What makes a maverick?

Who are the mavericks who take the path less travelled and bring organisations along in their wake?  We can point to individuals, such as the British entrepreneur Richard Branson, but there has been little empirical work to establish the personal profile that predicts maverickism.

Enter Elliroma Gardiner and Chris J. Jackson, who gathered data online from 458 full-time workers within a range of sectors, seeking to map a range of personal variables onto their measure of maverickism. This measure captured the tendency to behave in disruptive, bold, risk-taking ways to achieve goals. It was also constructed to capture only functional maverickism, on the basis that when these behaviours lead to failures rather than successes the instigator is labelled a misfit or deviant, not a maverick; a typical item was "I have a knack for getting things right when least expected."

What predicted maverickism? After accounting for the predictive power of maleness - associated with maverickism - the  regression analysis revealed what was contributed by personality. More extraverted participants tended to be mavericks, reflecting the energetic, sociable side needed to push new ideas. Mavericks were also open to experience, the personality trait that reflects willingness to try new things and act against the status quo. Those with high maverickism tended to be lower in agreeableness, which the investigators had predicted: you may need some social skills to be a maverick, but you also need to be comfortable with people resenting your approach and with upsetting people.

Gardiner and Jackson found two other measures mattered after personality was taken into account. One came from a computer task of risky behaviour, where participants gained in-game money by inflating balloons bigger - but lost cash when they burst. In a condition where balloons became very sensitive in a second stage, raising the risks markedly, those who finished with more ruptured rubber had higher maverickism scores. The final measure was of laterality: the degree to which we rely on one side of our body over another. Participants with a stronger left-ear preference were more likely to report maverick behaviour... if they also scored low in the personality variable of neuroticism. Why? Left body laterality implies right brain laterality, and some lines of evidence suggest this is associated with creativity. Creative ideas can make a good maverick - but not if we're too anxious to act on them, as high neuroticism would imply.

The research suggests that maverick behaviour originates from individuals who are extraverted, curious, tough toward others, and fairly inured to punishing risk. The data also suggests that a combo of an emotionally stable personality with a creative capacity facilitates maverickism, although we might want to see this measured directly using measures of creativity.  I'm left fascinated by what differentiates the maverick from the workplace deviant. It could be about picking the right risks, but note that our functional mavericks stuck to their bold (but non-optimal) balloon strategy even in the face of feedback (bursts) that led others to cool off.   Are the mavericks just the lucky ones?

Gardiner, E., & Jackson, C. (2011). Workplace mavericks: How personality and risk-taking propensity predicts maverickism British Journal of Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02090.x

Depression and burnout: vicious cycles and the saving grace of exercise

A rise in levels of depression contributes to subsequent increases in work burnout, and burnout to later depression, according to new research. However, physical exercise can mitigate and even prevent this vicious cycle.

Here's the how: Sharok Toker and Michal Biron assessed employed visitors to a medical centre on three occasions spanning on average 40 months. They ended up with 1,632 participants from a range of occupations with a mean age of 47, mainly (70%) male. At each time point participants recorded levels of burnout, in terms of fatigue, cognitive weariness ("I have difficulty concentrating") and emotional exhaustion, as well as completing the depression scale of a patient-oriented clinical instrument. Participants also reported the volume of strenuous exercise they conducted within a typical week in the last month.

The what is as described: an increase in burnout from time one to time two predicted an increase in depression from time two to time three, even controlling for time two depression (that is, depression at the time of the burnout uptick). The same effect was found for depression on subsequent burnout. Why? These concepts are understood as related but distinct, with burnout reflecting strain due to the quality of the social situation at work whereas depression is a global state that involves a range of symptoms and an intense experience of sadness or diminished pleasure. Both however make demands on psychological and energetic resources, and this study's results bear out its expectations that a drain on these resources from one origin - such as a harried workplace - can lay the groundwork for other problems.

How about physical exercise? Toker and Biron hypothesised several reasons why it might act as a bulwark against this spiral. Exercise activates systems that can have physical outcomes like improving sleep and even damping down the physical consequences of sustained stress. It can also produce psychological benefits such as better body image and mood states. Moreover, it can be a useful way to take our mind off things, distracting from specific concerns (such as work challenges) or global cognitions (negative thoughts). Toker and Biron found that the more exercise you do, the milder the effect of earlier burnout/depression upon the other variable at a later time point, to the point of obliterating the effect for high doses of exercise.  They conclude that, as well as considering the larger links between job burnout and global depression, employers should recognise the benefits of exercise “as an important means of preventing the build-up of work-related or general distress.”

Toker, S., & Biron, M. (2012). Job burnout and depression: Unraveling their temporal relationship and considering the role of physical activity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97 (3), 699-710 DOI: 10.1037/a0026914

Perfectionists worry away the benefits of a break from work

Go on, have a few days off. Take a week - you've certainly earned it! Clear your mind, take a break - things will tick over til you return...

Easier said than done, of course. But respites from work are valuable, replenishing resources and preventing negative loads (mental fatigue, adrenaline build-up) spiralling out of control. Sadly, the positive gloss of the holiday itself tends to slip quickly when we return to work - a 'fade-out effect' described well in this Psychologist article.  What makes you more likely to fall prey to the fade-out? The quest for perfection, new research suggests.

Researcher Paul Flaxman and colleagues canvassed academics before, during and on two occasions after an Easter break, measuring changes in well-being. The 77 participants also completed a tool that measures self-critical perfectionism; this form of perfectionism centres around high standards and doubting your actions are sufficient to reach them. As this attribute is triggered by achievement -related stressors, such as deadlines or presentations, the researchers suspected the holiday itself would likely be a genuine respite for all, but that those high in this attribute could quickly crash once they returned to work.

Pre-holiday, perfectionists were worse off in terms of well-being: more exhausted, anxious and fatigued than their colleagues. During the holiday, their wellbeing raised and fell in line with colleagues. Yet, at return to work, they quickly reported higher exhaustion, giving way to higher anxiety a few weeks later, with consistently higher fatigue across both time points. The finding accounted for differences in respite wellbeing, length of respite, and how much participants worked during the respite.

What's driving this? Participants reported on holiday cognitions, and it turns out that time spent ruminating about the correctness of past judgments and repeatedly worrying about future events led to more emotional exhaustion and anxiety on return to work. The effect that perfectionism has on the various wellbeing measures was partly due to the mediating influence of these 'perseverative cognitions', which explained at least a quarter and in one case (fatigue) two thirds of the effect. Why didn't these thoughts drag holiday wellbeing down, too? Flaxman's group conjecture that  these cognitions are functional in the short-term, staving off uncomfortable feelings (I should be doing something!) by rehearsing intentions in your head. However, by preventing psychological detachment from work, this strategy foregoes any chance to shake things off and lighten the load.

If you feel that the world might collapse if you took the invitation at the top of this piece, you might want to explore holiday activities that are extremely absorbing and take you well away from the work mentality; you might also want to switch off your work mobile.  The researchers also note that interventions such as CBT and mindfulness-based training may be effective in cushioning perfectionist beliefs from harming quality of life.

Flaxman PE, Ménard J, Bond FW, & Kinman G (2012). Academics' Experiences of a Respite From Work: Effects of Self-Critical Perfectionism and Perseverative Cognition on Postrespite Well-Being. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 22545621

A case for putting guilt-prone people in charge

Leadership research has  gained an appetite for dispositional affect, a person's tendency to feel one way more than another. Individuals who regularly express positive affects like pride or enthusiasm are seen as better leaders and produce better outcomes. Negative affects, meanwhile, are less consistently useful: although bursts of appropriate anger can help to focus efforts, frequent expressions of negative emotions lead to poor outcomes for followers such as stress and poor coordination. But recent study may change the conversation, as it suggests that a dispositional affect towards feeling guilty makes you more suitable for leadership, both in the eyes of others and through your efforts.

Stanford researchers Rebecca Schaumberg and Francis Flynn began online, asking 243 employed people to review a personality profile full of dummy responses to a set of questions, including some linked to unfortunate scenarios such as running down an animal. Half the participants looked at a fabricated profile with responses to the scenario focusing on guilt-proneness: how true is it that "You’d feel bad you hadn’t been more alert driving down the road"?  The researchers believed that participants in this group would rate the profile as having more leadership potential when it contained higher (vs lower) ratings of guilt, an emotion which leads you to review your behaviour and seek to fix things. Meanwhile the other half saw responses to shame-proneness ("You would think ‘I’m terrible’"), shame being another 'self-conscious' emotion but one that lacks the urge to act and involves simply a self-directed negative reaction. As expected, profiles high rather than low in guilt proneness were rated as more capable leaders, but levels of shame-proneness had no effect. People who are emotionally involved in redressing bad situations are seen as better leaders.

In the next study, things got real. 140 university staff and students completed surveys including a measure of guilt-proneness, before meeting in groups to carry out two exercises, one figuring out how to survive in the desert, another marketing chosen products by generating taglines and pitches. Participants then rated each team-mate on the degree of leadership that emerged during the sessions. A neat analysis technique allowed Schaumberg and Flynn to put aside relational effects (I get on best with you) and perceiver biases (I rate everyone high on leadership) to derive a true leadership score for each participant. As before, those scores were highest for the most guilt-prone.

 A final study combined survey data with that from a prior 360-degree feedback process for a group of 139 MBAs. The researchers found that 360 items that related to leader effectiveness were rated higher for individuals who expressed higher guilt proneness in the survey. This study also suggested that  guilt proneness partially makes its effect through another variable, how much responsibility to lead the participant felt. To reverse the aphorism, with great responsibility can come great power.

 The evidence then suggests that being driven by guilt to be conscious and caring about how your actions affect the wellbeing of others can help people to be perceived as leaders, emerge as leaders, and have an impact as leaders. However, Schaumberg and Flynn point out that the guilt-prone may be hesitant to take control, taking seriously the potential impact of their actions, and not wanting to displace others hopeful for the role; in summary, "the kind of people who would make outstanding leaders may, in some cases, be reluctant to occupy leadership roles." It may be the job of organisations to coax out these reluctant leaders and cultivate their responsibility to lead.

Schaumberg, R., & Flynn, F. (2012). Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown: The Link Between Guilt Proneness and Leadership. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0028127

How can managers play a positive part in a coaching relationship?

Coaching at work has become more common as a way to develop employees and improve performance. These coaches are often specialists from another function or from outside the organisation. Yet there is another person with stakes in the employee's developmental priorities... their line manager. To date, there has been little scrutiny of how they affect the coaching process, but a new study helps clarify the role of this third party.

Helen Ogilvy and Vicky Ellam-Dyson's study performed semi-structured interviews with 18 coachees (those receiving coaching) and 12 of their line managers, then coded this content using content analysis, separating ideas into meaningful categories. They found that managers that valued coaching and understood how it worked were seen as more likely to be involved in the process, either by bringing up the coaching in conversation (formally or informally) or through general focus on development steps. The ways in which they were seen as helpful included

•  supporting - such as listening, encouraging and offering reassurance
• informing - in particular, providing feedback on performance that could then be discussed within a coaching setting
• being open and giving the coachee space
• demonstrating a coaching style that reinforced the scheduled coaching sessions
• challenge - of limiting beliefs, and pressure to experiment and take risks

Conversely what was seen as unhelpful included

• passive behaviours, such as a disinterest in coaching, or lack of feedback
• restrictive behaviours such as being critical or not allowing time

Note the fine line between the helpful and unhelpful behaviours: challenge vs criticism, or giving space vs disinterest. Indeed, the interviews identified instances where managers, despite their interest in the process, held off from broaching the topic in the interests of privacy, leaving the coachee feeling neglected. The sense that coaching is a personal process was common to most managers, but shared by only half of the coachees. One takeaway is that it's worth managers asking how they can be involved (if at all) rather than assuming they aren't wanted.

Ogilvy and Ellam-Dyson make other recommendations, including that coaches make an effort to educate managers and coachees of the benefits of management involvement - as well as how to best approach it - and that coachees seek performance feedback ahead of the first coaching session.

A final point: coaching has been charged with producing goals are not tightly enough tied to organisational objectives. It's often assumed this is due to line managers being too hands-off, but this isn't borne out by these data, where regardless of the varied level of management involvement in goal setting, the majority of goals tended to be only indirectly related to business needs, for instance boosting personal effectiveness and aiding career progression. Perhaps this is the outcome of the reflective, non-coercive structure of coaching? Thoughts from practitioners are very welcome.

Ogilvy, H., & Ellam-Dyson, V. (2012). Line management involvement in coaching: Help or hindrance? A content analysis study International Coaching Psychology Review, 7 (1), 39-53

How do occupational psychology lab experiments hold up in the real world?

A new paper combs meta-analytic data from across psychology to better understand how laboratory research translates to the real world. Here at the Occupational Digest, we report on evidence from a range of sources, often field work from within specific organisations (such as managers ratings of performance), or more general surveys of working individuals - but also from laboratory studies, typically involving students rather than participants with a working history. Are findings from such set-ups likely to be reliable?

The answer from Gregory Mitchell's analysis is a qualified yes. He looked at 217 lab-field comparisons drawn from 82 previous meta-analysis that covered the breadth of psychological research areas, looking at when a finding in the lab was corroborated in in the field. This follows an earlier analysis using a smaller data-set by Anderson, Lindsay and Bushman in 1999. At the highest level, Mitchell's analysis dovetailed with the Anderson et al. finding: lab and field reports correlate at an r of around .7, which means a strong relationship between the two. Although this is reassuring, the analysis also revealed that 14% of laboratory results actually changed signs when tested in field; that is, the effect ran the other way to the original finding.

Things get really interesting for the analysis by sub-field. Mitchell drew out the two fields with the most lab-field comparisons available, which were social psychology and, fortunately for us, occupational psychology. Social psychology showed a lower correlation between lab and field of .53. The occupational results, meanwhile, showed a very strong correspondence, with an r of .89. (1 would be perfect correspondence.) Only two of 71 lab effects changed signs for occupational research, with the likelihood of this happening nearly tenfold greater in social psychology. The data suggests that one reason for this is a much higher proportion of small effect sizes reported in the social psych laboratory literature; a smaller effect can much more feasibly 'flip' than a large one, all else being equal.

All told, the use of laboratory studies to inform workplace psychology appears to be in fairly good health. That said, we can't jump from this general finding to the specific confidence that a given laboratory effect will translate into the field with the same strength or even the same direction. We should continue to look for real-world investigations to follow on the heels of laboratory proof-in-concepts. What we can be comfortable with is that this strategy seems to be working pretty well in our field.

Mitchell, G. (2012). Revisiting Truth or Triviality: The External Validity of Research in the Psychological Laboratory Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (2), 109-117 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611432343

Elsewhere: Gregory Mitchell contributes to the debate on replication of psychology findings in this months Psychologist magazine

How 'who you could have been' could shape your workplace identity

Carter is at a formal drinks for a colleague back from secondment, part of a fast-track management scheme. he remembers opting not to apply for the scheme five years ago and wonders how things would be now had he taken that plunge: the overseas experiences, the pressures, the opportunities. What would that Carter be like? In subsequent months he finds himself returning to this idea, finally setting up a meeting with his manager, who is surprised to hear him reveal that he feels dissatisfied and wants to reinvigorate his career.

Carter has encountered an alternative self: a version of him that could have been. This concept, unpacked by Otilia Obodaru in a recent Academy of Management Review article, can be contrasted with most theories of self that work within a temporal framework - the actual past and present, extrapolating the future from an actual now. The idea of an alternative self integrates research on counterfactual thinking – 'if I had gotten that bus, I would be there by now' – into the psychology of self.

Developing an alternative self and integrating it with identity requires a few steps. First, you need a turning point, a fork in your life where you took one road over another. As the 'job for life' has given way to more boundaryless careers, there are more work-related turning points to reflect on than ever. Secondly, you must undo that turning point, imagining 'what if?', easiest to do when the event was controllable, like Carter's choice not to apply for a role. Finally, the alternative self must have opportunity and motive to be rehearsed mentally or to an audience. Identity research suggests a self-narrative tends to be taken up when relevant to ongoing desires or fears; perhaps Carter has been tiring of his fixed location and wondering if he will ever get out of the city.

Not everyone has an alternative self, the article quoting one interviewee from previous research, confessing "I'm a priest... I can't imagine not being one. I have no idea what I would do if I wasn't a priest." But many do: Obodaru cites research that reports of long-term regrets have increased fairly linearly decade on decade from around 40% of people in the 1950s to close to 100% in the last decade. Note that this measures only 'better alternative selves'; worse ones are also possible, such as those that Alcoholics Anonymous encourage their members to reflect on - the active alcoholic they chose not to be. Having an alternative self means you can compare them to your actual self, generating emotional responses, affecting satisfaction, and leading to better self-knowledge about strengths or weaknesses.

As the AA example makes clear, organisations can encourage or dampen the formation of alternative selves, by drawing attention to turning points, inviting the undoing, or giving space for rehearsing what that alternative would look like. At its best, this can lead to insight and greater resolve, such as collectively considering 'what if we had never dared to start the business together?' It can also lead to the 'crystallization of discontent' and a motivation to change circumstances. In this sense, the road not taken doesn't always vanish: it can live on in our minds, affecting our present and shaping our future.

Obodaru, O. (2012). The Self Not Taken: How Alternative Selves Develop and How They Influence Our Professional Lives The Academy of Management Review, 37 (1), 34-57 DOI: 10.5465/amr.2009.0358