2011 review

It's the end of the year, the perfect time to look back at all the great research and psychology stories we haven't covered here - mainly as they were covered so well elsewhere. If you've been following @occdigest on twitter you may have seen some of these at the time.

Bob Sutton at Work Matters reports that "having the right co-workers can help us live longer, while having the wrong ones might kill us." link

Jon Sutton at the Psychologist asks "Is the popular view of meetings justified, and can psychology provide the science behind making them better?" link (pdf)

The BPS covers a study that suggests "people with subtle asymmetries - for example, imbalances in ear or finger length - are often better “transformational” leaders, able to inspire followers to put self-interest aside for the good of the group." link

Psyblog looks at how "making plans helps free up mental space for whatever we are doing right now, allowing us to be more efficient in the long term." link

Our mood at work worsens over the day, according to tweeting patterns reported at the BPS. link

Covered in Workplace Psychology, lab experiments suggest that "employees who stay up late working and miss sleep are more likely to distort/misrepresent/bend results and engage in other forms of cheating." link

The Research Digest covers an article that suggests "our view of companies is encapsulated by four fundamental dimensions: honesty, prestige, innovation and power." link

Research Digest again: "gossipers are perceived not just as unlikeable but also as lacking social influence" link

"Knowledge gained from our failures lasts longer than those from our successes", meaning organisations should treat failure as a learning opportunity, says Workplace Psychology. link

"IQ scores are absolutely predictive of long-term outcomes. But what our study questions is whether that's entirely because smarter people do better in life than other people or whether part of the predictive power coming from test motivation." An important study reported at Medical News Today. link

Medical school seems to decrease empathy in its students, particularly from the point where they begin seeing patients. Writeup at Mindhacks. link

Does a man's facial dimensions influence his leadership performance?

You might notice that many studies we cover rely on survey rating data. This reflects the field's research focus and its desire for 'ecological validity' - examining real-world contexts rather than simplified laboratory set-ups. Nonetheless, as someone with a heterodox psychology background, I find it heartening when studies choose more imaginative measures.

Here's a great example, entirely rating-free: a study that evaluates whether male CEO appearance affects company performance by actually measuring CEO face width-to-height (WHR) ratios in photos. The study suggests that in certain leadership contexts, leaders with larger WHR ratios generate higher firm returns on assets, seemingly due to such faces conferring a psychological sense of power needed for dynamic decision-making.

A similar finding that relied on rating data would be as much about perception as reality, but by using objective dimension measurements, the authors can make the claim that biological features directly predict work performance. So is it time for HR departments to pull out the callipers? Let's hear more on the study.

Elaine Wong and colleagues gathered data from 55 Fortune 500 organisations, collecting online photos and available financial data. In another example of a neat measurement variable, they conducted content analysis on letters to shareholders, analysing the frequency of words that reflect high and low cognitive complexity - the tendency to see the world as nuanced and graded (suggested by words like "possibility" or "trend") or black and white ("absolutely", "irreversible"). These letters are generally understood to be the work of whole senior teams, not the CEO alone, so they tell us which company teams are cognitively simple, making them more likely to take decisions quickly in deference to authority.

It turns out that only for companies run by cognitively simple teams did wider-faced CEOs delivered higher firm return on assets. In cognitively complex teams, where decisions are made more collectively and systematically, there appears to be less opportunity for firm, powerful leaders to stamp their authority. A fascinating nuance to the study.

A skeptical view could mount a counterclaim: CEO faces don't matter, but cognitively simple decision-makers think they do. Their black-and-white thinking demands a stereotypically solid-looking leader, or perhaps their history of solid-looking leaders has conditioned them to black-and-white-thinking. Either way, such teams then compete over CEOs of desired appearance and, all things being equal, the most attractive firms will be better at acquiring them. The lack of an effect in cognitively complex teams? Faces don't loom large in their choices of leaders.

It's an ad-hoc argument, weakened by the fact the study analysis controlled for firm performance in previous years. However, it's still possible that a firm on the verge of an upturn has a cachet they use to draw in leaders of the desired mould. Until a study explicitly measures psychological power, and demonstrates that it is the linking variable between the biological characteristic and performance, it remains possible that leaders with WHR are simply jumping on board to put their face to success.

All in all, a methodologically sharp study that opens up examination of how biological features act as markers for work-relevant capabilities.

Wong, E., Ormiston, M., & Haselhuhn, M. (2011). A Face Only an Investor Could Love: CEOs' Facial Structure Predicts Their Firms' Financial Performance Psychological Science, 22 (12), 1478-1483 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611418838

Impediments to private sector careers for women in science, engineering, and technology

More than ever, women are taking advanced degrees in SET subjects: science, engineering and technology. Yet a 'leaky pipeline' means women are significantly under-represented at higher levels in academia. What's the experience of those who take their expertise into the private SET sector? A recent study investigates.

Authors Lisa Servon and M Anne Visser surveyed 2,493 women who hold or have held SET management positions in private companies, following up with focus groups. Many women experienced a grind in SET roles, with 8% of the sample working 100-hour weeks, compared to 3% of women in the general workforce. Yet only 9.6% of STEM corporate roles were held by women, worse than the 15.4% in the general workforce. As 41% of junior SET roles in private companies are held by women, this suggests the private pipeline is as leaky as the academic one.

What specific problems are women facing? 23% feel that women are actively held in low regard in their sector, notably in Engineering and Technology. Over half of respondents reported experiencing sexual harassment at work. Balancing work and family life remains a challenge. And a third of the group felt extremely isolated at work: these individuals were 25% more likely to view their career as stalled, presumably because they lacked support systems such as mentors helpful for progression and managing tough times.

Part of the isolation relates to the expectation that a good engineer (scientist, technologist) acts and thinks a certain, often stereotypically male way. One reaction was for women to act more male, even distancing oneself from other women by putting them down or disavowing their work. Another strategy was to find a 'pocket of sanity' in the organisation where being a woman wasn't an impediment to getting on with the job. But such a strategy can undermine career progression: 36% of interviewees reported making lateral job moves, and 29% down-shifted to lower positions at one point. Once a safe space is found, it may feel difficult to leave.

To address these obstacles, Servon and Visser suggest changing organisational culture, developing more diverse career routes and introducing family-friendly policies. Women at the top make a difference too: when women held at least 10% of the top roles, respondents reported higher levels of support and feeling valued. Changes could be of wide benefit as "some factors causing women in management to leave SET careers...may eventually drive men away as well", especially if they disagree that blunt criticism or living in your lab epitomise a functional SET culture.

Servon, L., & Visser, M. (2011). Progress hindered: the retention and advancement of women in science, engineering and technology careers Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (3), 272-284 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00152.x

Productivity forecasts depend on whether you focus on work completed or time taken

People estimate small tasks to take longer than they actually do, but underestimate the time needed for larger tasks, leading to dangerous overconfidence - a good reason to view projects as series of small steps. But what happens when you focus estimates on how much work will be completed in a fixed time period, as is done in incrementally managed projects, common in IT and other industries? A recent article demonstrates that flipping your focus reverses the biases: people believe they will be less productive within a long period of time than in a short period.

Torlief Halkjesvik and colleagues from the University of Oslo began with simple task estimation. Following a pilot, their second study asked student participants within two conditions to imagine that they had read a book excerpt (the task was framed retrospectively to avoid encouraging ambitious estimates to whip up motivation). One condition involved estimating the time taken to read a fixed piece of text, either two or 32 pages. The work estimation condition involved estimating the amount of text read in either three or 48 minutes.

In terms of estimated productivity - page reading per minute - participants thought a big task was more efficient than a small one, but that proportionately less gets done in a larger amount of time than a smaller one - seemingly a paradox. To Halkjesvik and co-authors, this simply demonstrates we have trouble with magnitude, dilating small things - "it's not *that* small!" and compressing larger ones. This has parallels with other features, such as Vierordt's law on time estimation, and the central tendency of judgment. 

Moving to an occupational setting, the authors informed 94 IT professionals about a genuine (historic) software project, broken into 10 ‘UserStories’ - discrete components common to IT projects. The study again avoided personal motivation, here by focusing estimates on the productivity of a hypothetical project developer. Unlike the other studies, no effect was found for imagined time efficiency for completing smaller (two User Stories) vs larger (five) tasks, but participants estimated work delivered in 20 hours would be more efficient than that over 100. It's worth noting the study as a whole overestimated the true productivity of the historic project, so the estimation of work completed in short windows reflects a pinnacle of unwarranted overconfidence.

These studies suggest "smaller magnitudes (of work or of time) are judged as disproportionately larger than large magnitudes." Breaking a software project down into a quick succession of releases may encourage unrealistic estimates of just how much of the project will get done in each release. Therefore, it's valuable to reverse your thinking and focus on the sub-tasks involved, and sense-check whether their durations really do fit your fixed deadline.

Halkjelsvik, T., Jørgensen, M., & Teigen, K. (2011). To read two pages, I need 5 minutes, but give me 5 minutes and I will read four: how to change productivity estimates by inverting the question Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (2), 314-323 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1693

How mixing work incentives put us on the horns of a dilemma

To encourage collaboration, many organisations structure incentives so that whole groups are rewarded – or not - based on their collective output. However, the groups-eye view allows for social loafing, where people shirk duties and assume team-mates will carry their load, so it's tempting to keep everyone accountable by adding incentives to individual performance too. Christopher Barnes and his colleagues set out to see just how these mixed incentives turn out in practice.

The researchers used a computer warfare simulation that examines behaviour in tight, demanding circumstances, where teams of four protect their territories by correctly identifying enemy intruders and then quickly destroying them. Team-mates used separate monitors, but shared a room and could freely converse. They recruited 304 management undergraduates, half of whom were given straightforward group incentives:  $10 each if their group outperformed a specified rival group.

The other teams were given mixed incentives: group performance could lead to $5 each , and individually outdoing a specified member of another team garnered another $5. Participants who were individually incentivised were hungrier for scores, being significantly faster at destroying intruders. However, heavily penalised illegitimate attacks ('friendly fire') were more common in these teams. This slump in quality suggests a drop-off in the flow of information typical in close teams, making it harder to detect and ward off errors as attention was turned towards delivering immediate personal objectives.

The study also examined direct helping behaviour, in terms of the efforts made to destroy intruders in team-mate territory rather than your own. This mattered, as each team had a high workload member who was constantly swarmed with as many radar blips as the others had put together. Participants with pure group-level incentives showed more helping behaviours than their mixed incentive counterparts.

Barnes and his colleagues suggest that mixed incentives  present a conflict between maximising individual interests and that of the collective, and the temptation is to focus on your own priorities, letting others hold the fort for you. Moreover, if you doubt that they will, you'd be even more of a sucker to vainly do so yourself. This amounts to a social dilemma akin to the prisoner's dilemma, which pressurises players towards self-serving behaviours.

I felt - and the authors do note - that the experimental paradigm relates best to 'task forces' whose urgent tasks necessitate trade-offs between different behaviours. I'm skeptical about generalising to workplaces which are more elastic: I may forgo reading my book over lunch in order to help you out, feel rewarded by this, and spend the afternoon contributing just as much or more to my own goals. Nevertheless, by plugging social dilemmas in to the research on incentives, this article highlights that tweaking incentives can result in tradeoffs, not simply the best of both worlds.

Barnes, C., Hollenbeck, J., Jundt, D., DeRue, D., & Harmon, S. (2010). Mixing Individual Incentives and Group Incentives: Best of Both Worlds or Social Dilemma? Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1611-1635 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309360845

Formal mentoring relationships gain momentum over time

The support that mentors offer can have considerable benefits, for both their proteges and the organisation at large. Recognising this, many develop formal mentoring programs to encourage and manage this process. However, such a managed system provides different conditions to an informal one, where parties identify an alignment of person and circumstance. Frankie Weinberg and Melenie Lankau at the University of Georgia decided to explore what this means for mentor contributions within formal mentoring relationships.

Weinberg and Lankau worked with a voluntary nine month mentoring program where mentor-protege pairs were formed by the organisation's executive committee; 110 such pairs joined their research. Questionnaires were used to understand how much time mentors dedicated to the relationship, and how much they felt they were fulfilling various mentoring functions: providing career guidance, psychosocial support, and role modelling good behaviours.

Mentoring relationships are understood to move through phases, so the authors sampled mentors views twice: two months into the program and one month after its end. This allowed study of the initiation phase, where each party gets the feel of the other, and the following cultivation phase, which insight and the relationship deepens. Mentoring activity is expected to be optimised during the cultivation phase, so Weinberg and Lankau investigated the relationship between the time spent on mentoring, and the mentoring functions on offer. Time spent on mentoring increased all three mentoring functions during initiation (time one), but by the cultivation phase, time expended was even more strongly associated with enhanced mentoring function, suggesting an hour of mentoring is worth more during cultivation than during initiation.

Weinberg and Lankau were concerned that mixed-sex pairs may suffer in a formalised context, as weaker resemblance can lead mentors to invest less effort than when working with a 'younger version of me'. Indeed, during the initiation period, mentors paired with proteges of the other sex overall reported providing lower levels of all three mentoring functions. However, once they had reached the cultivation stage, these mixed-sex penalties disappeared for psychosocial support and role-modelling, suggesting that increased familiarity managed to erode some of these barriers.

This study clearly evidences how formal mentoring relationships gain momentum: after the initiation phase, investments into the relationship yield greater dividends and impediments to the relationship tend to be shucked off. So organisations considering formal mentoring should ensure that the relationships they cultivate have the time that they need to blossom.

Weinberg, F., & Lankau, M. (2010). Formal Mentoring Programs: A Mentor-Centric and Longitudinal Analysis Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1527-1557 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309349310

What makes a great programmer?

Experience and brute brainpower enhance programming skill by helping programming knowledge to build over time, rather than by directly boosting current performance, according to a new article in the Journal of Individual Differences.

Authors Gunnar Rye Bergersen and Jan-Eric Gustafsson put 65 professional programmers through their paces for two straight days, tackling twelve meaty tasks in the Java language to prove their programming skill; this was what the study ultimately wanted to better understand.

Participants all filled in an extensive questionnaire on Java programming knowledge. Some participants also completed a suite of tasks involving memorising items (e.g. letters) while simultaneously handling another task such as checking sentences for errors. These measure working memory, the component of mind that keeps things available for conscious processing, and related to 'g', our proposed fundamental level of mental ability. Unfortunately working memory scores for over half the participants weren't taken due to logistical issues.

The authors modelled the relationships between all variables, including years of work experience, and found the best predictor of programming skill was programming knowledge: it loaded onto skill with a value of .77, where one would mean perfect prediction. Once knowledge was taken into account, a programmer's skill didn't benefit from better working memory or longer experience. Rather, these variables seem to matter earlier in the process by building better knowledge: working memory to help the programmer make sense of complex concepts, experience to provide the time for this to happen.

You can't get by in the programming industry with a static knowledge base, so working memory and a sharp mind will always be in demand in the profession. Indeed, observing that their data found an association between working memory and programming experience, the authors speculate that wannabes with poor working memory are more likely to leave the profession entirely. But this study asks us to recognise that a whizz programmer's competence is thanks to applying that brainpower to learning their trade.

Bergersen, G., & Gustafsson, J. (2011). Programming Skill, Knowledge, and Working Memory Among Professional Software Developers from an Investment Theory Perspective. Journal of Individual Differences, 32 (4), 201-209 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000052