Managers in the middle shape change their own way

The middle child can be an awkward position in a family, and this is just as true in the workplace. Middle management juggle responsibilities to their reports and their managers, a feat trickiest when leadership decide that the organisation needs to change. Do they dutifully implement the bosses' plans, or cling to the manageable status quo? A recent qualitative study suggests this group take a third role, of ambivalent change agents.

Edel Conway and Kathy Monks of Dublin City University conducted interviews in the Irish Health Service, a 93,000-strong organisation, then undergoing a large top-down change. They asked 23 middle managers to talk about a major change event that they had experienced recently; around half chose the top-down strategic initiative while the others recounted a change they themselves had initiated.

The strategic initiative came in for criticism, with middle managers quick to point out issues like increases in workload, uncertainty about direction of travel, and a lack of ownership. Yet the same cohort were enthusiastic when discussing their own change ideas. They revealed a set of pragmatic tactics, such as beginning with a small number of enthusiastic staff as a catalyst within their department. They understood the importance of communications, reflecting the frustrations they felt when they were left in the dark. The general philosophy was noted by one participant:

I think the difference was that we said "we have an idea, can we talk to you about how it might work" Whereas with the other [top-down] one, it is: “we have an idea and this is how it is going to work.”

Some of this may simply reflect a tendency to prefer our own ideas to those imposed on us. But it certainly contests the idea that middle management are simply resistant to change. Through the nature of their in-between position in the organisation, Conway and Monks see them as ambivalent agents, able to see the many facets of a process of change, critiquing problematic ones and finding concrete ways to realise others.

The authors note that middle manager initiatives “were in many cases providing the solutions that the top-down change was intended to enforce: reductions in waiting lists, improvements in patient care.” And they warn that though the middle manager layer is a tempting target for reducing salary costs in pinched public services “wholesale elimination of such positions may have negative repercussions for the success of change initiatives.”

Conway, E., & Monks, K. (2011). Change from below: the role of middle managers in mediating paradoxical change Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (2), 190-203 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00135.x

Noise and music are more distracting to introverts at work

Many workplaces allow the playing of radio or recorded music during working hours, providing a chance to personalise and brighten the working climate. But how does music affect our ability to perform tasks at work? And does this depend on the kind of person we are? A recent study by a team from University College London sheds more light on this topic.

Stacey Dobbs, Adrian Furnham and Alastair McClelland worked with 118 female schoolchildren (aged 11-18) to investigate how tasks that demand focus are influenced by different kinds of auditory distraction administered over headphones. They developed two soundtracks, one composed of samples of environmental sound like children playing and laughter, and the other a mix of UK garage music. (I'll spare you the embarrassment of reading me trying to describe that.) They also wanted to know whether extraversion had any influence, following previous findings that suggest more introverted people suffer more from auditory distraction, as they are more easily overwhelmed by strong stimuli.

The participants attempted different tasks under the various conditions, and slightly different effects emerged. On a test of abstract reasoning, the participants did best under conditions of silence, and scores suffered less due to music than experiencing noise, when performance was lowest. But the penalties from auditory distraction diminished as extraversion increased, and the most extraverted students performed just as strongly in all conditions. On a test of general cognitive ability, and another of verbal reasoning, the silence and music conditions were comparable, with noise again leading to worst performance. Again, higher extraversion eliminated the penalty from noise.

We should always be careful generalising from a narrow sample (children) to another, although the extraversion effect has been observed before in adult groups (and it's also true that children do form part of our workforce). That said, it's interesting that noise was more disruptive than music across all tasks. The authors suggest that may be partly due to it lacking the positive emotional influence that music can provide; noise isn't designed to delight. They also draw attention to earlier work by the first author, which suggests that the most distracting music is that very familiar to the user. This suggests that an eclectic radio station, or a large and varied play-list, may be a viable alternative to wrestling with background chatter, or slapping that well-worn U2 record on. Again.

Dobbs, S., Furnham, A., & McClelland, A. (2011). The effect of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (2), 307-313 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1692

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

Why do subgroups emerge? And how do groups stay productive if they do?

Group working can be sociable, fulfilling and effective, yet there are many ways for it to fall short of the ideal. A mass of similar opinions can lead to groupthink, rushing to agreement without questioning a line of thinking. But a group splintering into subgroups can also lead to problems. Subgrouping doesn't take much, as minimal group research has revealed, and it creates barriers across which information struggles to flow, due to confusion or outright hostility. A new study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior explains how two kinds of group integration – cognition and emotion – influence the impact of subgroups in rather different ways.

A team of researchers lead by Matthew Cronin looked at performance of MBA students in teams of five or six participating in a 14-week business simulation exercise. They surveyed the 321 participants twice, once about three weeks before the end and again at the close of the exercise, determining the extent to which the team had formed subgroups and how satisfied individuals felt about being part of the team.

The researchers also took two measures of integration: affective integration, probing how much they liked and trusted the rest of the team, and cognitive integration, how much common ground members share in terms of how they look at the world. They were interested in how these variables ultimately affected the group' satisfaction, measured in the final survey, and its performance, determined by the final company earnings it achieved.

The data revealed a vicious circle: less affective integration made it more likely that subgroups would emerge later, and more definite subgroups led to subsequent lower integration. Falling into this pattern meant team members felt less satisfied about being part of the team at the end of the event. Moreover, as subgroups emerged, team performance also suffered. But this effect was dampened when there was good cognitive integration. That is, when members are divided, possess diverging agendas and may not particularly like each other, they can still get the job done if they share a framework for looking at the world.

This study is valuable in untangling some of the distinct processes that contribute to healthy team working. In the words of the authors, cognitive integration can “prevent the harm that subgroups can potentially create”. But to stop the subgroups forming in the first place, it comes down to preventing that slide into us-vs-them and the lack of trust that it feeds and is fed by. Stakeholders who want a group to succeed should consider interventions, and make them early to avoid the rot setting in.

Cronin, M., Bezrukova, K., Weingart, L., & Tinsley, C. (2011). Subgroups within a team: The role of cognitive and affective integration Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 831-849 DOI: 10.1002/job.707

Can we get away with using lo-fi assessment to recruit advanced positions?

In recruitment, the promise of comparable results for less effort is understandably tempting. It's offered by the offsetting of costly assessments with alternative measures that use pencils, screens and standardised questions instead of expert assessors. However, as some sources suggest a bad hire can cost twice or more that position's annual salary, the stakes are high. A new study kicks some assessment tyres to see whether that bargain is actually a banger.

Researchers Filip Lievens and Fiona Patterson looked at recruitment into advanced roles which typically seek the skills and knowledge to hit the ground running. They took their sample of 196 successful candidates from the UK selection process for General Practitioners in medicine (GPs). To get here, you've completed two years of basic training and up to six years of prior education, by which stage you're after someone ready to go, not a future 'bright star'. Lievens and Patterson were specifically interested in how much assessment fidelity matters, meaning the extent to which assessment task and context mirror that in the actual job.

Three types of assessment were involved, all designed by experienced doctors with assistance from assessment psychologists. Written tests assessed declarative knowledge through diagnostic dilemmas such as “a 75-year-old man, who is a heavy smoker, with a blood pressure of 170/105, complains of floaters in the left eye”. Assessment centre (AC) simulations meanwhile probe skills and behaviours in an open-ended, live situation such as emulating a patient consultation; these tend to be more powerful predictors of job performance, but are costly.

The third was the situational judgement test (SJT), a pencil and paper assessment where candidates select actions in response to situations, such as a senior colleague making a non-ideal prescription. SJTs are considered by many to be “low-fidelity simulations”, losing their open-endedness and embodied qualities, but hanging on to the what-would-you-do-if? focus. The authors were interested in whether its predictive power would be in the same class as the AC simulations, or mirror the more modest validity of its pencil and paper counterpart.

The data showed that all assessments were useful predictors of job performance, as measured by supervisors after a year spent in role. Both types of simulation - AC and SJT - provided additional insight over and above that given by the rather disembodied knowledge test – each explaining about a further 6% of the variance. But in comparison with each other, the simulations were difficult to tell apart, with no significant difference in how well they predicted performance.

It should be noted that the AC simulations did capture some variance over and above the SJT, notably relating to non-cognitive aspects of job performance, such as empathy, which is important as such areas are less trainable than clinical expertise. However, this extra insight was fairly modest, just a few percentage points of variance. More expensive AC assessments can provide additional value, but the study suggests that at least in this specific recruitment domain, you can get away with a loss of fidelity if the assessments are appropriately designed.

Lievens, F., & Patterson, F. (2011). The validity and incremental validity of knowledge tests, low-fidelity simulations, and high-fidelity simulations for predicting job performance in advanced-level high-stakes selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (5), 927-940 DOI: 10.1037/a0023496

Positive pollyannas more frustrated by unmet expectations

A tendency to view the world positively yields many benefits, such as higher wellbeing and a sense of personal effectiveness that gets you ahead in life. However, according to a recent article in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, this sunny view of life brings with it certain workplace expectations – and when they aren't fulfilled, it can spell trouble. Behold the “disaffected pollyannas”.

Researchers Olivia O'Neill, Laura Stanley, and Charles O'Reilly were interested in the career expectations and choices made by individuals with high “trait positive affect” (PA). They recruited 132 participants from a full-time MBA course, who sat an assessment centre where they completed a Positive and Negative Affect Scale and reported what they expected their highest lifetime salary to be. The data showed that PA results in confidence about salary, with every one-unit increase in PA associated with a $100,000 increase in expected earnings. High hopes, but what if they aren't met?

Four years later, 105 of the participants responded to a follow-up survey probing salary levels and frequency of moving organisation. High PA individuals turned out to be far more responsive to low salary; at a standard deviation below average, they shifted through an average of four jobs, compared to two for their low-PA counterparts. This higher turnover was expected, as frustration of their higher salary expectations is more likely to lead to doubting their fit at the organisation. Moreover, they are more willing to believe the grass is greener elsewhere, and more able to make that step successfully, due to better social networks and an interview advantage due to infectious positive affect at interview (similar to the rapport advantage described here).

Measures of job and life satisfaction at a final follow-up eight years on showed that for low PA individuals, more frequent job shifts led to more satisfaction. The notion is that shopping around means that over time you get a sense of what is realistic and make your peace with what a reasonable job constitutes. But for high PA, the reverse was true, with more job shifts making them more frustrated, bemoaning the absence of the perfect job they are destined for.

High PA individuals can be a positive feature in organisations, but this research shows that they can be open to disappointment, affecting their prospects in the organisation and their feelings on life. The authors conclude that “the key to finding long-term satisfaction, then, may be managing expectations, rather than pursuing unrealistic ideals.”


O'Neill, O., Stanley, L., & O'Reilly, C. (2011). Disaffected Pollyannas: The influence of positive affect on salary expectations, turnover, and long-term satisfaction Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (3), 599-617 DOI: 10.1348/096317910X500801

How much should we trust job applicant ratings of their own emotional intelligence?

Self-rating is a popular way to measure emotional intelligence in the workplace. Under lab conditions it's been shown that these ratings vary depending on what your (imaginary) objective is: to give a 'true' picture or to successfully win a job. A new study translates this lab finding to the workplace, finding that applicants for jobs really do rate themselves higher on EI than counterparts already working in that organisation.

The study compared scores for 109 job applicants with 239 volunteers, matched by department and managerial level. They rated themselves on four classic components of EI: self emotion appraisal, others emotion appraisal, use of emotion, and regulation of emotion. Applicants significantly outscored incumbents in all areas, on average rating themselves more than a standard deviation better. The areas of greatest divergence were in use of emotions and regulation of emotions, which have much in common with the Big Five personality traits conscientiousness and emotional stability, which we know job applicants have a higher tendency to inflate.

On all but one of the components, applicant scores were significantly more bunched together than incumbent scores, which could be seen as additional support that they were manufactured, with candidates homing in on scores that were solidly good, avoiding suspicious high or unhelpful low scores.

The study is important because in other areas of research, score discrepancies can be found in the lab, due to different explicit instructions, that don't seem to surface in the real world, suggesting the overt nature of lab conditions can exaggerate or even manufacture differences. Yet here the effect is found again, suggesting that if we do want to rely on self-report to assess EI we should recognise that this inflation may take place, and that relying on the normative data that accompanies these tests may lead us to unrealistically high appraisals of candidates.


Lievens, F., Klehe, U., & Libbrecht, N. (2011). Applicant Versus Employee Scores on Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Measures Journal of Personnel Psychology, 10 (2), 89-95 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000036