When and how does mentoring matter?

A recent meta-analysis on mentoring aims to shed light on what matters in these relationships. Mentoring is a distinctive relationship where the mentor acts as a role model, has more experience than their protege, offers them guidance, and provides a safe space for learning and exploration. Obtaining mentoring is often proclaimed as a life-changing opportunity, so a chance to assess this is useful.

The work, led by Lillian Turner de Tormes Eby, used database searches to gather 173 samples where mentoring had been investigated. All these samples contained data on protégé perceptions of mentoring, allowing the study to amass common findings and arrive at sizes for the different effects. The analysis spanned across academic and working contexts, and the authors found that the findings rarely differed between these contexts, doing so only in degree, not in nature.

First off, greater similarity between protégé and mentor on deep features such as aligned values or attitudes was solidly related to three key measures of mentor value: relationship quality (liking of the mentor and satisfaction with how the relationship has unfolded), psychosocial support (counselling and offering acceptance), and to a lesser extent instrumental support (sponsorship or providing visibility in organisations). Having a similar background and experiences provided a more modest boost to instrumental support and a smaller one with relationship quality. Meanwhile, surface level similarities between mentor and protégé such as race, age and gender, turned out to be in aggregate almost irrelevant, with tiny effect sizes.

In terms of the process of mentoring, protégés in more informal relationships received slightly more support of both types, as evidenced by the small correlations with those variables. And more frequent interactions were helpful in terms of all three key measures, especially for the workplace-based samples. In terms of what the protégé brought to the table, those with more social capital - supportive friends and family - appeared to be better able to form a relationship of higher quality and felt they could gain more usable instrumental assistance.

What did these effects produce? The more the relationship embodied any of the three core components, the more satisfied the protégé,  the stronger their sense of affiliation with the organisation, and the less likely they were to plan to leave the organisation. In addition, the two types of support were associated with greater learning.  More instrumental support and higher relationship quality were both associated with stronger perceptions of career success. All these effects were between small and medium in size. The analysis looked at health outcomes and found a no effects beyond a small correlation between more psychosocial support and less workplace strain.

To summarise, mentor-protégé relationships are stronger when the two align on deep features and to a lesser extent in terms of common experiences, when the contact is regular and informal, and when the protégé has other relationships to offer them solid foundations. In terms of outcomes, the authors note in concluding that 'for the typical protégé, the benefits of mentoring are likely to be more limited in both scope and magnitude' than have sometimes been touted.

de Tormes Eby LT, Allen TD, Hoffman BJ, Baranik LE, Sauer JB, Baldwin S, Morrison MA, Kinkade KM, Maher CP, Curtis S, & Evans SC (2012). An Interdisciplinary Meta-Analysis of the Potential Antecedents, Correlates, and Consequences of Protégé Perceptions of Mentoring. Psychological bulletin PMID: 22800296

Interested workers are better performers

Vocational interests – the activities, processes and environments you prefer at work – are, compared to ability and personality, the neglected child of occupational psychology. This is partly thanks to a 1984 meta-analysis, which reported a weak correlation with job performance of just .1. However, recent focus on the idea of person-job fit has drawn attention back to this domain, and a new meta-analysis appears to further rehabilitate interests by showing a rather stronger relationship to performance.

Lead author Christopher Nye and his team gathered 60 studies by searching the literature for terms such as vocational interests, job performance, and turnover, and by perusing the bibliographies of texts such as interest inventory technical manuals. Half the studies followed the 1984 meta-analysis, 42 involved employment (the remainder looked at academic achievement), and these related interests to various measures of performance, such as job outcomes or organisational citizenship behaviours. Interests were measured in various ways, but common to many studies was John Holland's six-interest taxonomy, comprising work that is realistic (e.g. technical), investigative (research), artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. Interest scores can be treated in a fairly absolute way - your standardised interest score is above average, so you should be somewhat suited to this role - but the team suspected that stronger relationships would be found in by taking a different approach. An individual's interests can be portrayed in terms of a personal ranking or interest profile, where the absolute scores matter less than the relative priorities; a strong investigative interest matters less if other areas matter even more to you. Matching individual interest profiles to job profiles produces 'congruence scores' that, by more closely reflecting fit or misfit, could be better predictors of outcomes.

Overall, the regression-based meta-analysis revealed the baseline relationship between interests and job performance to be .20, already twice as strong as the original 1984 analysis. Moreover, the congruence indices had a much stronger relationship, on average .36. Highest correlations were found around organisational citizenship behaviours, which makes sense: if you enjoy what you do you are more likely to go over and above what the job asks of you. Across the measures, the team found that "interested employees are likely to perform better, help others in the organization, and stay with the company longer." These correlations are substantial and suggest that interests are of greater value than previously believed.

The analysis also made it clear that choosing the right measure is critical. In Holland's taxonomy certain domains are more closely related than others: social interests can be partly compatible with artistic or enterprising job features, but opposed by realistic features. Following that example, studies that correlated a social interest measure with job performance found stronger relationships when the jobs were dominated by social features, weaker ones for artistic, and weakest for jobs that were essentially realistic. This re-emphasises that for interest to be valuable, it must be considered in terms of fit to a particular role, rather than as a more-or-less proxy of motivation. “Because past research has  indicated that interests are not strong predictors of performance, vocational interests have seemingly been ignored in selection contexts”, concludes Nye's team, inviting a new wave of research to fill in the gaps.

Christopher D. Nye, Rong Su, James Rounds, & Fritz Drasgow (2012). Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of Over 60 Years of Research Perspectives on Psychological Science (7), 384-403 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612449021

Do we prefer potential over achievement?

From job interviews to first dates, people emphasise their personal achievements, reckoning that track record is certain, whereas potential is not. But high potential commands attention: consider the 'next big thing'. A new study makes the surprising case that in many contexts we actually prefer people with the potential to achieve over those who already have.

The researchers, Zakary Tormala, Jayson Jia and Michael Norton, noted that although uncertainty can be aversive, ambiguity does serve to create mystery, posing questions that the questing mind wants to resolve. This encourages deeper processing of information, and when that information is positive, this could lead to greater overall investment than would otherwise occur.

Across 8 experiments, the authors demonstrate this effect in a variety of domains. For instance, experiment two used an occupational setting, in which 84 participants considered a hypothetical job candidate. In one condition, the candidate had two years of experience and a high rating on a test of 'leadership achievement', the other was just beginning work with a similarly high rating in 'leadership potential'. Both were matched on qualifications. Participants were asked to anticipate how well each would perform five years into this position, and favoured the high-potential over the high-achieving individual. Note this means the participants felt a high-potential will do better five years into a career than their counterpart reaches seven years in.

Experiment three replicated the finding, this time asking participants to weigh two candidates against each other, one high-potential, one high-achiever, again based on presented test scores. Candidates were explicitly framed to be of the same age, to avoid confounds from a bias against older applicants. This study used multiple measures: how favourably they rated the candidate, and concerns about how risky it would be to hire this individual. This was to explore the possibility that the ambiguity inherent in the high-potentials leads to more extreme assessments per se, not necessarily just good ones; enigmatic wild cards who could do the impossible - or the unspeakable. Participants rated the high-potentials as a more favourable hire, and neither  candidate was seen to be a risky prospect. All participants provided ratings that showed they accepted that the high-achiever was objectively stronger on paper; nevertheless, they tended to prefer the high-potential for the role.

Other experiments ranged as widely as evaluations of restaurants and stand-up comics, where the up-and-comers were judged more favorably than those who had already delivered. The researchers used these not just to extend the generalisability of the finding but to test the central hypothesis that framing around potential leads to deeper processing. A particularly nice example was an experiment that leveraged the well-established finding that deeper processing helps distinguish strong arguments from weaker ones: accordingly, participants given a letter advocating for a student's acceptance to graduate school were better able to differentiate a strong argument when that student was positioned as high-potential, rather than a high-achiever.

The authors emphasise that they doubt that high potential would compensate for an actively horrible track record; the research focused on examples that were positive rather than containing mixed messages. They also suggest that truly outstanding achievements - like an Olympic medal - would outshine potential, not least because their exceptional nature would encourage deeper processing. Nevertheless, their research 'suggests that potential framing can be an effective means of persuasion', whether seeking employment or winning business for your company.

Tormala ZL, Jia JS, & Norton MI (2012). The Preference for Potential. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: 22775472

Stretching emotional limits leads to bad behaviour at work

While counter-productive work behaviours (CWBs) such as pilfering stationery or hassling colleagues arise through the decisions of individuals, there is an increasing interest in how they may be encouraged by broader working conditions. Incentive schemes or different levels of organisational engagement may deter or encourage such behaviours, and now a recent study suggests that emotional exhaustion may open the door to bad actions. The research, led by George Banks at Virginia Commonwealth University, suggests that emotional exhaustion matters because it makes it harder to form and maintain deep relationships within the organisation, such relationships being the foundation for a sense of organisational commitment.

The research team surveyed 113 South Korean bank employees, and contacted the supervisors of each to get a measure of CWB from an outside source, allowing them to minimise correlational artefacts due to data arising from a common source. All employees rated their emotional exhaustion with items such as "I feel frustrated by my job" as well as their organisational commitment, for instance "I really care about the fate of this organization". Supervisors rated the frequency of CWBs relating to the organisation ("Takes a longer break than is acceptable in your workplace") and that specific to organisational members ("Makes fun of someone at work"). They found that higher exhaustion was related to both lower organisational commitment and higher frequency of CWBs. Analyses suggested that the effect of emotional exhaustion on CWBs is solely due to its influence upon organisational commitment.

It's already well-understood that emotional states can contribute to CWBs. For instance, they become more common when individuals experience negative emotions arising from co-worker incivility. Whereas that finding suggests a reflexive quality to the rise in behaviours - “the employee strikes back” - the current research suggests that they can also increase due to the mechanisms that prevent them being eroded. Banks' team point out that CWBs typically present an intrinsic reward, such as pleasure, personal gain or thrill-seeking, that would normally be resisted using regulatory processes. But exhaustion is likely to tap the resources these processes themselves depend on; moreover, the motivational juice of doing right by your meaningful relations peters out when those relations have deteriorated due to lack of attention. The author suggest that to avoid the substantial costs that CWBs present to organisations, they should act to reduce emotional exhaustion by better work design, or at minimum through availability of stress reduction techniques.

George C. Banks, Christopher E. Whelpley, In-Sue Oh, & KangHyun Shin (2012). (How) Are Emotionally Exhausted Employees Harmful?. International Journal of Stress Management. DOI: 10.1037/a0029249

Emotional Intelligence helps manage team issues - but not in every context

Past research has confirmed that emotional intelligence (EI) is more important in jobs such as teaching or nursing because it provides resources and methods for personally managing the high emotional loads common to such positions. A new paper demonstrates that jobs that involve high managerial demands benefit from EI for a different reason: the specific ability to detect emotional cues helps smooth over issues and keep team relations positive. However, in some cases, EI could be doing harm rather than good.

EI can be conceptualised in many ways, and lead researcher Crystal Farh and her colleagues chose to focus on Mayer and Salovey’s model, a purely ability-focused scheme that comprises emotional perception, the use of emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions. They asked 212 early-career managers to complete web surveys that measured personality together with managerial work demands, defined by items such as "This job is a dramatic increase in scope". Managerial demands were of interest because they reflect work situations that are challenging and involve degrees of stress and intense emotions to deliver ambitious outcomes; Farh's team believed that emotional cues in these contexts need to be picked up quickly by managers. EI was measured through a series of standardised ability tests, and participants' supervisors contributed ratings of overall job performance together with perceptions of how effective the participant's team was.

 When managerial work demands were great, higher EI was associated with higher teamwork effectiveness, but the relationship disappeared when the managerial demands were at or beyond one standard deviation below the sample average. EI made a difference in busy, complex and multi-layered managerial contexts, not when managing single teams under less pressured conditions. Farh's team predicted that the first EI component, emotional perception, would be the most crucial component, because noticing emotions is a precondition to acting upon them. They duly found that when each component was analysed separately, only emotional perception maintained the effect under high managerial demands; moreover, when those demands were low, emotional perception was actually associated with a penalty to teamworking. Why? The paper conjectures that being hypersensitive to emotional cues in a low-stress environment may actually be counterproductive, leading to 'reading too much' into situations and rocking the boat unnecessarily.

Does teamworking matter? An analysis demonstrated that in this sample, higher EI was associated with better job performance, and this was due to the positive relationship between EI and teamwork effectiveness. All analyses controlled for personality, as in particular conscientiousness tends to be tied to meeting specified work outcomes.

The research adds to the literature that EI matters in a range of work roles, acting as a solution to specific problems rather than acting as a global resource that improves every situation.  The authors conclude that 'managers should recognize that selecting emotionally intelligent employees or training employees’ EI may not lead to higher performance outcomes in all situations, but that investing in the EI of employees working in jobs characterized by high managerial demands may be a worthwhile endeavour.'

Crystal I Chien Farh, Myeong-Gu Seo, & Paul E. Tesluk (2012). Emotional intelligence, teamwork effectiveness, and job performance: The moderating role of job context. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97 (4), 890-900 DOI: 10.1037/a0027377

Self-serving leaders levy an emotional toll on those who aren't getting their dues

How does it feel to work under a self-serving leader? We know how horrendous the extremes can be - dictators or fraudulent CEOs can quickly wreck lives - but more commonly the problem is likely to be bad feeling owing to uncertainty about where you stand. That's the conclusion of research from the University of Leuven, Belgium, which also suggests that people find it easier to make peace with these situations when they feel they are getting their personal dues.

Jeroen Camps, Stijn Decoster, and Jeroen Stouten developed and validated a Self-Serving Leadership Scale, involving just those behaviours that involve advancing the leader's own interests, rather than other toxic qualities such as abusive behaviour. This was given to 134 employed participants alongside a set of items indicating the extent to which they felt harmed by their leader, such as 'my leader has disadvantaged me'. In addition, the participants completed three measures of organisational justice: procedural (are rules applied consistently?), interpersonal (am I treated with respect) and distributive (am I getting the outcomes I deserve?).

Camps and his colleagues predicted that the last measure, distributive justice, would offset the lack of trust in a leader seen as self-serving. Just so: when distributive justice was low, self-serving leadership was strongly related to perceptions of harm, but when it was high, the relationship weakened. The pattern remained even when controlling for other types of justice: what mattered was simply the sense that you haven't been stiffed thus far.

 The team looked at what lies underneath this in a further study which brought new measures into play, specifically looking at levels of uncertainty and of negative emotions. This experimental study used a hypothetical situation, with the 87 participants being asked to imagine that their chances of a potential promotion depended entirely on the decisions of their boss. In one condition the boss was presented as entirely unbiased, whereas the second, self-serving condition, presented the boss as willing to make decisions that directly benefit themselves, such as promoting someone favoured by influences in the company. Participants were then told either that they were offered the promotion or passed over, providing or withholding distributive justice from them.

Participants with a self-serving boss indicated that they were more uncertain about their job, boss and overall situation. Missing out on the promotion led participants to be more upset, measured by ratings of emotion words like angry and frustrated, and that upset was magnified when the boss was presented as self-serving. In this promotion-less, no-justice condition, the high uncertainty and higher negative emotions were bound together. Conversely, when participants received justice in the form of the promotion, levels of uncertainty were decoupled from negative emotions. The boss's motives made no difference to their emotional state.

These studies suggest that when we suspect a leader is working to their own agenda, the resultant uncertainty can be neutralised when we feel we are getting the outcomes we deserve. The authors note that this can be interpreted as participants accepting that 'leaders can act fair and ethically even though their motives are inherently selfish' - but can also be seen as a step away from ethics entirely, into a myopic mentality: I'm alright, Jack. Further research could help us tease these explanations apart.

Jeroen Camps, Stijn Decoster, & Jeroen Stouten (2012). My Share Is Fair, So I Don’t Care: The Moderating Role of Distributive Justice in the Perception of Leaders’ Self-Serving Behavior Journal of Personnel Psychology , 11 (1), 49-59 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000058

What are the pitfalls of moving away from hierarchy?

What's the best way to organise groups of people?  Experimentally-minded organisations have explored the use of 'autonomous workgroups', where teams are led from within rather than being allocated a supervisor. The psychological benefits are apparent: providing workers with more direct autonomy is well-known to promote motivation. Is the relative rarity of such approaches merely down to inertia within the world of work, or are there some challenges that need consideration? 

In a recent article, Jonas Ingvaldsen and Monica Rolfsen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology present a case study detailing 'Tools', a Norwegian tool company that decided to move from a traditional foreman situation to a flatter structure, partly led by an organisational and national culture that is sympathetic to labour empowerment. The investigators took a qualitative approach, using interviews and focus groups to gather information from team members over 13 years. They began as a new approach kicked off, where each week a different team member took on a spokesperson role. Then, the  workforce was enthusiastic: 'The flat structure has come to stay. We won’t return to the foreman system, where someone points the finger and tells you what to do.'

Yet eight years later, interviews and discussions revealed several issues. Although members wanted to do good by their team, the transient nature of the spokesperson responsibility made it possible to skimp on more onerous and seemingly less essential activities like information-sharing. Moreover, the fact that the spokesperson role was crafted around the team needs meant that when tensions between teams or functions emerged, there were few formal mechanisms to resolve disputes. Spokespeople were unable to enforce decisions that were individually unpopular but better for the larger system:  'self-management ends up with what is optimal for each individual, and that is comfort' - meaning that products were put together on a schedule that was efficient for the team but was harmful to the inventory management.

Tools switched it up. The new system involved distributed leadership, where managerial responsibilities were unbundled and made the responsibility of different team members. In this '5-M' model, one person would look after Man (eg staffing), another Machine, and so on. While this appears to have had some powerful benefits - Mileu specialists can get together in their M-meeting, and discuss how to improve air quality across the organisation - real-life problems don't always fall neatly into boxes. The interviews revealed concerns that non-essential issues often got kicked from one M to another without resolution. Concrete and immediate problems did tend to get resolved rapidly and effectively, but anything big-picture called on co-ordination that no-one was equipped for.

This case study encapsulates some of the benefits and challenges of non-hierarchical methods within large, complex organisations. Are all members dispositionally suited to taking on leadership duties over their existing work? How can they develop mastery and hence satisfaction for these duties when only practiced one week in six? Are the domains that we carve the world into sufficiently legible to the human users who have to operate with them? Worthwhile questions to help us toward a 21st century approach to the workplace.

Jonas A Ingvaldsen, & Monica Rolfsen (2012). Autonomous work groups and the challenge of inter-group coordination Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726712448203