Category: the modern workforce

By: Keaton Fletcher

In a recent review accepted for publication in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Dr. Malissa Clark (Work Science Center Network Member) and colleagues provide a clearer understanding of the nature and role of empathy in the workplace. Empathy is a complex phenomenon with affective (e.g., experiencing others’ emotions), behavioral (e.g., demonstrating you share another’s internal state), and cognitive (e.g., understanding others’ thoughts) components. People can vary in their trait-levels of empathy, in other words, some people are more empathetic than others, but can also vary moment-to-moment in their empathic state (i.e., I’m more empathetic now than I was this morning).

Clark and colleagues suggest that the proposed link between empathy and improved job performance may be premature; that this relationship may not be as clear as once thought. Specifically, much of the literature confuses empathy (i.e., experiencing the same state as another individual) and sympathy (i.e., understanding, but not experiencing another’s state) sometimes capturing both. So we do not really know if more empathetic people actually are more likely to perform better, or go above and beyond for their colleagues and company. Research does, however, suggest that people view more empathetic individuals as better leaders. There is also promising initial evidence reviewed by Clark and colleagues that suggests empathy may be able to be manipulated. In the remainder of their manuscript, Clark and colleagues outline goals for future researchers on how to improve our understanding of empathy.

By: Catherine Liu

With advances in technology increasing, the need for rapid adaptation and adjustment, many companies, particularly those in the technology sector, have turned toward Agile as a potential solution. In a 2011 study of over 200 IT and business executives, it was found that Agile had a positive, significant correlation with firm performance.

Agile is a mindset developed for software development that emphasizes incremental delivery, team collaboration, and continuous planning and learning. As Agile development becomes relevant to nearly all aspects of the daily workings of companies and not just to areas focused on software development, it is important to understand the core values of Agile methodology. Agile was first developed in 2001 in the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto established principles that emphasize individuals and interactions over processes and tools, a working product over comprehensive documents, collaborating with customers rather than contract negotiation, and responding to change rather than following a structured plan. Agile was designed to boost the motivation and productivity of teams and to increase the quality and speed that the product is delivered to the market.

Agile focuses on continuous improvement and clear future plans that are malleable based on the situations that arise. Although Agile emphasizes being responsive to change, it does not mean that no planning should be done. Rather, it underscores the importance of continuous planning and revision throughout the project. By continuously planning for the future of the project, the team is able to adapt faster and learn from mistakes that have been made. Agile focuses on the Definition of Done, which is a list of criteria based on project goals which must be met before a section of a product is considered to be completed.

Specifically, Agile teams form when a project is presented. Teams consist of a lead who works on overall project management, team members who work on the technical aspects of the project, and a product owner who helps make a prioritized work item list. Agile projects cycle through a process of (1) reviewing requirements, (2) planning the next steps, (3) designing a the solution, (4) developing the solution, (5) releasing the product for testing , and (6) tracking and monitoring the product’s usage in order to find bugs to fix, before restarting the cycle and reviewing the new requirements of the project based on the bugs found. Lastly, Agile teams typically dissipate when the project is completed, and team members can join other teams.

Agile has been used successfully in companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and AT&T and is being adopted into companies that are less technology focused, such as McKinsey & Company. Agile methodologies can be applied to nearly all disciplines, not just to software development. In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, the application of Agile to multiple sectors such as marketing, human resources, and warehousing is discussed. Agile, when adapted properly, gives companies the ability to revolutionize their productivity, worker satisfaction, and product quality.

By Brian Hengesbaugh

Why aren’t there more women on corporate boards? Women constitute 47% of the labor force and 52% of management and professional positions (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). Yet women comprise just 21% of corporate board seats (Catalyst, 2018). 

This dearth of women on corporate boards exists despite what appear to be strong efforts to the contrary. In 2009, the Security and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) ruled that publicly traded companies need to disclose how diversity factors into the selection process for directors. Moreover, a pair of surveys in 2012 showed that 75% of U.S.-based publicly traded companies had instituted diversity policies, and 80% believed that diversity in the boardroom created shareholder value. It seems that diversity policies and the belief in the importance of diversity is not enough. 

A 2017 article, published by Catherine Tinsley and colleagues, explores the decision making factors that influence corporate board selection. Classic decision making indicates the use of a multi-attribute decision making model to: identify the selection criteria, weight each criterion based on relative importance, and select candidates based on performance against these weighted factors – a process known by I-O Psychologists as mechanical combination. However, these decision aids are infrequently used in practice. HR managers and head-hunters often believe that using their “gut instinct” produces better results. This preference for instinct over analytic tools increases with experience (Camerer and Johnson, 1991).

In the absence of external decision making aids, we regularly rely on rules, known as heuristics, to simplify complex decisions. These mental shortcuts often operate nonconsciously to ease the cognitive burden of a decision. Tinsley posits that the percentage of women on corporate boards may be slow to increase, despite the presence of positive attitudes towards gender diversity, due to the use of a gender-matching heuristic. 

Gender-matching refers to the propensity to match the gender of the incoming candidate to the gender of the board member being replaced. The results of the analysis of archival board data from 2002-2011 for more than 3,000 U.S.-based publicly traded firms showed that a woman is most likely to be selected to join a board when a woman has just left the position. On average, 12.8% of new board members are women. This number drops to 10% when replacing a man, and increases to 23% when replacing a woman – nearly doubling the rate at which women are selected (Tinsley, Wade, Main, & O’Reilly, 2016). 

While the propensity for gender-matching remained robust, Tinsley’s subsequent laboratory studies found that fewer than 10% of participants cited gender-matching as a criteria for board member selection. This indicates that the gender-matching heuristic is primarily operating outside of conscious awareness. 

Further laboratory studies by Tinsley and colleagues sought to understand “what works” to increase the representation of women on boards. These studies examined two factors: (1) highlighting the importance of gender diversity and (2) manipulating the gender composition of the candidate pool. Results showed that priming decision makers by highlighting the urgency of selecting a woman had little impact on improving gender diversity. However, there was a significant increase in the selection rate of women when the candidate pool was comprised of more women than men, suggesting a need to more actively recruit female applicants if gender-diversity is valued by an organization. 

Additional research is needed to explore the nonconscious mechanisms of the gender-replacement heuristic, as well as understand the factors that work to increase the selection of women to corporate boards. Practitioners should explore methods of increasing the female to male ratio of applicants by examining qualities of job ads, recruiters, or company culture that attract women applicants.

Key takeaways:
Women are underrepresented on corporate boards.
Women are most likely to be selected as a new board member when the board member being replaced is a woman.
Increasing the number of women in the candidate pool increases the rate at which women are selected.

References:

Camerer, C. F., & Johnson, E. J. (1991). The process-performance paradox in expert
judgment: How can experts know so much and predict so badly? In W. M. Goldstein & R. M. Hogarth (Eds.), Research on Judgment and Decision Making: Currents, Connections, and Controversies, pp. 342-364. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

Catalyst. (2018, October). Pyramid: Women in S&P 500 Companies. Accessed at 
https://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-sp-500-companies (October 2018)

Tinsley, C. H., Wade, J., Main, B. G. M., & O’Reilly, C. A. (2016). Gender Diversity on U.S. 
Corporate Boards: Are We Running in Place? ILR Review, 70 (1), 160-189

US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2017, April). Women in the labor force: 
a databook. Accessed at 
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2016/home.htm (October 2018).
 

By: Hannah Ramil

The Ethic of Care (EoC) rests upon the belief that “an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another, a perception of the need for response” (Gilligan, 1982). In essence, the EoC perspective emphasizes the importance of interpersonal relationships and the needs of others in moral reasoning and moral decision-making.

Previous studies have found that care and compassion in the workplace can enhance commitment to the organization (Lilius, Kanov, Dutton, Worline, & Maitlis, 2012), workplace self-esteem (McAllister & Bigley, 2002), and resilience (Waldman, Carmeli, & Halevi, 2011), and reduce work-based anxiety (Kahn, 2001). Building on these previous findings, Lawrence and Maitlis (2012) proposed the EoC as an underpinning for narrative practices in the workplace. They suggested that narrative story-telling of shared experiences, struggles, and possible futures amongst coworkers can be a vehicle for enacting care in the workplace. For example, when a work team debriefs about a recent performance episode, members can take this time to appreciate and acknowledge one another’s abilities and commitments. This practice can lead to group potency, a shared belief among team members in the general efficacy of the team as a whole (Guzzo, Yost, Campbell, & Shea, 1993; Lester, Meglino, & Korsgaard, 2002).

Carmeli and colleagues (2017) empirically examined the EoC perspective as a corporate culture. Corporate culture is “a set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization” (O’Reilly and Chatman, 1996, p. 166). These shared norms and values influence worker attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction and organizational identification) and behaviors (e.g,. task performance and counterproductive work behaviors). Their study focused on how corporate culture may influence workers’ likelihood of engaging in sustainability-related behaviors, such as prioritizing environmental concerns, choosing more sustainable alternatives for products, services, and practices, lobbying, activism, and encouraging sustainable behaviors throughout the company (Carmeli et al., 2017).

In their first study, they found that an organizational culture based on EoC increased employees’ satisfaction with the organization’s sustainability concerns and increased employee motivation to follow through with the organization’s sustainability values. This boosted employee involvement in sustainability-related behaviors. Their second study found that EoC was related to increased employee sustainability-related behaviors. Not only did EoC improve sustainability behaviors, but it also enhanced the employees’ identification with the organization.

For organizations hoping to increase sustainability efforts (e.g., WeWork’s new meatless initiative), establishing a corporate culture founded on an EoC may help employee adherence to initiatives.

By: Brian Hengesbaugh

How can we enhance goal setting and increase performance? Prime the mind with effort.

Priming is the process of using a stimulus to subconsciously activate stored knowledge and psychological processes. As an example, if you were to read the following sentence “The fire truck ran through the intersection, ignoring the stop sign” and then were asked to think of a color, any color, you would most likely think of red. At a neuronal and cognitive level, our minds hold networks of interconnected ideas, and activating one node in the network, primes the other nodes for activation. We can capitalize upon this to improve performance.

In an experiment conducted by Latham and colleagues, pictures of weightlifters lifting various weights were used as the stimulus to prime participants with different levels of effort for the upcoming task of pressing on a scale. Before performing the task, participants either saw a picture of a weightlifter lifting 20 lbs (easy goal), 200 lbs (moderate goal), or 400 lbs (difficult goal). The study found that participants who were primed with the picture of the weightlifter lifting 400 lbs (difficult goal) exerted more effort during the task than the participants who were primed with the moderate and easy goals. A following experiment by Latham, which used a brainstorming task, showed that participants primed with the difficult goal consciously chose to set more challenging goals for themselves and performed better than the participants primed with easier goals. 

What about using goal priming in the workplace? Shantz and Latham primed workers at a call center with a picture of a woman winning a race. Employee performance was then measured based on the amount of pledged donation dollars raised during the subsequent three-hour shift. When compared to the control group that did not receive a prime, the group of primed workers raised significantly more money than the control group. Latham and Piccolo, later showed that priming the call center workers with an image of three smiling individuals on headsets, improved performance above and beyond the general success prime.

More research is needed in order to thoroughly understand the subconscious processes of goal priming. Bargh’s automaticity model, which explains the relationship between primed goals and performance, has been criticized for a lack of theoretical framework describing the mechanisms that link the subconscious priming stimulus to behavioral changes. Latham and his colleagues look to fill this void with Goal Setting Theory – an explanation of the positive relationship between the difficulty of a consciously set goal and performance towards that goal, with factors such as effort, persistence, choice, strategy, and conscientiousness used to mediate the relationship. 

As research continues, two key takeaways remain: 
(1)    Effort levels can be primed
(2)    Increased effort leads to increased performance

By: Haleigh Streak

In the modern economy, with the rise of automation and gig work, employment gaps are common. These gaps may be voluntary (i.e. caretaking for new children or aging parents/grandparents, spouse relocation, etc.), or involuntary (i.e. downsizing and termination). No matter the nature, employment gaps signify considerable interruptions in career paths, and carry with them significant emotional strain. A recent article (Dust et al., 2018) published in Journal of Organizational Behavior provides compelling evidence for one factor that can help navigate the complications and stress associated with employment gaps: emotional intelligence.

The international research team (Scott Dust, Joseph Rode, Marne Arthaud-Day, Satoris Howes, & Aarti Ramaswami) examined employment quality following reemployment, in the forms of person-organization fit and person-job fit. The former entails alignment of employees’ personal values with the organization’s values, and the latter involves the pairing of employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities with the demands of their specific jobs. Results from the 10-year field study of 157 alumni of a large American Midwestern university suggest self-esteem can help explain the relationship between facilitation-based emotional intelligence and employment gaps. In other words, individuals who are especially able to harness information about their emotions to enhance their thinking tend to have higher self-esteem which may actually help reduce the length of an employment gap. 

Furthermore, the researchers found that the ability to distinguish between emotions and to understand their causes may protect individuals from the effects of employment gap length on subsequent person-job fit. In general, as a gap in employment lasts longer, an individual’s fit with the new job following reemployment tends to decrease—this may not be the case, however, if you are particularly able to understand your emotions and what they mean in the context of your life. 

The article suggests that effectively understanding and coping with stress and emotions plays a pivotal role in managing unemployment. Those who have a better understanding of emotions may be better at coping and may have a heightened sense of control, which in turn, helps to find higher quality employment following an employment gap.

Generally, emotional intelligence is seen as an inherent, relatively stable quality about a person, but there is evidence (e.g., Slaski & Cartwright, 2003) that we can improve our emotional intelligence. Thus, individuals who strengthen their emotional intelligence may find that their gains do not just benefit their short-term interpersonal and professional experiences, but rather, their abilities to manage their career paths and any employment gaps they may face.

By: Keaton Fletcher

Findings from a recently published meta-analysis (a method of combining the findings from many different smaller studies) by Gavin Slemp, Margaret Kern, Kent Patrick, and Richard Ryan suggest that good leaders support your autonomy in the workplace.

Leadership has long been a useful tool for organizations to motivate and manage the workforce. Perspectives on leadership have shifted from what rewards and punishments a leader should use, to how can a leader facilitate workers’ own motivation. One perspective on leadership behaviors is that of leader autonomy support. The idea behind leader autonomy support is that a good leader should recognize that workers have their own perspectives, should encourage the workers to be self-starters, and give employees opportunities to make decisions and have input. Further, leaders should avoid the use of rewards and punishments or controlling language/communication, to help the workers feel empowered and motivated to make their own decisions. 

The perspective of leader autonomy support is tied to a main motivational theory, self-determination theory, which suggests that humans have three needs beyond those for survival: a need for autonomy, a need for competence, and a need for relatedness. Work can help people meet each of these needs, particularly if it is well designed and workers have leaders who support these ideals. Leader autonomy support has been shown to relate to people’s perceived ability to meet each of these needs through work. In turn, meeting these needs then predicts workers’ autonomous motivation. In other words, if you feel like your work is fulfilling and meeting your needs, you are more motivated to work because you like it and you value it, not because someone else is telling you that you have to, or because you need the rewards (e.g., pay) it provides. Workers who are more highly autonomously motivated, in turn, experience a wide range of positive outcomes. They have higher levels of well-being, work engagement, and lower levels of general distress.

So, what is the takeaway? Leaders in the workplace should be helping you to motivate yourself by giving you opportunities to act autonomously. This is why everyone complains when they feel like their boss is micromanaging, or when they feel like there is no room to grow or work on projects they care about. Having the autonomy to determine, to some extent, when, where, how, and what work you do can help keep you engaged and happy with your work. This will be particularly important as people continue to live longer, and staying in the workforce until one’s 70s or 80s is optional, but can be valuable both for the individual (if the work is meeting your needs) and society.