143 posts · 58,027 views

The British Psychology Society's Occupational Digest is a blog dedicated to how psychology matters in the workplace. It follows the success of the award-winning BPS Research Digest which reports on psychology of every flavour. The Occupational Digest continues this spirit of reporting what matters, but keeps its sights firmly on what matters at work. This extends beyond academic findings to knowledge gathered through case studies and expert testimony. The purpose is to share evidence to help us understand work and make the most of it.

BPS Occupational Digest
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February 25, 2013
07:07 AM
191 views

Your boss's expectations shape your performance - but only if you trust them?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

The Pygmalion effect is the much-observed finding that a leader's high expectations for their subordinates, if clearly communicated and followed up by supporting behaviours, translate into higher achievements for those subordinates. The leader paints the possibility of another possible self that the subordinate could become - 'be all you can be' - if they apply themselves and follow the path. Thus inspired, the subordinate fixes themself on the new horizon, and with guidance, surpasses themself. The leader keeps the horizon visible, a function termed 'the maintenance of hope'. As you can see, the orthodox view of this is rather unidirectional - leader transmits, others receive. In a theoretical paper, Leonard Kararkowsky, Nadia DeGama and Kenneth McBey unpack how the subordinate is likely to be a crucial factor in this effect: for them, it all comes down to trust.Trust involves at its base a willingness to be vulnerable and put yourself in anothers hands, believing they will not let you down. Clearly the Pygmalion effect involves risk, as it calls for individuals to abandon old behaviours and strive for something currently beyond them. So it's reasonable to believe trust plays a part. Just how might it do so?Firstly, the authors note that for trust to occur, the individual has to believe that the trustee has the ability to deliver. This is a cool, cognitive component of trust. Does this leader have the nous to get me from the present to the new possibility? And even before this, do I believe they possess good enough judgment to spot talent? If this trust is present, then the manager's high expectations can raise the subordinate's self-expectations, and with it self-efficacy and motivation to perform.Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. So trust also relates to beliefs about a person's integrity: how reliable they are, whether their words meet their actions. Coupled with this is an even more important factor: benevolence. While integrity and capability are concerns to coolly appraise, benevolence involves emotional feelings of loyalty and attachment, the sens that this individual cares for you and will go beyond obligations to see you right. When leader Pygmalion behaviours - goal setting, feedback, advice - are viewed through the prism of integrity and benevolence, the subordinate can view them as one side of a social contract, where the leader is delivering effort (integrity) for the subordinate's good (benevolence). This calls for reciprocity from the subordinate, in the form of renewed efforts and changes in their own behaviour.Karakowsky and colleagues note that the effect has been most deeply researched in educational and military settings - settings where respect for the other's authority and integrity is taken for granted. The military setting in particular is heavily masculine, which may explain why the research often fails to find the effect with female leaders, who may be perceived through social stereotyping as less capable due to misfit to masculine activities. The authors conclude that for Pygmalion to be fully understood, we need to understand the influence of trust and the active role that subordinates need to take for change to occur.Karakowsky, L., DeGama, N., & McBey, K. (2012). Facilitating the Pygmalion effect: The overlooked role of subordinate perceptions of the leader Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (4), 579-599 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02056.xFurther reading: White, S. S., & Locke, E. A. (2000). Problems with the Pygmalion effect and some proposed solutions. The Leadership Quarterly, 11, 389–415. DOI: 10.1016/S1048-9843(00)00046-1 ... Read more »

Karakowsky, L., DeGama, N., & McBey, K. (2012) Facilitating the Pygmalion effect: The overlooked role of subordinate perceptions of the leader. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(4), 579-599. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02056.x

February 22, 2013
06:44 AM
127 views

Can more cognitive ability be a liability?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

If you want to predict performance at work, you're hopefully aware of the long-investigated benefits that cognitive ability provide in many types of occupation. So hearing about apparently contradictory psychology studies in domains such as 'success under stress' where 'less is more', you're curious. Can cognitive ability - intelligence, roughly told - undermine task performance, or learning adaptability? A critical review by Oswalt and Beier argues that we needn't rewrite our assumptions just yet.There are differing explanations for why ability could be a liability, all homing in on higher attentional control (through for instance high working memory capacity) biasing one towards highly conscious 'controlled processing', looking for perfect solutions when more automatic processing or loose heuristics do the job better, or at least protect you from falling into debilitating anxiety. If so, we could - we should - favour low-cognitive ability applicants for roles involving the kinds of tasks that show such effects. X and Y draw out three research areas that claim such effects, taking the position that the exceptional findings can be resolved by appraising the complexity of the tasks themselves.First, 'pressure to perform' research asserts that when attempting difficult tasks, high cognitive ability individuals are more sensitive to pressures such as financial incentives or being observed, and their performance suffers accordingly. This is often construed as lower-ability individuals being more 'adaptable' to pressure. Beier and Oswalt firstly point out that in these studies the performance drop still leaves high-ability individuals doing better than their counterparts, just by a smaller margin than before. They go on to offer another account: under normal conditions, high-ability people do indeed tackle difficult tasks by bringing their attentional resources to bear, which pays off in superior performance. When pressure arises, which can indeed mess with highly conscious strategies, they rely more on the blunt, guessy, heuristic approach which low-ability people were using all along. Under this account, then, higher cognitive ability are *more* adaptable under pressure, changing up their strategies and still coming out top.A study by DeCaro et al used a procedural learning paradigm where you must figure out the hidden rules to categorise images flashed on screen, varying in colour, shape, number and background. They showed that for simple rules high cognitive ability individuals learned faster, but the situation reversed when the rules were highly complex. Then, low-ability individuals are hypothesised to thrive by going with gut or employing kludgy strategies such as memorising individual successes rather than attempting to generalise to rules. But Beier and Oswalt suggest two problems concerning the goal of the task. The dependent measure of Task-Mastery was based on how long it took a participant to make a run of eight correct responses. But why not five? Or 15? A followup study showed that using 16-trial runs as your criteria, the ability liability disappeared. Perhaps more importantly, the goal was not explicit for participants. If it were, high-ability individuals might have exercised judgment as to whether to bother investing in solving the algorithm, or go for more imperfect tactics, as the reviews believe occurs in pressure to perform situations.Finally, researchers investigating 'adaptive performance' have suggested that when learning a complex task, such as tank-battle simulations - a sudden change in the task demands (a massive terrain shift) is harder to stomach for those of higher cognitive ability, who experience a larger drop in performance at the point where we leave the familiar old world and bravely enter a new one. Again, this is marshalled as evidence of lack of flexibility due to commitment to one strategy. In this particular study, the authors' analysis suggests that higher-ability people are not learning at a faster rate than their counterparts (presumably they begin with a higher capability, given that just as in the Pressure to Perform literature they do perform better overall than their counterparts). But through some simple modelling Beier and Oswalt demonstrate that this is hard to believe, as it suggests that in a complex situation with constantly changing demands - hundreds of brave new worlds - higher ability people would get worse and worse with respect to those with less ability, which is a radical claim. Instead, they suggest that the parallel learning rates are due to the analysis approach used, and that in truth the finding is more intuitive: higher ability means you learn a situation more quickly, and thus have more to lose at the moment where the conditions are altered. This line of research line will continue, as we seek to better understand how performance is influenced by a range of interlocking factors. For now, Beier and Oswalt conclude that their review "is strongly aligned with one of the most consistent findings in over a century of psychological research: Cognitive ability exerts a main effect such that the smarter you are, the better you will perform on just about any complex task, all else being equal."Beier, M., & Oswald, F. (2012). Is cognitive ability a liability? A critique and future research agenda on skilled performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 18 (4), 331-345 DOI: 10.1037/a0030869Further reading: Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262–274.doi:10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262... Read more »

Beier, M., & Oswald, F. (2012) Is cognitive ability a liability? A critique and future research agenda on skilled performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 18(4), 331-345. DOI: 10.1037/a0030869

February 19, 2013
05:45 AM
217 views

Toxic Emotional Experiences: What they are, How they affect us, How to avoid them

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

When does experiencing negative emotions lead to longer-lasting consequences, for our mental health, our attitude toward work, or our performance? Negative emotions themselves tend to be short-lived, such as the flash of hot anger during a fruitless phone call with your would-be internet provider. These moments in themselves needn't necessarily wear us down; in fact, they can be galvanising, such as anger generated from a sense of injustice. Researchers Tina Kiefer and Laurie Barclay propose that for lasting harm to occur, discrete negative events need to happen against a wider backdrop, to which every event contributes and by which every event is given weight. These backdrops they describe as 'toxic emotional experiences' (TEEs).Kiefer and Barclay explored this concept within a pool of 876 participants recruited online, asking them to anonymously rate their own performance, attitude toward the organisation (in terms of trust, perceived organisational support, and affective commitment, the feeling of belonging), and psychological health. These outcome measures were predicted using negative emotions such as angry or anxious, and as a second component of their model, features that are seen as defining of a TEE. This was based on items describing three features: whether emotional experiences were recurring, draining, and encouraged disconnection from others.Structural Equational Modelling was used to ask whether and how the TEEs mediated the impact of negative emotions on the outcome measures. Within the data, various effects were found: performance was influenced by levels of disconnection and recurrence, psychological health by recurrence and draining, and attitude to organisation by recurrence. Total TEE also influenced each outcome.In a second study, Kiefer and Barclay looked at helping behaviours, such as contributing ideas or sharing workload, within 136 individuals from within a single organisation. Contrary to predictions, higher incidence of negative emotions produced more helping behaviours, rather than less. It's possible this is an artefact of certain teams in high pressure, crisis situations, experiencing more negative emotions during a time when they were required to work more closely together. However, TEEs, particularly the recurring component, moderated the effect by making helping behaviours less likely. This study shows that not only are TEEs distinct from raw negative emotional events, the two can pull apart in different directions.Recurring appeared to be a particularly important component of TEEs. You can see it as the chip, chipping away of resolve due to the sense that problems are continuing without a clear end. This study reinforces the importance of addressing persistent low-level negative issues, as their effects seem to be insidious - a kind of No Broken Windows effect for the emotional workplace, perhaps?Kiefer, T., & Barclay, L. (2012). Understanding the mediating role of toxic emotional experiences in the relationship between negative emotions and adverse outcomes Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (4), 600-625 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02055.xFurther reading:Lee, K., & Allen, N. J. (2002). Organizational citizenship behavior and workplace deviance: The role of affect and cognitions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 131–142. DOI:10.1037/0021-9010.87.1.131 ... Read more »

Kiefer, T., & Barclay, L. (2012) Understanding the mediating role of toxic emotional experiences in the relationship between negative emotions and adverse outcomes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(4), 600-625. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02055.x

February 12, 2013
06:08 AM
221 views

Do test cheats matter if you test enough people?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Over the past decade, the cheapness and convenience of online testing has seen its usage grow tremendously. Its critics raise the openings it makes for cheaters, who might take a test many times under different identities, conspire with past users to identify answers, or even employ a proxy candidate with superior levels of the desired trait. Its defenders point to countertactics, from data forensics to follow-up tests taken in person. But the statistical models employed by researchers Richard Landers and Paul Sackett suggest that in recruitment situations, the loss of validity due to online cheating can be recovered simply due to the greater numbers of applicants able to take the test.Landers and Sackett point out that test administrators normally intend to select a certain volume of candidates through testing, such as the ten final interviewees. The accessibility factor of online testing could allow you to grow your candidate pool, say from 20 to 50. Considering these numbers, its possible to now select those that scored better than 80% of the other candidates, rather than merely those in the top half. And if some of your candidates cheat, oomphing their scores to the 82nd percentile when they only deserve the 62nd, that's still a better calibre than the 50-or-better you would have been prepared to accept from your smaller face-to-face pool.Landers and Sackett moved from these first principles to modelling out some realistic large data sets containing a range of true ability scores. They considered sets where cheating gave a small (.5 SD improvement) or large (1 SD) bonus to your test score; against this was another factor, how much your natural ability influenced your likely to cheat, from no relationship, r=0, into increasingly strong negative relationships, from -.25 to -.75, modelling the idea that weaker performers are more likely to cheat. And finally, they varied the prevalence of cheating in increments from zero up to 100%.The researchers ran simulations in each data set by picking a random subset - the 'candidate pool' - and selecting the half of the pool with better test scores. In the totally honest datasets, the mean genuine ability score of selected candidates was .24. but that value was lower for sets that contained cheaters, as some individuals passed without deserving it. Landers and Sackett then added more candidates into each pool, allowing pickier selection, and reran the process to see what true abilities were obtained. In many data sets the loss of validity due to cheating was easily compensated by growth of applicant pool. For instance, if cheating has only a modest effect and is only mildly related to test ability (r= -.25) then doubling the applicant pool yields you genuine scores of .24 even when 70% of candidates are cheating, and higher scores when the cheaters are fewer in number, such as .31 for 30% cheaters.Great...but wait. there are two important take-aways relating to fairness. It's true that if we're getting .31 averages instead of .24, our selected candidates should be more job-capable, even some of those who did cheat, and that's a win for whoever's hiring. But in the process we've rejected people who by rights deserved to go through. Essentially, this is a form of test error, and so not a uniquely terrible problem, but it's one we shouldn't become complacent about just because the numbers are in the organisation's favour.Secondly, and as anyone trained in psychometric use will be aware, increasing selection ratios from top 50% to top 25% is no casual prerequisite. Best practice is that without evidence, such as an inhouse validity study, cut-offs on a single test should be capped at the 40th percentile, meaning you pass 60% of candidates. In particular, raising thresholds can have adverse impact on minority groups, on whom many tests still show differentials (although these are closing over time). As minorities tend to make up a minority of any given applicant pool, such differentials can easily squeeze the diversity out of the process before you even get a chance to sit down with candidates and see what they have to offer in a rounded fashion.Nevertheless, this paper brings a fresh angle to the issue of test security.Landers, R., & Sackett, P. (2012). Offsetting Performance Losses Due to Cheating in Unproctored Internet-based Testing by Increasing the Applicant Pool International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20 (2), 220-228 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00594.xFurther reading:Tippins, N. T. (2009). Internet alternatives to traditional proctored testing: Where are we now? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2, 2–10.... Read more »

Landers, R., & Sackett, P. (2012) Offsetting Performance Losses Due to Cheating in Unproctored Internet-based Testing by Increasing the Applicant Pool. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20(2), 220-228. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00594.x

February 8, 2013
09:39 AM
215 views

Saving the world through psychology

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Can Occupational Psychology play a part in saving the world? Absolutely, insisted Prof Stuart Carr in his keynote presentation at the DOP conference. After all, work is deeply woven into the world, so transforming one can influence the other. Carr brought this home through examples of the United Nation's 2015 Millennial Development Goals, which include reduction of poverty, which manifests in the wages that workers derive; education, which depends on the capability of teachers and other staff; and gender equality, which can be combated in the workplaces in which we spend much of our waking hours. This exemplifies a humanitarian approach to work psychology, ensuring decent work for all workers and ensuring that the work they do meets responsibilities towards multiple stakeholders, rather than the bottom line. Carr provided some examples of how he and collaborators are making inroads into this, for instance by organising a Global Special Issue on Psychology and Poverty reduction that spanned multiple journals, raising awareness of how psychology can point at these issues.Carr also raised another way to use psychology to improve the world: by applying it directly to the conditions of those involved in Humanitarian Work. These roles can involve risk and be demanding, so it would be useful to investigate this and take steps to foster well-being. And any way to improve the impact of the humanitarian work itself would obviously be beneficial. Carr reported on the creation of online networks such as Humanitarian Work Psychology that connect researchers, students and those on the ground, who are commonly isolated, to allow them to share knowledge and put it to work on actual problems.So we can change the world through 'Humanitarian' Work Psychology to make conditions of work decent everywhere, coupled with 'Humanitarian Work' Psychology that focuses attention on those aspiring to be levers of change in the world. Further examples abounded in the presentation, including a global task force to address pay disparities in humanitarian work: the dual pay levels for foreign and national staff causing distancing of the two groups due to negative appraisals - the former rationalising the latter's low pay as reflecting their capability, the latter becoming demotivated and distrustful of the attitude of the foreigners, causing a vicious cycle.There is much more to do, and the keynote was a call to arms to the profession as a whole. As Carr reminded us, much occupational psychology work developed in the Peace Corps in the 1960s and following, and only later became concentrated in focus on the for-profit sector. A shift is possible and long overdue. Carr likened this to a Koru, the fern frond native to many countries including his home in New Zealand, whose spiral shape suggests a return to beginnings, and whose swift unfurling denotes the possibility of change.Carr, S., McWha, I., MacLachlan, M., & Furnham, A. (2010). International–local remuneration differences across six countries: Do they undermine poverty reduction work? International Journal of Psychology, 45 (5), 321-340 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2010.491990... Read more »

Carr, S., McWha, I., MacLachlan, M., & Furnham, A. (2010) International–local remuneration differences across six countries: Do they undermine poverty reduction work?. International Journal of Psychology, 45(5), 321-340. DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2010.491990

February 5, 2013
05:56 AM
199 views

What's the evidence for coaching?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Extending the conversation about evidence in psychology, the DOP conference held several sessions looking at this exactly this issue as it pertains to an area close to the occupational domain: coaching.A discussion session led by Rob Briner asked the simple question: does executive coaching work? As a whole, the field contains many claims about its effects, which Briner demonstrated using choice quotes taken from public websites. Coaching can apparently make you more effective at work, help you lead your team better, help resolve interpersonal tensions, uncover strengths and help overcome weaknesses. Yet, as became clear during this workshop, very few practitioners have the evidence at their fingertips to support such claims. And as we will see, this is because such evidence is scant.Another challenge to a truly evidence-based coaching is that coaching enterprises are often entered into without a clear definition of what success would look like. When the problem is extremely ill-defined, applying a 'treatment' (in the scientific sense) and then seizing on any changes as proof of this treatment being effective is problematic. That said, Briner made it clear that evidence-based does not mean 'randomised control trial or nothing', and outlined four types of evidence that matter:Practitioner experienceLocal contextEvaluation of researchOpinions of those affectedThere is value to all of these, and in some situations (for example when dealing with new approaches or revisions to these) it isn't reasonable to expect an activity to have peer-reviewed data behind it. But coaching is hardly new, so we should be moving to a position where the core claims are in some way validated.The subsequent day's symposium on evidence in coaching was therefore well-timed. Amongst some presentations of interesting but specific investigations, Yi-Ling Lai presented her PhD research comprising a systematic review of the evidence on coaching. As these reviews should - and we'll look at this more thoroughly in a future digest - it followed a highly systematic process to identify what should and shouldn't be included in this study. The danger with non-systematic reviews is that of cherry picking data to fit a narrative (intentionally or no), and this analysis avoided this issue, and presented what appears to be a reliable account of the current state of the field.The review was highly useful in understanding what practitioners felt mattered most in coaching relationships - factors such as emotional support and trust, and the overall quality of the coaching relationship, rather than merely the content of the coaching sessions, was believed to be key. However, if anything, the review underlined the fact that we are still missing an adequate amount of hypothesis-driven research on effects and outcomes, at least of the sort that would support the claims that are frequently made about coaching. In line with the consensus that the previous day's discussion led to, the take-away is to talk about and market coaching activities in a way that you feel you can defend, using the four forms of evidence and being honest about unknowns.The effect of coaching isn't understood in the way that aspirin is, nor is it likely to ever be. This isn't a problem, up until we make it one.Further reading:Grant, Anthony M;, Passmore, Jonathan;, Cavanagh, Michael J;, & Parker, Helen. (2010). The State of Play in Coaching Today: A Comprehensive Review of the Field International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology , 25, 125-167 DOI: 10.1002/9780470661628(direct pdf link available here)... Read more »

Grant, Anthony M;, Passmore, Jonathan;, Cavanagh, Michael J;, & Parker, Helen. (2010) The State of Play in Coaching Today: A Comprehensive Review of the Field . International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology , 125-167. DOI: 10.1002/9780470661628

January 31, 2013
09:20 AM
161 views

Finding the balance between work and home

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

(We're reporting from this month's Division of Occupational Psychology conference at the Digest. This post is by Dr Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist, and will also feature in that magazine's March issue. @jonmsutton / @psychmag)Who is responsible for work-life balance? The individual, the organisation, or even the legislative system? That was the question posed at the start of this symposium, and it became clear that ‘one size fits all’ policies and practices don’t exist: we must understand needs and wants in order to tailor solutions.First up was Dr Ellen Ernst Kossek (Purdue University, US), who identified the importance of feeling in psychological control of boundaries. Based on three validated measures of ‘cross role interruption behaviours’, ‘boundary control’ and ‘work-family identity centralities’, Kossek outlined different profiles. You’re either an ‘integrator’, or a ‘separator’, or you cycle between the two: a ‘volleyer’. Add in consideration of whether your well-being level is high or low and you end up with six styles, including the ‘fusion lovers’ who are happy to integrate work and family life, the ‘job warriors’ who volley away to their heart’s discontent, and ‘captives’ who are the separators with low well-being.The image of Winston Churchill in his pyjamas, as an early remote worker, cast a large shadow over the talk by Dr Christine Grant and colleagues from Coventry and Warwick Universities. Grant described her work to outline competencies related to the effective e-worker, and to develop an assessment tool. Organisations can provide training for existing and new e-workers, Dr Grant said, before leaving us with the thought that ‘a good manager is always a good manager; a bad manager is worse as an e-worker’.It’s one thing taking your work home with you when you’re an academic or editor, but another entirely when you’ve just been pulling a family out of some motorway wreckage. Dr Almuth McDowall (University of Surrey) looked at work-life balance self-management strategies in the police force, eliciting 134 behaviours from semi-structured interviews. Some were context-specific, for example in the police it’s actually very important not to take work home with your, as it is confidential and often intrusive material. McDowall highlighted the importance of communication and negotiation over work-life balance, and suggested that there is a separate competence for line managing work-life balance in others.Finally, Professor Gail Kinman (University of Bedfordshire) tackled a subject close to home for many: work-life conflict in UK academics. She noted that academics vary in the extent to which they wish their roles to be integrated, with many highly absorbed in the job role and most working considerably over the 48 hour working time directive. In Kinman’s survey of 760 academics in at least 99 universities, most academics weren’t getting the separation they wanted. Working at home and ICT use predicted work-life conflict. Kinman called for enhanced sensitivity to variation in boundary management styles and preferences amongst colleagues and supervisors, citing the example of sending e-mails at the weekend as potentially role modelling that behaviour for the recipient.Another interesting point to emerge from the symposium is that most measures of work-life balance are focused on the impact on families, despite the fact that it’s an issue for the single and childless as well.Further reading:Ernst Kossek, E., Lewis, S., & Hammer, L. (2009). Work--life initiatives and organizational change: Overcoming mixed messages to move from the margin to the mainstream Human Relations, 63 (1), 3-19 DOI: 10.1177/0018726709352385... Read more »

Ernst Kossek, E., Lewis, S., & Hammer, L. (2009) Work--life initiatives and organizational change: Overcoming mixed messages to move from the margin to the mainstream. Human Relations, 63(1), 3-19. DOI: 10.1177/0018726709352385

January 30, 2013
05:36 AM
124 views

Are organisations led by the limbic system?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

(We're reporting from this month's Division of Occupational Psychology conference at the Digest. This post is by Dr Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist, and will also feature in that magazine's March issue. @jonmsutton / @psychmag)According to keynote speaker Gerard Hodgkinson (Professor of Strategic Management and Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School), ‘Descartes’s error is alive and well in the workplace’. In a bold and wide-ranging address, Hodgkinson made the case for why and how occupational psychology needs to connect with the social neurosciences.Hodgkinson is bringing psychology into the field of strategic management, trying to help decision makers become more rational. Take how organisations tend to respond to a major threat or opportunity (HMV and Blockbuster come to mind as I write this). Usually there are small, incremental changes, and when it becomes apparent this isn’t sufficient, what does the organisation do? Nothing. There is a period of ‘strategic drift’. Then there is a period of ‘flux’, which on Hodgkinson’s graphic representation looks rather like a tailspin. This is followed by ‘phase 4’, ‘transformational change’ or ‘complete demise’.But to what extent can psychology shed light on this process? Hodgkinson’s 2002 book ‘The Competent Organization’ argued the case for the centrality of the psychological contribution to organisational learning and strategic adaptation, yet 11 years on, he said, there was still only a passing consideration of affective and non-conscious cognitive processes. Why do we continue to sidestep it?Using examples from his practice, Hodgkinson demonstrated how strategising is both an inherently cognitive and affective process. Eliciting a cognitive taxonomy from senior figures in a UK grocery firm, he found that although the market conditions had changed dramatically, mental models – individually and collectively – had not. Decision makers were slaves to their basic psychological processes, for example still focusing on the ‘magic number’ of ‘7 plus or minus 2’ competitors.Hodgkinson showed how he confronts strategic inertia in top management teams, stimulating individual cognitive processes by scenario analysis. Some organisations excel at this: Hodgkinson claims that Shell closed all their facilities within 45 minutes of 9/11. While others were still struggling to comprehend what was happening, their scenario planning had allowed them to take quick and decisive action.Hodgkinson’s latest research draws on social cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics to develop a series of counterintuitive insights. His hope is that these can teach people to be more skilled in their control of their emotional, limbic system. True rationality, he concluded, is the product of the analytical and experiential mind.Further reading:Hodgkinson, G., & Healey, M. (2008). Cognition in Organizations Annual Review of Psychology, 59 (1), 387-417 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093612Pdf freely available here.... Read more »

Hodgkinson, G., & Healey, M. (2008) Cognition in Organizations. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 387-417. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093612

January 21, 2013
09:06 AM
175 views

One personality to rule them all?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

(We're reporting from this month's Division of Occupational Psychology conference at the Digest. This post is from regular editor Alex Fradera, and the report will also feature in March issue of The Psychologist magazine.)Until recently I was pretty ignorant of the idea of a general factor of personality, a situation which undoubtedly hurt my psychology-nerd cred. I'm back on track now, thanks to an afternoon spent in Rob McIver's symposium on the matter.The general factor of personality, or GFP, is analoguous to g, the intelligence quotient that predicts to differing degrees the multiple intelligences - verbal, musical, numerical -that sit below it. (The symposium reminded us that whereas Spearman posited g in the 1900s, and Thurstone the differential intelligence model in the twenties, it took until the 1950s for Phillip Vernon to reconcile the models).While practitioners who use personality emphasise its differential qualities - many facets, no one right profile - the academics who advocate GFP say that on the contrary, there is such a thing as having lots of personality, and that this global factor is meaningful, predicting a range of life outcomes. Critics say this may be down to statistical artefacts, such as an individual's desire for social desirability influencing all their questionnaire responses. So this symposium took us into the science, and particularly what it means for practitioners.The first session, given by Rainer Kurz of Saville Consulting, was the most technical in focus, introducing a way to get a GFP simply by summing raw scores on each Big Five personality measure. It's an intuitive approach that in his dataset of 308 mixed roles proved as valid in predicting job performance as the standard approach (extracting the 'first unrotated principle component') while avoiding some fiddly statistical issues. However, the GFP was not comprehensive, as after partialling out its variance he found significant influences of personality subcomponents remained, notably assertiveness and achievement. This suggests the add-up method doesn't quite account for their influence. He concluded that this was a promising recipe but the approach will take refining.His colleague Rob McIver chose to put aside notions of 'the ideal GFP' to explore total personality scores that predict success on a particular capability-set - in most cases, a job. Rather than relying just on factor extraction or the add-it-all-up approach, this starts by developing and shaping tests to pre-fit the criterion you care about.McIver's data drew on external raters who had judged various facets of workplace effectiveness for the same individuals described by Kurz in his earlier presentation. The individuals had also completed seven different personality tests, and McIver explained how he generated a total personality score for each one using a criterion approach: personality dimensions were mapped onto effectiveness based on logic and previously reported relationships, meaning some dimensions were weighted heavily and others not at all if judged irrelevant to effectiveness. McIver showed how their own questionnaire, developed from the ground up around these effectiveness factors, produced the most powerfully predictive total scores, with an r up to .32.McIver went further, producing a personality super-score for each participant by totalling all seven tests together. Would it work, given that many of these questionnaires were not developed with this effectiveness framework in mind? It turns out that united they stand, pretty well, with a validity of .27, thanks in some part to the criterion-based pruning and weighing. McIver concluded that this approach may be more profitable than searching for one true GFP.Between these two talks Rob Bailey of OPP took the floor to question whether, in any case, true GFPs could truly be useful for practitioners. He points out that the literature tends to describe the general factor as reflecting people who are relaxed, sociable, emotionally intelligent, satisfied with life, and altruistic - and that a low score means the opposite of these things. He challenged the symposium to imagine cases where such information could be provided to an individual in any constructive fashion, compared to the conventional profiling approach.Bailey then went to the data, in this case taken from over 1,200 individuals paid to complete a 16-factor personality questionnaire, the absence of career implications giving them little incentive to 'fake nice' and apply spin to their results. His component analysis suggested the personality data could reduce to two factors, not fewer, and he showed how opting to use the dual factors rather than the 16 original ones weakened the ability to predict variables such as job satisfaction, dropping coverage from 9.3% of the variance to 7.5%.He concluded that granularity, not fat factors, may be a better bet for predictive power, and also cautioned that the differences he finds (no single factor, more value in the parts than a whole) may result from using a personality measure that isn't built to the specifications of the Big Five, and that in fact dependence on that model may be under-valuing the diversity, and thus relevance, of personality itself.When the dust settled, the questions remained, but the issue of the GFP will undoubtedly be one we will revisit.Further reading:van der Linden, D., te Nijenhuis, J., & Bakker, A. (2010). The General Factor of Personality: A meta-analysis of Big Five intercorrelations and a criterion-related validity study Journal of Research in Personality, 44 (3), 315-327 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.03.003... Read more »

van der Linden, D., te Nijenhuis, J., & Bakker, A. (2010) The General Factor of Personality: A meta-analysis of Big Five intercorrelations and a criterion-related validity study. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(3), 315-327. DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.03.003

January 18, 2013
10:06 AM
200 views

The dark side of behaviour at work

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

The face that launched a thousand peer-reviewed journal articles beamed down from the stage as self-confessed ‘well adjusted workaholic’ Professor Adrian Furnham (University College London) began his keynote. Quips were in ready supply, but Furnham is much more than a crowd pleaser: this was a talk steeped in history and theory.According to Furnham, there are 70,000 books in the British Library with leadership in the title. But most leaders don’t succeed, they fail, with a base rate of bad leadership collated from various studies of 50 per cent. This is due to incompetence (not having enough of something, or being promoted beyond the job they are good at), or derailment (having too much of a characteristic, such as self-confidence, or creative quirkiness). It’s this later problem that Furnham focused on, identifying three root causes: troubled relationships, a defective or unstable sense of self; and ineffective responses to change.Furnham highlighted three fundamental issues. Firstly, organisations ‘select in’, for the traits they think will help an employee be a success, rather than ‘selecting out’ for what is going to cause problems. Secondly, it’s assumed that competencies are linearly related to success. And thirdly, employers fail to see the dark side of bright side traits and the bright side of dark side traits. For example, what if a self-confident leader pursues a risky course of action built on overly optimistic assumptions?How do we characterise what makes a leader destructive? Furnham feels that the early ‘trait’ approach to leadership failed because ‘the list of traits grew remorselessly, leading to confusion, dispute and little insight’. Trait theory also ignored the role of both subordinates and situational factors. This oversight was rectified in the work of Tim Judge – who Furnham called ‘the best living occupational psychologist’ (see Digest coverage here)– which showed the ‘toxic triangle’ of destructive leaders, susceptible followers and conducive environments. The influence of the model was clear in Furnham’s own consideration of the ‘Icarus syndrome’. High flyers fall through poor selection, flawed personality, no or poor role models, and because they are rewarded for toxicity in the organisation.Furnham then cantered through some typical personality disorder problems in plain English: arrogance, melodrama, volatility, eccentricity, perfectionism etc. I was struck by the simple, neo-psychoanalytic conception of Karen Horney from 1950: people move away from others, towards them or against them (something covered recently). Furnham outlined some just published research on the differences between private and public sector dark side traits, with private sector more likely to move against others through manipulation or creating dramas whereas public sector managers were more likely to show moving away traits such as withdrawal, doubt, or cynicism.A series of his own studies, generally with huge samples, elucidated sex differences in dark side traits and their relationships with career choice and success. From all this, Furnham distilled some key implications for selection and recruitment. Consider using ‘dark side’ measures; beware excessive self-confidence and charm; do a proper bio-data and reference check; and get an expert to ‘select out’ for you. As for management, the message was to beware fast-tracking wunderkinds, and to seek a mentor, coach or at least a very stable deputy to keep these individuals on the rails.‘Just as a good leader can do wonders for any group, organisation or country,’ Furnham concluded, ‘a bad one can lead to doom and destruction. Understanding and developing great leaders is one of the most important things we can do in any organisation.’Furnham, A., Hyde, G., & Trickey, G. (2013). Do your Dark Side Traits Fit? Dysfunctional Personalities in Different Work Sectors Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1111/apps.12002... Read more »

Furnham, A., Hyde, G., & Trickey, G. (2013) Do your Dark Side Traits Fit? Dysfunctional Personalities in Different Work Sectors. Applied Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/apps.12002

January 8, 2013
04:52 AM
200 views

Psychopathic traits won't give an edge to entrepreneurs

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Most people in business would agree that the dog-eat-dog mentality most celebrated in the 1980s has passed its high water mark, giving ground to cultures that value collaboration and mutual benefit. Yet shows such as The Apprentice still depict ruthlessness and uncompromising nature as the hallmark of the business success, and fictional characters from Gordon Gecko to Patrick Bateman further the idea that value-creators are a little psychopathic. Investigation of the 'dark-side' traits of leadership has started to focus on this notion: a recent report describes ongoing research suggesting these traits are present in start-up entrepreneurs, and may even be helpful to their success. This matters if it were so, and a London-based team of Reece Akhtar, Gorkan Ahmetoglu, and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic have just published research into this issue, canvassing 435 individuals through an online survey.The research looked at entrepreneurialism both as a personal trait, using the Measure of Entrepreneurial Tendencies and Abilities (META), and in terms of involvement in entrepreneurial activities. In this study, this was defined widely to include achievements and activities that relate to the researchers core definition of entrepreneurialism: innovation, value creation, and taking opportunities. So success included not only selling ideas and inventing products, but organising events and helping create social institutions.Participants also responded to Levenson's self-report scale on psychopathic tendencies. The team predicted that different facets of psychopathy might mean different things for entrepreneurialism. Primary psychopathy involves narcissism, manipulation of others and low empathy, and was measured by agreement with items such as one beginning 'success is based on the survival of the fittest'. This was predicted to facilitate entrepreneurialism through competition and exploiting opportunities. Secondary psychopathy, meanwhile, involves lifestyle behaviours such as impulsivity or parasitic dependence, and anti-social behaviour such as criminal activity and recidivism. Given how these traits look likely to create more problems than they solve and alienate others in the process, they were predicted to actually impede entrepreneurial activities.Akhtar and his colleagues built a statistical model of the data (including demographics and other basic controls) to determine what factors mattered when others were taken into account. META had a strong relationship of .72 with the overall entrepreneurial activity of the individual. Secondary psychopathy turned out to have no significant relationships to entrepreneurial traits (META) or activities. Meanwhile, primary psychopathy - that Darwinian 'me-first' mentality - was moderately linked to META ratings. But once META was taken into account, primary psychopathy had little bearing on whether an individual had entrepreneurial achievements or activities. The only exception that was found was in one sub-domain - building and benefiting society - and this relationship was negative, which is in this case makes intuitive sense.This study suggests that for a broad definition of entrepreneurialism, the perception that psychopathic traits are needed is a false one. It may be that they can occur alongside other more pertinent traits, but their quintessentially psychopathic elements don't make for a better entrepreneur: they can even undermine their effectiveness. It may yet be true that entrepreneurs value getting ahead over getting along, but far from fetishising these dark-side traits, we should treat them with appropriate caution. Apprentice-makers, take note.Akhtar, R., Ahmetoglu, G., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2013). Greed is good? Assessing the relationship between entrepreneurship and subclinical psychopathy Personality and Individual Differences, 54 (3), 420-425 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.10.013... Read more »

Akhtar, R., Ahmetoglu, G., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2013) Greed is good? Assessing the relationship between entrepreneurship and subclinical psychopathy. Personality and Individual Differences, 54(3), 420-425. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.10.013

November 30, 2012
11:11 AM
288 views

Intention to leave job driven by partner's perception of how work disrupts home life

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

We know that levels of work-family conflict can cross-over from an employee to their partner, loading them with their share of the stressors produced by such tension. Now new research shows how employee attitudes to work are influenced by cross-over from the other direction: their partner's perception of how much work is getting in the way of family life.A team led by Marla Baskerville Watkins approached individuals in a large sample of US government agency workers to identify those who were willing to be involved alongside their partner. 102 couples completed the data collection which consisted of two phases: the first collected demographic data from the employee and asked each partner to rate the amount of disruption that the employee's work posed to family life. The second phase one month later asked the employee how they perceived their own levels of work-family conflict, and additionally the degree to which they were looking for another job.Employees were more likely to be engaged in a job search when their partners had higher perception of work-family conflict, even after controlling for the employee's own perceptions. I may feel the late hours and weekend work is reasonable, but if my other half doesn't, I may find myself looking for other options. Baskerville Watkins and team remind us that many organisations already recognise the importance of engaging with their employees' partners in a specific context: expatriation to an unfamiliar country. But they suggest that it may be more worth more broadly for organisations 'to consider family members in employer retention endeavours.'Baskerville Watkins, M., Ren, R., Boswell, W., Umphress, E., Triana, M., & Zardkoohi, A. (2012). Your work is interfering with our life! The influence of a significant other on employee job search activity Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (3), 531-538 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02050.x... Read more »

Baskerville Watkins, M., Ren, R., Boswell, W., Umphress, E., Triana, M., & Zardkoohi, A. (2012) Your work is interfering with our life! The influence of a significant other on employee job search activity. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(3), 531-538. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02050.x

November 26, 2012
11:22 AM
222 views

Adjustment to a new role is influenced by how your supervisor makes you feel

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Before every great employee, there was a new employee. Getting newcomers up to speed is crucial for organisations, so it's useful to know how this is supported or disrupted. Competing models suggest the supervisor as the decisive factor in onboarding, or that newcomers themselves are the crucial agent. A new article focuses on the interplay between the two: how a supervisor makes you feel shapes your behaviours that can make or break those early days.Suhsil Nifadkar, Anne Tsui and Blake Ashforth conducted their survey-based research within the IT sector in India, where growth at around 30% and high turnover means a lot of newcomers and high stakes for their rapid adjustment. Being 'new' can mean different things in different jobs, so the team consulted with HR representatives in the industry to agree on a boundary of the first three months of employment. New starters across a range of companies were contacted and those enlisted sent a survey at the end of their first month, asking about how their supervisor treated them, in terms of levels of support and amount of verbal aggression. Two weeks later respondents were asked to complete a second survey asking how they currently felt about the supervisor, both in terms of positive affect, with items like 'I feel glad to interact with my supervisor', and negative affect, such as 'I feel very tense around my supervisor'. Nifadkar and colleagues constructed their inventories based on Russell's influential circumplex model of emotion, which defines it in terms of valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and high to low arousal, and the team opted to measure positive and negative affect separately as people can experience ambivalence with 'mixed emotions' in response to experiences and individuals. They predicted that feelings towards a supervisor would be driven by how they have been treated in the past, and this was born out, with more support leading to more positive affect and more aggression to more negative affect.But what consequences do these feelings have? The research team were driven by the approach-avoidance model of emotion, in which emotions direct us towards one of two fundamentals of behaviour: moving towards or away from a target activity or individual. In a workplace environment, they hypothesised this could take two forms: the extent to which they proactively seek supervisor feedback to better understand the workplace, and the extent to which they avoid the supervisor when possible. These were measured in a survey two weeks further into the respondents' employment, analysis of which found positive affect led to more feedback behaviours and identified a particularly strong effect of negative affect upon avoidance behaviours. The consequences of these behaviours were measured in a final survey two weeks on, looking at in-role performance, amount of helping behaviours towards colleagues, and newcomer adjustment outcomes - a combination of social adjustment, understanding of tasks and clarity on their own role. Requesting more feedback was positively associated with performance and newcomer adjustment, and actively avoiding the supervisor was associated with worse performance and fewer helping behaviours.Organisations can invest substantially in onboarding schemes for new staff, recognising how much a bad start can cost them. As important as these are, this research suggests that the disposition of one individual - the supervisor - can be highly influential on outcomes. Supervisor behaviour triggers emotional responses, which are intended to be protective and adaptive but can lead to counterproductive behaviour, such as refraining from seeking help on a task beyond you because you were rebuked on an earlier occasion. Nifadkar and colleagues suggest that organisations could give more attention to the formative emotional experiences that their supervisors are bestowing on new staff, and even consider that the 'probation period' is really evaluating two people: the new hire and the person responsible for their early days.Nifadkar, S., Tsui, A., & Ashforth, B. (2012). The way you make me feel and behave: Supervisor-triggered newcomer affect and approach-avoidance behavior. Academy of Management Journal, 55 (5), 1146-1168 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0133... Read more »

Nifadkar, S., Tsui, A., & Ashforth, B. (2012) The way you make me feel and behave: Supervisor-triggered newcomer affect and approach-avoidance behavior. Academy of Management Journal, 55(5), 1146-1168. DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0133

November 20, 2012
07:31 AM
198 views

Applicants' voluntary experience is valued by recruiters

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Job applicants with experience in voluntary roles may be tempted to report this to their prospective employers. But how favourably do recruiters regard these sorts of experience? Christa Wilkin and Catherine Connelly investigated this in a group of professional recruiters, providing them with CVs (resumes) constructed to differ systematically in the types of experience reported. They suspected that other things being equal, work experience may be favoured more when it comes with a wage, as duration in a paid role implies you have met performance and behavioural standards, whereas voluntary positions tend to lack appraisals and focus more on participation (hours of involvement) than evaluating outcomes. Wilkin and Connelly also predicted that voluntary work would be subject to the same 'relevance' criteria as paid: if it didn't obviously supply skills, knowledge and experience that were pertinent to the targeted job, it wouldn't make them more attractive to the recruiter.The 135 participants each evaluated eight CVs with a target job in mind, rating each one on a seven point scale in terms of how qualified they seemed for the role. The work experience for four CVs was either entirely voluntary or entirely paid, and either clearly relevant or irrelevant. The other four CVs all had a mix of voluntary and paid work in various combinations (e.g., relevant voluntary and irrelevant paid work). In addition, each recruiter recorded how involved they had personally been in voluntary work, to test the hypothesis that first-hand experience may lead them to attribute more value to this kind of work.Comparison of voluntary and paid-work CVs showed that the recruiters had no significant preference for paid experience, but did favour relevant experience over irrelevant, regardless of type of employment. A recruiter's background of voluntary work had no influence on their ratings of applicants with voluntary experience. Finally, CVs with a mix of experience were rated more favourably than either pure voluntary or pure paid work. Wilkin and Connelly had predicted this, based on the idea that voluntary work can 'round-out' a career history by showing evidence of traits that may not be illuminated in paid opportunities to date, such as altruism, cooperation, and a work ethic. It provides evidence that a candidate may be a welcome presence, which is especially attractive when coupled with evidence that the candidate can also produce results in an appraised environment.This study paints an optimistic picture for candidates with volunteering backgrounds. Recruiters tend not to automatically deprecate these types of experiences: they simply care about how the experience is relevant to the application. Moreover, introducing volunteering work as a complement to paid experience can enhance prospects, this appears to be true even when the volunteering is less-relevant, as long as the paid work is relevant, despite the explicit positions of recruiters that this evidence is unlikely to sway their evaluation.Wilkin, C., & Connelly, C. (2012). Do I Look Like Someone Who Cares? Recruiters’ Ratings of Applicants’ Paid and Volunteer Experience International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20 (3), 308-318 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00602.x... Read more »

Wilkin, C., & Connelly, C. (2012) Do I Look Like Someone Who Cares? Recruiters’ Ratings of Applicants’ Paid and Volunteer Experience. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20(3), 308-318. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00602.x

November 16, 2012
09:43 AM
189 views

Can you be coached to better outcomes on a situational judgment test?

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

The Situational judgment test (SJT), which asks respondents to choose their preferred course of action in a workplace scenario, has become a popular way of assessing fit to attributes of a job or organisational culture. It's used by governments, military, polices forces, and for educational selection such as certification of GPs (medical General Practitioners). Like other popular techniques, it has spawned an industry that promises to help people pass them. Can coaching enhance performance on such a test?Filip Lievens and his team examined this in a real-world context - laboratory studies can lack the motivation to learn that drives coaching's benefits - in the form of August admissions to a Belgian medical school, where candidates take a battery of assessments including an SJT. A challenge is that candidates who seek coaching may differ from their counterparts in ways that could influence their eventual performance, independent of the effect of the coaching itself. Lievens' team addressed this through two routes. Firstly, they used a form of matching called propensity scoring, by which every coached candidate is matched against an uncoached one through deriving scores based on a range of individual factors, including demographic background, career aspirations, previous academic performance, and their tendency to prepare through other means, such as practice tests. Secondly, the team only included candidates who had previously failed the assessments in July, and had not engaged in any coaching prior to July. This meant that the July SJT performance could act as a pre-test measure of how candidates did before coaching was introduced. From a larger sample, Lieven's team ended up with 356 matched candidates that fit the stringent criteria.Merely examining the August performance, it appeared that coaching did have an effect: matched candidates scored an average of 1.5 points higher, with an effect size of around .3. But by comparing the difference scores of how much candidates improved between July and August, the team found that coached candidates improved by 2.5 points more than uncoached, for an effect size of around .5. This is because the candidates who decided to receive coaching on average had been weaker performers the first time around - possibly one reason they invested in assistance. This effect size is fairly large - a boost of half a standard deviation - especially compared to those for coaching in cognitive tests, which fall between .1-.15.SJTs are popular with candidates, being intuitive and overtly job-relevant. Employers are also fans: SJTs are strongly predictive of relevant job performance, with incremental value over and above that supplied by ability tests, and have less adverse impact, with demographic groups typically showing small average differences in performance. But this evidence suggests that their results can be influenced by coaching. Does the coaching result in an increase in the underlying ability? It may do, but programs tend to focus on 'teaching to the test' rather than broader ability, meaning results may be distorted. The researchers suggest this needs to be investigated, and that test developers explore different scoring techniques and broaden the attributes assessed by SJTs to make them difficult to exploit.Lievens, F., Buyse, T., Sackett, P., & Connelly, B. (2012). The Effects of Coaching on Situational Judgment Tests in High-stakes Selection International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20 (3), 272-282 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00599.x... Read more »

Lievens, F., Buyse, T., Sackett, P., & Connelly, B. (2012) The Effects of Coaching on Situational Judgment Tests in High-stakes Selection. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 20(3), 272-282. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2012.00599.x

November 13, 2012
06:27 AM
200 views

How organisations need to forget

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Should an organisation forget? Seems a strange idea, given how we prize information. But a recent study suggests that an eidetic memory may get in the way of a coherent, enduring identity.Researchers Michel Anteby and Virág Molnár studied the French aeronautics firm Snecma, founded by de Gaulle in 1945. It's preeminence in the field was seen as a national success, and Snecma cast itself as a quintessentially national company. Anteby and Molnár were interested in how this influenced how the company reported on and remembered times where it operated together with other nations. They investigated this through interviews with company retirees, and review archival material and the company bulletins, 347 in all, which acted as the formal voice and memory bank of the organisation.Snecma was involved in two major collaborations where its future course depended on foreign assistance. The first was just after WWII where the development of key engine technology was jump-started by a contingent of 120 German and Austrian engineers, leading to among other things the development of the ATAR engine. Yet amongst the 5,622 pages of bulletins describing these endeavours, only five made explicit mention of any German involvement. Another source stated that Snecma's management made a 'more or less conscious drive to "erase" the German presence responsible for the ATAR'. This continued well into the 1980s, where a speech at the retirement of an engineer saluted him as entering the company as a simple draftsman, when in fact he had trained as an engineer in Germany during the war.This was mirrored in the second instance of foreign assistance, a 1969 collaboration with General Electric to develop civilian engines. Just 0.3% of bulletin pages on GE-related activities made explicit reference to GE itself. Many of the retirees interviewed had worked closely with GE counterparts, often visiting the US to do so, and when probed could recall benefits of these collaborations such as access to technology that was superior and even remarkable, such as x-ray-like machines that allowed them to peer inside engines. But their natural habits of recounting their Snecma experience omitted these elements, focusing on their time within the country and referring to a key engine that resulted from this collaboration as a Snecma creation. It seems that even vivid direct experiences became discoloured and de-emphasised by a consistent organisational leaning towards remembering the national and forgetting the foreign.The result? In the minds of the retirees, the national quality of Snecma's identity endures. 'Snecma's success was France's success', quoth one. Just as the autobiographical narratives that shape individual human identity involve both focused attention and deliberate castings-away - so it seems that organisational identity endures through selective forgetting.Anteby, M., & Molnar, V. (2012). Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm's Rhetorical History Academy of Management Journal, 55 (3), 515-540 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0245... Read more »

Anteby, M., & Molnar, V. (2012) Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm's Rhetorical History. Academy of Management Journal, 55(3), 515-540. DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0245

November 8, 2012
10:22 AM
222 views

Driven away by hypocrisy: when endorsing a caring workplace backfires for leaders

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Interpersonal justice - treating others with care and respect - is something every organisation seeks to cultivate. Such a climate can lead to favourable team interactions, better customer service and higher employee engagement, and managers can play their part by communicating standards and the importance of such behaviour. But can an expectation for interpersonal justice backfire? What about when the manager demonstrates they have no interest in following it themselves? This question led Rebecca Greenbaum, Mary Mawritz and Ronald Piccolo to examine the impact when an act of managerial mistreatment is also seen as a hypocritical one.Hypocrisy has only recently garnered attention in the examination of 'dark-side' leadership behaviours. Also referred to as word-deed misalignment, it specifically denotes occasions where leaders espouse rules that they regularly break themselves - distinct from other types of immoral but at least consistent behaviours. According to Behavioural Integrity Theory, employees seek to predict and control future encounters with the leaders who hold power over them, so a hypocritical manager is a real issue, being hard to predict on the basis of their words.The team surveyed 312 participants from a range of industries, the questionnaire tackling how much each experienced supervisory undermining (if they 'Talk bad about you behind your back), Leader Hypocrisy ('I wish my supervisor would practice what he/she preached'), and Interpersonal Justice Expectation, such as the extent to which you are asked to 'treat people with respect'. The questionnaire also probed intention to leave the organisation, and collected control data on similar variables such as trust in your leader and psychological contract breach, meaning whether you felt that specific promises made to had been broken.After controlling for the other variables, higher levels of hypocrisy were associated with greater turnover intentions. Supervisor undermining was positively related to turnover, but close examination of the data revealed that this effect became significant only at a certain level of justice expectations. In other words, when employees didn't feel that their supervisor emphasised fair treatment, their own unfair treatment didn't reliably lead to greater intention to leave. This strongly suggests that hypocrisy is a driving factor here, the concern being less about the instances of undermining but the sense that the leader is hostile *and* unpredictable and therefore the employee has no control.As the authors conclude, 'the promise of interpersonal justice expectation adds insult to injury as subordinates realise that their leader's behaviour deviates from the dignified and respectful behaviour they promote.' Managers who espouse organisational behaviours they have no intention of keeping may end up chasing employees away quicker than if they made no secret of their severe treatment of others. From the employee point of view, if you're going to work with a devil, better one you know.Greenbaum, R., Mawritz, M., & Piccolo, R. (2012). When Leaders Fail to "Walk the Talk": Supervisor Undermining and Perceptions of Leader Hypocrisy Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312442386... Read more »

Greenbaum, R., Mawritz, M., & Piccolo, R. (2012) When Leaders Fail to "Walk the Talk": Supervisor Undermining and Perceptions of Leader Hypocrisy. Journal of Management. DOI: 10.1177/0149206312442386

October 29, 2012
11:41 AM
227 views

Ruminative thoughts deepen the long-term impact of workplace violence

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Experiencing workplace violence can have negative impacts far beyond the event itself. How do our own thoughts and cognitions influence this? And is there anything we can do about it? Karen Niven and colleagues from the universities of Manchester and Sheffield suspected that ruminative thoughts may be a problem. Rumination involves returning to a difficult memory or thought over and over without a clear goal-directed purpose. Its generalised nature means it obstructs solutions while maintaining the negative qualities of the thought in time, extending its impact. After an initial experimental study, demonstrating that rumination on simulated violence prevents our emotional state from returning to normal levels in the short term, the team took the effect out into the field. This study investigated whether trait rumination - our individual tendency to fall into ruminative thinking, would predict longer-term outcomes following actual workplace violence. The sample of 78 social workers were surveyed on their experiences of violence over the last six months on the job (only 23% had experienced no violence), as well as completing measures of current psychological wellbeing, health complaints, and trait rumination.Using regression analysis, the team found that individually both violence and rumination led to worsened physical and psychological health, but that violence didn't have an impact on wellbeing for those who tended not people to ruminate. In other words, rumination appeared to be a necessary condition for violence to cast a wider pall upon psychological health.Existing research warns of the hazards of suppressing our thoughts, which is psychologically involving and can lead to negative outcomes. However, once thinking starts to become ruminative, going over old ground again and again, then finding a means of distraction may be effective in reducing impact both immediately, and in the longer term. Regardless, we shouldn't forget that the onus is on the perpetrators of workplace violence to change their behaviours. Niven, K., Sprigg, C., Armitage, C., & Satchwell, A. (2012). Ruminative thinking exacerbates the negative effects of workplace violence Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02066.x ... Read more »

Niven, K., Sprigg, C., Armitage, C., & Satchwell, A. (2012) Ruminative thinking exacerbates the negative effects of workplace violence. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02066.x

October 18, 2012
09:54 AM
200 views

Sticking with self-employment: the traits that matter

by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest

Although I'm largely self-employed, life within an organisation is recent enough that I can recall some of its attractions: regulated income, conscientious support staff, nice equipment. Still, I'm happy as I am, having never once felt the inclination to pack it in and look for a job. Some of that owes to circumstance - and no little luck - but a recent piece of research suggests there may be important individual characteristics that differentiate those who persist in self-employment from those who leave it.The study, by Pankaj Patel and Sherry Thatcher, gathers data on a subset of people from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which collected waves of information on a cohort of people who left high school in 1957. Their employment history was coded to note moves into self-employment and the duration it lasted. This was used to model the influence of a number of individual variables, after controlling for a host of factors including income and prestige in jobs (which might unduly tempt individuals to stay in place), family precedents such as a self-employed parent, and so on.Patel and Thatcher were interested in the Big Five personality traits, as these have been shown to differentiate people in entrepreneurial roles, which form part of the self-employment population. The analysis suggested that individuals who are more emotionally stable are more likely to enter, and then to persist in, self-employment, as are those who are more open to experience. This pattern, similar to that found in entrepreneurs, is fairly intuitive: confidence and resilience in the first case, and flexibility and problem-solving curiosity in the second, are vital features of the jack-of-all-trades (and crises) that the self-employed need to be. However, while entrepreneurs are more likely to be extraverted, conscientious, and less agreeable (that is, less concerned about people's feelings), none of these factors influenced decisions to start or persist in self-employment.The team also predicted that aspects of psychological well-being - a set of beliefs about your place in the world - would also matter, specifically those utilitarian ones concerning how we can get ahead in the world. The verdict was mixed: Personal growth, the belief that you are able to learn and grow had no impact on self-employment. Meanwhile, those who believed they could master their environment were more drawn to self-employment but no more likely to persist in it. The only aspect that influenced both entering and persisting in self-employment was autonomy, the belief that independence was important to them. The study also found that individuals more likely to tenaciously persist with goals and re-frame negative obstacles to see them as still achievable were more likely to continue to go it alone.The self-employed, then, are marked out by individual qualities, but they don't map neatly onto the entrepreneur model. The study suggests that a sense of independence, curiosity and a tendency not to ruminate help people persevere in this kind of work, along with a goal-focused tenacity. But it seems the field is too diverse to demand extraversion, a highly systematic outlook, or a particular sensitivity to other people. Being your own boss comes in many shapes and sizes.Patel, P., & Thatcher, S. (2012). Sticking It Out: Individual Attributes and Persistence in Self-Employment Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312446643... Read more »

Patel, P., & Thatcher, S. (2012) Sticking It Out: Individual Attributes and Persistence in Self-Employment. Journal of Management. DOI: 10.1177/0149206312446643

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Alex Fradera

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