State of the Science
Welcome to “The State of the Science,” where Dr. Lance Ferris of Michigan State University highlights recently published or in-press research coming out of Canadian universities that is relevant to I/O psychology. Each quaterly issue, new research will be summarized for our readers who may not have time to read, or access to, the full articles.
For older columns, please check out our Newsletters archive.
If you have any suggestions for research to cover in future columns, please contact Dr. Lance Ferris at lanceferris@gmail.com.
October 2023
Fall is a time of change, whether it be the colours of leaves falling from trees, or the composition of CSIOP’s executive board! Along those lines, I figured what better way to welcome Ivona Hideg (our new CSIOP Chair) and Samantha Hancock (our new CSIOP Program Coordinator) than by featuring one of their new papers in this column? As a bonus, the paper also features Winny Shen, a past CSIOP Chair!
In their paper (Hideg, Hancock, & Shen, currently in press at Psychology of Women Quarterly), they examined how women with non-native accents (specifically, Mandarin) were evaluated in a hiring context. They argued that while women are generally stereotyped as being high in warmth, this would particularly be the case for women with nonnative accents because such accents suggest they are immigrants to Canada. Prior work has repeatedly found that immigrant women are strongly stereotyped according to gender roles and are seen as adhering to traditional feminine values, which they argued should lead to women with non-native accents being seen as warmer than women with native accents (such effects should not occur for men, who generally are stereotyped as being high in competence but not warmth). In turn, being seen as higher in warmth may be beneficial on the job market as warmth generally conveys being trustworthy and cooperative; as such, Hideg and colleagues argued this should lead to women with non-native accents being more likely to be recommended for job positions.
While this may seem beneficial for those with non-native accents, they argued it might also only apply to promoting hiring within feminine, but not masculine, industries – because masculine industries are stereotyped as requiring masculine traits. Put differently, while women with non-native accents are seen as particularly warm, this may make them be seen as particularly unsuited to work in more masculine industries. If so, this would represent a problem for advancing gender equality at work given employees in feminine industries are typically considered less prestigious and also paid less.
Across three studies, they generally found support for their predictions: the first study had student participants evaluate audio statements of men and women with native or non-native accents who were applying for a student volunteer position at the university, while the second study had a similar design but with different participants (employed adults) hiring for a different position (a paid marketing coordinator position). Across both studies, they found that having a non-native accent increased perceptions of warmth for women (but not men), and these increased ratings of warmth led to increased recommendations to hire the applicants. In their third study, they had working adults evaluate audio statements of women with native or non-native accents who were applying for a marketing position in a company that caters to a masculine (manufacturing, oil, and gas industries) or feminine (fashion and cosmetics) industry; they found that women with non-native accents were seen as warmer (and hence more likely to be recommended for hiring) only when the position was for working in feminine industries.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Hideg, I., Hancock, S., & Shen, W. (2023). Women with Mandarin accent in the Canadian English-speaking hiring context: Can evaluations of warmth undermine gender equity? Psychology of Women Quarterly. DOI: 10.1177/03616843231165475
July 2023
When you think of narcissists, you're probably thinking of someone who might not necessarily be considered leadership material. Narcissists tend to be incessant braggarts who constantly talk about themselves, who attack anyone who even slightly suggests they may have been wrong, who take the credit for other's work, and who put down others to raise themselves up. On the other hand, for a number of you, you may have read the description I just wrote and thought "actually, my boss is exactly like that." This paradox cuts to the heart of a pressing question in leadership research: how do people like that become leaders in the first place?
Addressing this paradox was the purpose of a paper by Western University's Jennifer Lynch and Alex Benson, which was recently accepted for publication in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Nothing that various research studies have found narcissism has a positive, negative, or no relation with leader effectiveness and emergence (depending on the study), they argued that the negative effects of narcissistic leaders would take time to develop – while at first blush, their constant self-promotion may be seen as indicating they are accomplished and perhaps even charismatic, over time these effects would dissipate once people got to realize that the narcissistic behavior was more posturing and annoying than substantive and charming.
To help unravel the process through which narcissism eventually led to being viewed as a poor leader, they also examined the extent to which followers viewed narcissists as being motivated by prosocial or self-interested motives. In particular, they argued that narcissists may not be seen as behaving particularly prosocially or self-interested at first, as their behavior could be excused as benign impression management. However, over time, they argued that narcissists would be seen as being less likely to be motivated by prosocial concerns, and more likely to be motivated by self-interested concerns; in turn, these perceived motives would lead to them being seen as poor leaders.
Using a sample of 119 teams from an engineering design course where students worked on projects with actual organizations, Lynch and Benson collected data across 8 months, examining the effects of narcissism across time. They examined two types of narcissistic behaviors: those involving self-promotion (emphasizing uniqueness, believing they are special) and those involving self-protection (acting aggressively towards threats, devaluing others). Their results indicated that while narcissism was generally unrelated to leader effectiveness initially, narcissists behaving in a self-protective manner were viewed over time as less prosocial, leading to them being evaluated negatively as leaders. Interestingly, self-promoting narcissistic behaviors did not seem to influence leader effectiveness, suggesting that the negative effects of narcissism were in part dependent on how it was measured – the more self-protective types of narcissism (e.g., attacking others seen as a threat) was ultimately what lead to negative effects, while the more self-promoting types of narcissism (e.g., bragging) had no effects.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Lynch, J., & Benson, A. J. (2023). Putting oneself ahead of the group: The liability of narcissistic leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI: 10.1177/01461672231163645
April 2023
Particularly as workforces age, individuals with hearing disabilities – or those with some limitation on their ability to comprehend spoken communication – are becoming increasingly common in organizations, with some estimates suggesting nearly half of people aged 60-69 have at least some level of hearing disability. Such communication impairments can leave employees feeling frustrated and anxious, impacting their sense of professional isolation. This isolation, in turn, can lead to being less likely to be promoted or to be given raises, as well as lower levels of career satisfaction and commitment.
One might reasonably expect that as the severity of hearing loss increased, this sense of professional isolation might deepen. However, in a recent paper accepted for publication in
the Journal of Management by Brent Lyons (York University), David Baldridge (Oregon State University), Liu- Qin Yang (Portland State University), and Camellia Bryan (York University), they argue that the opposite might actually be true. Drawing on the concept of psychological disengagement, they argued that employees with more severe forms of hearing impairment would detach from the work role because – given the frustration and anxiety associated with it – the work role would threaten their feelings of self-worth. Ironically, doing so would lead those with more severe forms of hearing impairment to be less likely to feel a sense of professional isolation: because the work role is less important for them, they would be less sensitive to being isolated from others, while those with less severe forms of hearing impairment would be highly attuned to and distressed by such isolation.
Given professional isolation negatively impacts career attitudes and advancement opportunities, in reducing their sense of isolation, those with more severe forms of hearing impairment may actually end up more satisfied with, advanced in, and committed to their careers. Across two studies testing their hypotheses, this is generally what Lyons and colleagues found: although results varied slightly between studies, they found robust support for the notion that more severe hearing impairment was related to less professional isolation, which in turn impacted career attitudes and advancement. Moreover, these results were particularly pronounced when employees had lower- quality relationships with their supervisors (i.e., low LMX); when individuals had higher-quality relationships with their supervisors, they tended to experience lower levels of isolation regardless of the severity of their hearing impairment.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Lyons, B. J., Baldridge, D. C., Yang, L.-Q., & Bryan, C. (2023). Disability severity, professional isolation perceptions, and career outcomes: When does leader-member exchange quality matter? Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063221143714
January 2023
After finishing a big presentation or project at work, you are probably curious as to how others think you did: were there any mistakes? Room for improvement? Or was it a smash hit? Reaching out to your manager, you ask for some feedback, but beyond a few bromides you are not given a lot of useful information. After all the effort you put into your work, your manager seems to be putting little effort into telling you how you did.
Why managers don’t put effort into the feedback they provide was the focus of a recent paper published in the Journal of Business and Psychology by Amy Minnikin and James Beck (both at the University of Waterloo) and Winny Shen (at York University). Drawing on the fact that managers have many tasks to do and that providing high- quality feedback requires both time and effort that could be used for other managerial priorities like scheduling and budgeting, they argued that managers make discretionary decisions about how much effort to provide in response to feedback requests. One factor that influences these discretionary decisions is the supervisor’s perception of why their subordinate is asking for feedback, or the perceived feedback-seeking motive of their subordinate.
Minnikin and colleagues argued that supervisors can perceive their subordinate’s feedback requests as reflecting two distinct motives: an instrumental motive and an image enhancement motive. The instrumental motive involves employees looking for feedback to improve their performance and skills, and to see if they are meeting expectations; the image enhancement motive involves employees looking for feedback not to improve their own performance but to make sure others know that they have done a good job (presumably only seeking feedback after they believe they have done a good job, not a bad job). In other words, while instrumental motives are associated with wanting to improve, image enhancement motives are associated with making sure others know about one’s good performance.
Because managers’ time is limited, Minnikin and colleagues argued that they are more likely to direct their effort towards allocating feedback when they believe it is likely to be used – that is, when the feedback is seen as motivated by instrumental concerns. As such, they expected instrumental motives to be positively, and image enhancement motives to be negatively, related to the effort managers put into providing feedback. Two studies were conducted to test their hypotheses. The first study had managers recall an instance where they provided feedback to a subordinate, and rated the perceived feedback-seeking motives of the subordinate as well as the effort they put forth in providing feedback. The second study had managers complete a managerial simulation where a subordinate was soliciting feedback on a new company logo; the subordinate’s feedback-seeking motives were manipulated, and the actual feedback that the manager provided was collected and analyzed to assess the effort the manager put forth when providing the feedback. Specifically, the feedback was coded in terms of its quality and sensitivity to indicate the effort made by the managers. Across both studies, they generally found support for their hypotheses, with managers putting forth more effort when providing feedback if they perceived their subordinates as having instrumental motives, and less effort if they perceived their subordinates as having image enhancement motives.
October 2022
Organizations generally want their employees to behave creative and innovative, and one of the main facilitators of such behaviors is the sharing of knowledge across individuals, teams, and departments. This sharing of information allows employees to take perspectives they otherwise may have missed, and see problems or opportunities they may have overlooked. But at the same time, employees can often feel that information they have is theirs – hard-won products of their own thinking or collaborations, and something they are reluctant to part with, particularly if they don’t stand to benefit from it. This feeling of territoriality – a negative manifestation of psychological ownership representing a fear of losing ownership over something – can serve to halt knowledge sharing in its tracks.
This was recently illustrated in a study by Mengyao Guo, Graham Brown, and Lihua Zhang (of Changsha University of Science & Technology, University of Victoria, and Renmin University, respectively) in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. In particular, they argued that as a consequence of feelings of territoriality, employees will hide the knowledge from others who are requesting the knowledge the employee possesses. This hiding can be manifested in a number of ways, including (a) evasively giving a requester incorrect knowledge or promising to give them knowledge but not doing so; (b) playing dumb and pretending to not know what the requester is talking about; and/or (c) accurately noting the knowledge is classified or otherwise not available for sharing. They specifically argued that the first two forms of knowledge hiding would be most affected by feelings of territoriality, as the latter form tends to reflect organizational policies that are out of the employee’s control
Aside from arguing that territoriality would lead to decreased forms of knowledge sharing, they also argued this would have a boomerang effect and ultimately negatively impact the innovativeness of the employee who is hiding knowledge. More specifically, they argued that when an employee does not share information with others, team members will not share information with the employee in the future as a form of retaliation. In so doing, this limits the employee’s ability to come up with innovative solutions of their own.
Across two different studies, they found general support for their predictions. Their first study of information technology workers tested the first part of their model, and found support for the idea that individuals’ feelings of
territoriality over their knowledge led them to both evasively hide their knowledge and play dumb when coworkers asked them to share their knowledge. Their second study of workers from a variety of industries replicated these results (with high team-level trust mitigating these effects for evasive knowledge hiding). Moreover, they also found that evasively hiding knowledge and playing dumb was negatively related to supervisor ratings of the employee’s innovativeness, and that these forms of knowledge hiding mediated the effect of territoriality on decreased innovativeness.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Guo, M., Brown, G., & Zhang, L. (in press). My knowledge: The negative impact of territorial feelings on employee’s own innovation through knowledge hiding. Journal of Organizational Behavior. doi: 10.1002/job.2599
July 2022
While bad bosses and abusive supervisors have been received the lion’s share of attention in both the media and organizational research, their opposites – humble leaders – have increasingly become the focus of research over the last decade. Conceptualized as leaders who are willing to be self-critical, appreciative of their own weaknesses and others’ strengths, and open to feedback, humble leaders are thought to be role models for team members in organizations. Yet it has also been said that people may interpret humble leaders as lacking selfconfidence and be less willing to follow such leaders; the literature similarly suggests the effects of humble learning on outcomes can be variable.
A new study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior by Pierre-Marc Leblanc and Vincent Rousseau (of Université de Montréal) and Jean-François Harvey (of HEC Montréal) tried to address when and how humble leaders are able to have a positive impact on organizational outcomes, focusing in particular on their effect on a team’s level of innovation. In particular, they argued that a humble leader can act as a role model for teams to become more reflective, which in turn leads to greater innovation – but only when the team has a high level of proactive team members.
More specifically, Leblanc and colleagues argued that humble leaders can legitimize reflexivity among team members – that is, legitimize thinking about the best methods and optimal approaches to achieve objectives – by modeling behaviors such as questioning their own approaches, being open to diverse opinions, and accepting feedback in an open-minded manner. However, such role modeling also requires that teams be characterized as high in proactivity, as such teams are more likely to see humble leadership as an opportunity to improve team functioning; on the other hand, non-proactive teams are more likely to prefer the status quo and wait for the leader to decide things for them, shying away from taking on additional work. Using multi-wave and multi-source data collected from 71 teams at a Canadian university-affiliated hospital, they found support for their model: humble leadership was related to greater team reflexivity, which in turn was related to greater team innovation, but this relation only held for teams characterized by a high level of proactivity.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Leblanc, P-M., Rousseau, V., & Harvey, J.-F. (2022). Leader humility and team innovation: The role of team reflexivity and team proactive personality. Journal of Organizational Behavior. doi: 10.1002/job.2648
April 2022
For most people, the COVID-19 pandemic has had, and/or continues to have, a large impact on our lives. The early days of the pandemic were particularly stressful, when so little was known about this virus that upended our lives. During this time most people were understandably focused on keeping themselves and their loved ones safe, and dealing with the strain of new routines like working from home, figuring out grocery deliveries, or planning trips to the store when few people were around. Recent work published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior outlines how this stress and anxiety also impacts behavior at work. In particular, Annika Hillebrandt (of Ryerson University) and Laurie Barclay (of the University of Guelph) argued that COVID-19 could have an impact on employee cheating behavior – that is, behaviors that involve unethically advancing one’s own interests at work such as exaggerating one’s work hours, falsely representing one’s productivity, and lying about being absent, among others. Importantly, they also outlined how organizations can take steps to mitigate this relation. More specifically, they argued that when employees viewed COVID-19 as a personal threat or risk to themselves, they were more likely to experience anxiety. This anxiety was argued to make employees narrow their focus towards themselves and their own self-interests, and away from how their behavior impacted others. Such individuals would be particularly more likely to engage in cheating behaviors, because cheating behaviors ignore the norms or expectations of others while prioritizing one’s own interests over others.
7 Across two studies – both an experimental study and a field study – they found support for their prediction that viewing COVID-19 as a threat was related to increased anxiety, which in turn was related to increased cheating behaviors (in the experimental study, they also established that a focus on the self was the mechanism through which anxiety impacted cheating behavior). However, in both studies they also examined how to mitigate this relation with prosocial messaging, or messages highlighting how their work impacts others. In particular, they expected that prosocial messages from a company would reduce the tendency to focus on one’s own self-interests, and consider the impact of their behavior on others. Supporting their predictions, they found that employees who reported that their organization engaged in more prosocial messaging (or, in the experimental study, participants who were asked to think about their impact on other people) were less likely to react to their anxiety with cheating behaviors. As they put it, such messaging is “simple, easy to implement, and cost effective” (p. 17), and hopefully one that leaders will consider applying to their own workplaces!
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Hillebrandt, A., & Barclay, L. J. (2022). How COVID-19 can promote workplace cheating behavior via employee anxiety and self-interest – and how prosocial messages may overcome this effect. Journal of Organizational Behavior. doi: 10.1002/job.2612
January 2022
Imagine you come into work one day and you see two fellow employees talking. The first employee is rolling their eyes at the second employee and constantly interrupting them; this tracks with other behavior you’ve witnessed, with the first employee excluding the second employee from work events and gossiping about the second employee behind the second employee’s back. As a bystander, you ask yourself whether you should say something to the first employee, or find some way to support the second employee.
Do you? A paper recently published in the Journal of Business and Psychology by Jaclyn Jensen and Jana Raver (of DePaul University and Queen’s University, respectively) suggests there are a number of factors that will influence how bystanders will react to observing incivility between a target and a perpetrator at work. Using a policy capturing study, they sought to experimentally manipulate a number of different factors to see which influenced whether or not bystanders (i.e., the participants) were likely to support the target of incivility and confront the perpetrator. They particularly argued that because incivility tends to be a low-intensity form of deviant behavior that is inherently ambiguous about whether the perpetrator really means to harm the target, factors that reduce ambiguity around whether harm is occurring should increase the likelihood that bystanders will intervene (either in the form of support for targets or confronting the perpetrator). Specifically, they examined whether the target seems bothered by the treatment, and whether the target asks you for help directly, as these reduce ambiguity surrounding whether the treatment is unacceptable.
However, they also argued that the decision to intervene involves a consideration of the costs of both taking action and not taking action. Along these lines, they also examined whether the bystander’s own workload, and the job performance of the target of incivility, affected the likelihood that bystanders will intervene, arguing that greater workload increased the cost of intervening, while not intervening when the target is a valued high-performer would also be costly (to the team and organization). Finally, they also argued that supervisors would be more likely to intervene, both because it is part of their role and because failing to intervene could reflect poorly on their own ability to maintain a productive team.
These hypotheses were tested using a policy capturing methodology, which involves creating scenarios that simultaneously manipulate each of these factors (they also manipulated the gender of the perpetrator and target). This leads to a lot of scenarios and requires a high number of participants – in this study, over 3,400 people participated! – but does allow for a comprehensive examination of the joint influence of multiple different factors while also affording the ability to experimentally manipulate factors to better establish causality.
They found general support for their predictions, in that participants were more likely to intervene with targets who were bothered by the treatment, targets who asked for help, targets who were high performers, and when their own workload was low (supervisors were also more likely to intervene than coworkers, as were those participants who had strong moral identities; the gender composition of the perpetrator-target dyad did not produce any consistent effects). Interestingly, however, they found that the biggest influence on whether people chose to intervene was not the costs of acting (or not acting), but rather whether or not the target of incivility looked like they were bothered or asked for help. Although costs did influence the outcome, the targets’ reactions accounted approximately 90% of the variance in how people responded.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Jensen, J. M., & Raver, J. L. (2021). A policy capturing investigation of bystander decisions to intervene against
workplace incivility. Journal of Business Psychology, 36, 883-901.
October 2021
When we think about why people might lie in interviews – be it exaggerating their accomplishments, omitting unflattering information, or even making up fake stories to tell in the interview – we usually ascribe the basest of motives to these people. They are trying to deceive, they are unscrupulous, they are power-hungry and willing to do anything to get what they want. But what if it turns out there is a more benign explanation: they were just nervous? A paper recently published in the Journal of Business and Psychology sought to examine the role anxiety plays in leading to what is more formally referred to as “deceptive impression management.” Co-authored by a mix of past, present, and incoming CSIOP Chairs – Deb Powell (incoming, at the University of Guelph), Josh Bourdage (current, at University of Calgary), and Silvia Bonaccio (past, at University of Ottawa) – their work argued that not only may anxiety lead to greater deceptive impression management, but that it may explain why certain people are more likely to engage in deceptive impression management in interviews.
In particular, they argued that interviewees may engage in deceptive impression management as a way to mitigate the anxiety they are understandably feeling in a high-stakes evaluative context (i.e., an interview). Because deceptive impression management is a way to put forth a better (albeit dishonest) version of oneself that may align better with what they think organizations are looking for, such tactics may effectively manage the anxiety that arises from interview contexts. An implication of this is that people who are more or less prone to experiencing anxiety in interview contexts may be more or less likely to engage in deceptive impression management.
To test their ideas, they examined whether anxiety mediated the effect of two personality traits, extraversion and honesty-humility, on deceptive impression management. They argued that both extraverts and those high on honesty-humility would experience less anxiety in an interview setting, because they would feel more secure in evaluative interpersonal environments (for extraverts) or more secure that they were already the type of people organizations would seek to hire (for those high on honesty-humility). Using a sample of approximately 200 actual applicants who applied and were interviewed for a research assistant position, they found general support for their predictions: more anxious people were more likely to indicate they had engaged in deceptive impression management, and extraversion and honesty-humility both had negative indirect effects on deceptive impression management via their negative relation with anxiety.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Powell, D. M., Bourdage, J. S., & Bonaccio, S. (2021). Shake and fake: The role of interview anxiety in deceptive impression management. Journal of Business and Psychology, 36, 829-840.
July 2021
They say nothing is certain except death and taxes, and today’s column is about the former (I’ll be happy to write a bookending column about taxes, if research on that subject ever appears in our journals). As vaccines help countries – including Canada – make tentative steps out of the darkness of the past year, it’s undeniable that during this time death has been a more constant presence than all of us would have preferred. How do the consequences of living with this presence play out in the workplace?
A recent publication in Journal of Applied Psychology examined this question. Co-authored by Rui Zhong, Rebecca Paluch, Sandra Robinson (all from the Sauder School of Business at University of British Columbia) and Vanessa
Shum and Christopher Zatzick (both from the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University), their research sought to examine how risk of catching COVID impacted death anxiety – that is, “fear or panic about ... mortality” (p. 839), which in turn influenced workplace outcomes such as well-being and prosocial behavior. However, they also argued that risk of catching COVID could lead to death reflection – that is, “a cognitive state in which individuals engage in analytic and deliberate contemplation of the meaning of mortality” (p. 849) whose cool-headed approach may lead to a greater appreciation of life and desire to contribute meaningfully to it.
They were particularly interested in how these two forms of death awareness – both anxiety and reflection – could exist within the same person, given they are not mutually exclusive. Using latent profile analysis across two studies, they found that employees tended to be grouped into one of three categories. “Anxious reflectors” were those employees who had high levels of both death reflection and death anxiety; “calm reflectors” had high levels of death 9 reflection and low levels of death anxiety; finally, “the disengaged” had low levels of both death anxiety and death reflection. They also found that anxious reflectors were generally more likely to be individuals who were at a high risk of contracting the virus, whose work required human contact, or who lived in areas with a high level of infections or fatality rates.
With respect to outcomes at work, they found that anxious reflectors were more likely to experience decreased wellbeing (i.e., greater depression and emotional exhaustion). In terms of prosocial behavior (e.g., organizational citizenship behavior and pro-diversity behavior), Zhong and colleagues found in their first study that anxious reflectors were actually more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than calm reflectors or the disengaged. They argued this may be because anxious reflectors are engaging in prosocial behaviors as a way to buffer against anxiety by engaging in meaningful acts that also could lead to social support; however, Study 2 only partially replicated these findings, so more work is needed to better understand this relationship.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Zhong, R., Paluch, R. M., Shum, V., Zatzick, C. D., & Robinson, S. L. (2021). Hot, cold, or both? A person-centered perspective on death awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(6), 839-855.
April 2021
Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve had to deliver bad news to someone – if not in the workplace, then certainly outside of it. Being well-versed in I/O psychology, we (ideally!) remember how important interactional fairness is when delivering the bad news – that is, a manager should deliver the bad news in a polite and interpersonally sensitive manner to the employee. Interactional fairness leads to more favorable responses from the employee – it cushions the blow, as it were – and so some straightforward advice is that managers should just be nice and caring when delivering bad news. Simple, right? Well, as it turns out, not so much – again, chances are, if you’ve had to deliver bad news to someone, you also probably didn’t want to do it. You may have found the experience to be personally distressing; maybe you put off doing it, maybe you tried to get it over with quickly, maybe you tried to be coldly neutral rather than warmly empathetic.
The same applies when managers have to deliver bad news to employees: despite the fact that managers should be interactionally fair when delivering bad news, it’s easier said than done. How can we help managers get better at it? That was the question examined in a recent study by University of Waterloo researchers Lauren Holt, Ramona Bobocel, and Valerie Chen, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. They argued that the key was getting managers to take the point of view of the employee receiving the news – not just feeling sympathy or concern for them but trying to adopt their perspective or put themselves in their shoes. Doing so would make them realize how important it is to be interpersonally fair and motivate them to act in such a way, versus being more focused on their own distress.
Drawing from construal level theory, Holt and colleagues argued that one way to help managers adopt the employee’s perspective is to encourage them to take an abstract (vs. concrete) mindset. People with concrete mindsets tend to focus more on what is actually being done (e.g., delivering a bad performance review), while people with abstract mindsets tend to focus more on why something is being done (e.g., to help an employee develop better work habits). As such, managers with abstract mindsets should be more likely to adopt the employee’s perspective and consider what would be most valuable from their point of view: not so much the bad review itself but a discussion of how to improve (and a polite discussion, at that). Consequently, they predicted that managers with more abstract mindsets would be more likely to be interpersonally fair in their delivering of bad news, compared to managers with more concrete mindsets.
Across three studies, they found support for their predictions. The first two studies were conducted on managers recruited via an online research platform, where their construal levels were manipulated to be either abstract or concrete. Managers then wrote out how they would tell an employee about a decision to demote the employee; independent coders rated to what extent the manager’s decisions were polite, respectful, clear, justified, and expressed concern for the employee. The third study used a similar design but with undergraduate students asked to write out how they would tell another student that their scholarship was being revoked. Study 1 found that managers primed to adopt more abstract mindsets were more likely to be interpersonally fair when delivering bad news; Study 2 found similar results using a measure of construal level and found the effect of construal level on interpersonal fairness was mediated by adopting the other person’s perspective. Finally, Study 3 found these effects were stronger for people who scored higher (vs. lower) on a measure of trait perspective taking.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Holt, L., Bobocel, D. R., & Chen, V. (2020). Delivering bad news fairly: Higher construal level promotes interactional justice enactment through perspective taking. Journal of Organizational Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2497
January 2021
Whether you’re a practitioner or an academic, you’re probably familiar with goal-setting theory: in comparison to just telling employees to do their best, giving specific, challenging goals is more likely to lead to better employee performance. However, when we think of goal-setting in a work environment, we think of things like performance management meetings with bosses or other explicit statements along the lines of “Make X widgets within Y hours” and not of things like the office poster of a cat hanging from a tree branch saying “Hang in there!”
A recent review of primed goal effects by Xiao Chen (University of Prince Edward Island), Gary Latham (University of Toronto), Ronald Piccolo (University of Florida), and Guy Itzchakov (University of Toronto and University of Haifa) in the journal Applied Psychology: An International Review suggests that we may want to take another look at those motivational posters hanging around the office. They conducted a qualitative and quantitative review of the literature of supraliminal goal priming effects – that is, primes we are aware of (i.e., not subliminal) but whose connection to a behavior not be immediately apparent. Examples include things such as a photo of an athlete winning a race priming better performance, or completing a word sort task where the words primarily deal with achievement, or reading an email with achievement-related words included in the email.
Reviewing the results from over 50 studies, they generally found that supraliminal goal primes can have effects on performance. These effects can be long-lasting: one study (comparing the aforementioned emails from a CEO with and without achievement-related words included in the email) found an email sent on Monday had effects across the entire work week. While both visual (e.g., the winning athlete photo) and verbal (e.g., word-find tasks and word exposure) supraliminal goal primes showed significant effects, visual cues seemed to have a larger effect, particularly when the visual cue was related to someone’s actual work (in other words, a winning athlete may motivate better performance overall but particularly amongst athletes). Chen and colleagues also found that studies generally show these effects are in addition to more explicit goal-setting effects, in that both explicit goal setting and supraliminal primes had significant effects on performance.
So does this mean we can just throw up some posters and wait for the money to roll in? Not quite: Chen and colleagues also took pains to note that prior work has generally found you cannot prime people willy-nilly, and people have to be at least predisposed towards doing the behavior you are trying to prime. That is, someone who doesn’t want to work won’t suddenly leap up and start working after seeing a motivational poster; however, someone who is already predisposed to work may be more likely to work even harder. And hopefully your workplace is comprised of the latter types of employees, not the former.
For those interested in the complete paper, the full citation for the article is as follows:
Chen, X., Latham, G. P., Piccolo, R. F., & Itzchakov, G. (2020). An enumerative review and a meta-analysis of primed goal effects on organizational behavior. Applied Psychology: An International Review. doi: 10.1111/apps.12239