necessary, offering a bridge between the two ways of thinking.

So should leaders be distinct from their employees to be effective? It depends what outcomes you are after. If you want employees to have higher job satisfaction, evidence suggests it's actually better for the leader to closely share their values, meaning everyone is comfortably on the same page. Yet as the authors note, “divergence leads to better outcomes when it is important for leaders to stand out and be noticed”.

To close, here's a telling detail from the study: in over half the pairs, the executive actually had the lower score in moral development. While we can debate whether it's better for a leader to be part of the moral mainstream or forging ahead, either is surely preferable to bringing up the rear.

Jordan, J., Brown, M., Trevino, L., & Finkelstein, S. (2011). Someone to Look Up To: Executive-Follower Ethical Reasoning and Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206311398136

Drinking habits of freelance musicians are a response to job demands

When we pore over biographies of Cobain, Mozart, or Shakur, are we getting a true insight into the psychology of musicians? Doubtful; dealing with rare figures whose musicianship is confounded with celebrity, the psychological autopsy is inadequate for understanding this ancient and valued profession. The stereotypes it can reinforce, such as the 'mad genius', are often dispelled by more rigorous investigation: a study of psychopathology in a sample including artists, writers and scientists revealed that composers had almost the lowest rate.

And how about the other stereotype, that musicians love to get trashed? It's true that jazz greats often got high, but their reasons were more varied than simply hedonism; many used drugs to deal with pressure from the job and from peers. A recent study suggests our current jazz and string musicians, in a similar spot, find themselves deep in the drink.

Melissa Dobson from the University of Sheffield conducted interviews with eighteen freelance musicians, half string players and half jazz musicians. Reviewing these reveals that a key professional capability for these musicians is social expertise with peers. If looking to draft in a cellist for an event, differences in talent between candidates may be too minor to matter for the audience, so the job may swing to whoever's a better laugh to hang with during the breaks. In their informal economy, musicians know the power of these fickle decisions and do what needs to be done to maintain a reputation that they “get on with people”.

Typically, that involves drinking. Partly a generational legacy, as hard drinking is tied into the subcultural furniture, it's also a fact of the environment, as venues for live music typically serve alcohol. It fills dull gaps between sets in unfamiliar places, and after the show offers a form of psychological detachment from work. Ultimately, it's socially self-perpetuating: if everyone drinks, then you need to develop a habit too. Some interviewees had mixed feelings about this: “lots of players that haven't been offered jobs.... [are those who] won't really go out for the whole sort of socializing thing... a bit sad, but that's sort of the way it works”.

As well as alcohol, the interviews revealed the highly political nature of the freelance music world, where musicians both compete against and depend upon each other for work, and can find themselves trading disparaging judgements on absent peers to shore up their in-crowd position - another form of social currency.

Melissa Dobson concludes that the professional training that musicians undertake focuses on technical development over the challenges of navigating a freelance career, leaving them to figure out how to maintain reputation through a 'hidden curriculum' that operates out of sight of the convervatoire. Is this the only form of professional training that this critique applies to?

Dobson, M. (2010). Insecurity, professional sociability, and alcohol: Young freelance musicians' perspectives on work and life in the music profession Psychology of Music, 39 (2), 240-260 DOI: 10.1177/0305735610373562

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Modest, conventional and prepared to lead: Older adults in the workplace

Since 1983, the median age in the UK has increased from thirty-five to forty. The sun is setting on a fixed retirement age. So it's more important than ever for workplaces to understand how personality differs in older adults.

Previous research has reported a range of ways that ageing influences personality, such as declines in the Big Five factors of neuroticism, extraversion and openness.

James Bywater and Mathijs Affourtit of psychometric firm SHL wanted to extend this work using another instrument – their personality questionnaire, the OPQ - and to redress the age sampling bias common in occupational testing, where data on those over sixty is hard to come by.

They dug into a massive sample of 235,407 people who had sat the tool against a managerial/ professional benchmark, and categorised the data into four age brackets: 16-24, 25-44, 45-64, and 65+. It's worth noting that only 158 of the sample were in the oldest bracket, and of these, only thirty-six were women.

Focusing on notable findings rather than previous effects, moving from the younger to the older brackets the study found the following trends:

• A preference for more conventional ways of working
• A stronger desire to take charge of others that levels out over the last two brackets
• Higher levels of modesty
• Lower focus on career progression

For the last two findings, the trend did not hold for women in the 65+ bracket, who were not significantly more modest nor less ambitious than women in the 45-64 bracket; this may be due to the size of that sample.

As is common in this research, this was a cross-sectional study. We're still waiting for the holy grail: a comprehensive longitudinal study that revisits people over time. This would allow us to untangle a person's age from their birth cohort, such as the personality differences of being a baby boomer versus a millennial.

As the authors remind us, these differences are small, and dwarfed by individual differences; we would certainly never use them to inform selection decisions, for instance. However, given that many companies focus heavily on attracting Generation Y employees, it's important that changes to the workplace are in the context of understanding, rather than ostracising, older adults who will be a core part of our future economies.

Bywater, J., & Affourtit, M. (2011). Work personality in later life: An exploratory study. Assessment and Development Matters, 3 (1), 14-17

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The wages of sin: Envy in the workplace

(This post is inspired by the Research Digest's Sin Week, bringing psychological understanding to the seven sins. Sin Week also featured in February's The Psychologist magazine.)

Have you ever felt that tight, uncharitable feeling in your belly when a colleague gets a raise, or commendation, and all you can think is “why wasn't that me?” Especially common when the colleague is like you – same role, similar tenure? That's envy, my friend. As you may recognise, it often contains a sour seam of hostility, full of ill-will towards the successful party. Clearly, this is not ideal for workplace relationships.

We might think it better to admire another's success instead, and this feeling of delighted approval is commonly thought of as a good workplace motivator. But recent research by Niels van de Ven and colleagues (covered in a sin week follow-up) suggests that feeling admiration doesn't increase motivation or performance toward our own goals.

Rather, the researchers found that motivation was most enhanced by what they call 'benign envy', a state where you don't actively wish misfortune to the person but still twinge with the recognition that their success could be yours. Of course, once in the envy zone, it's possible to tip into the more toxic kind.

The lessons here aren't simple. As the van de Ven paper notes, 'whether to admire or to be envious might depend on what matters most: feeling better or performing better' – or as we might put it, a collaborative working culture or increases in effectiveness. Still, here are a few thoughts to navigate this.

When envy is an issue in the workplace, employees can

• Combat this by engaging more deeply with their own goals. Detailed goal and career planning can turn others' success from a vague threat into valuable information: 'They've got early promotion. What can I learn from them to make Section Head next year?'

• Form tighter working relationships. As psychologist Alex Haslam points out, this can iron out the uglier features of envy by transforming 'their achievement' into 'our achievement'.

To maximise the 'better yourself' impact of envy, managers can

• Ensure success is seen as deserved. Otherwise, malicious envy is more likely to arise. Organisational justice and fair reward of performance are likely to be crucial here.

• Help people believe they can self-improve. The van de Ven study showed this was key to achieving benign envy. A mistake when celebrating success, is to focus on the unique: “nobody thinks like Dinesh does”, or one-off factors. Emphasise the attainable.

Finally, watch out for the flipside of envy: scorn for those we consider lower than us. Given that we tend not to think about the inner world of those we scorn, this is a recipe for being blindsided by really nasty conflict. I wouldn't envy you that.

van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., and Pieters, R. (2011). Why Envy Outperforms Admiration. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: 10.1177/0146167211400421

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

Be yourself, or else: how fun is used in high-control workplaces

Call centres are a world of call stats, cubicles, and scripted encounters, yet in recent years some companies have promoted a credo of fun and individuality. A new article investigates one company to see how deep these currents run. It portrays a darker side to the fun workplace.

Peter Fleming and Andrew Sturdy conducted their qualitative study with an embodiment of the new trend, an Australian call centre they dub ‘Sunray’. Its telephone agents, age averaging at a youthful twenty-three, are expected to live by the 3Fs: Focus, Fun, and Fulfilment, and are continually encouraged to “be yourself”. The company strongly promotes diversity, notably regarding sexual orientation, and dyed hair, piercings and sexy clothing are encouraged. The company promotes itself akin to a permanent party, running training events that involve drinking and scoping out sexual conquests, and extends this atmosphere into working hours, via fancy dress events and a culture of dating and flirting.

So far, so fabulous. But Fleming and Sturdy went underneath the exterior through group and one-to-one interviews with thirty-three telephone agents and managers. Though some were positive, with around half endorsing the 3Fs and a be yourself policy that let them feel “free to be who we are”, a dissenting picture also emerged.

The chief complaints were that the freedoms could be limiting, and the authenticity...inauthentic. According to employees “you have to be able to see the lighter side of things… you have to be bouncy and willing to try anything”; failing to make it to the fun away days could result in penalties. Others felt that claims for a lack of hierarchy simply didn't hold up, and wished managers would “simply tell me the truth”.

According to the authors, these tensions emerge because the claims don't line up with the reality of how call centres operate. Like many industries, their roots are squarely in the command-and-control structure of the military. Sunray exemplifies this through its technological controls like call monitoring, bureaucracies such as strictly defined targets, and cultural edicts that specify “how we do work here”.

As Fleming and Sturdy see it, these stringent controls work to alienate and sap employees, which can lead to them disengaging or even resisting. The solution for these workplaces has been to divert attention from these controls with a parade of exciting things: cleavage, piercings, the chance to bring your surfboard into work. As the authors put it, “employees enjoyed liberties mostly around the work task...rather than so much in the task itself”. Indeed, one HR manager made the telling admission that “we need to make up for the kind of work that is done here”.

By this account, the company does alright, having their monotonous, wearing work completed, and escaping any real backlash by buying the employees off with a facsimile of social life. The young employees do less well. As we see, some are disillusioned that the promises don't line up with reality. Others may be drawn into dependency, as they've been encouraged to draw their social world from the same well as their pay-check. Work equals friends, romance, even identity; for the company, it's ultimately 'just business'. And overall, the individuality culture discourages ways of thinking that cultivate solidarity across the workforce.

It would be interesting to see follow-up work to evaluate some of these claims, such as to look at burnout rates and the consequences of overlapping work/leisure social networks. As it is, the authors suggest that organisations should tackle the root issues of alienating work, by reducing controls, introducing some practical freedoms and making the work more intrinsically rewarding. Until then, they conclude, “the 'humanized' call centre remains some way off.”



Fleming, P., & Sturdy, A. (2010). 'Being yourself ' in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control Human Relations, 64 (2), 177-200 DOI: 10.1177/0018726710375481