Author Archives: kathrynwelds

About kathrynwelds

Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership and Career Coach | Thought Partner | Accountability Ally | Creating value by connecting people, information, and ideas, to accomplish strategic results Professional experience spans roles as an organizational psychologist, coach, consultant, leader in technology, healthcare, professional services, public sector.

Writing Power Primer Increases Efficacy in High-Stakes Performance

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Adam Galinsky

“Power is the central regulator of human interaction…because it creates patterns of deference, reduces conflict, creates division of labor — all things that make our species successful,” wrote Columbia’s Adam Galinsky.

Francesca Gino

He evaluated a power-enhancing technique used by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School when she applied for academic positions at top-tier universities after initial unsuccessful interviews.

Gino wrote a “power prime” to remind herself of a time she felt powerful.
She reviewed this prime before she presented a talk and interviewed for academic roles.
Using this approach, Gino received job offers from four top universities, in contrast to her previously unsuccessful attempts.

David Dubois

Galinsky empirically investigated whether feelings of power are associated with different outcomes in professional interviews, as in Gino’s anecdotal case.

Collaborating with David Dubois of INSEAD, Tilburg University’s Joris Lammers, and Derek Rucker of Northwestern University, they asked job applicants and business school admission candidates to write about a time they felt powerful or powerless.

Joris Lammers

Independent judges, who were unaware of the different instructions, rated “applicant’s” written and face-to-face interview performance.
Evaluators assigned highest scores to those who recalled power experiences.

Derek Rucker

Judges preferred power-primed applicants, citing their greater persuasiveness and confidence.
These candidates received more offers of job roles and business school admission than those who wrote about powerless experiences or those who wrote about situations unrelated to feelings of power and powerlessness.

Sian Beilock

An earlier post highlighted Sian Beilock’s investigation of writing as a coping tool in stressful academic situations.
Her collaborators at University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and Pace Universities showed that students could manage test anxiety by writing about their concerns to maintain a calm mindset.

Recalling an experience of personal power can influence impressions of persuasiveness, competence, and likeability in professional interviews.
This effect can be enhanced by writing about power experiences to increase confidence and optimism when working toward desired goals.

-*How do you prepare for challenging professional interviews?

-*How effective have your found “power primes” in high-stakes performance situations?

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Cognitive Value of Handwriting in the Digital Era

©Kathryn Welds

Career Advancement as Contest–Tournament: How to Win

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

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Taya Cohen

Agreement bias is the tendency to agree (“settle”) in a negotiation even if the outcome is disadvantageous.

During negotiation, participants’ positions and interests may be significantly different.
Skillful negotiators usually end the discussion if it is unlikely to move beyond a stalemate.

Leigh Thompson

Negotiators may accept a disadvantageous deal for reasons besides personality traits, explained Carnegie Mellon’s Taya Cohen and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern with University of Toronto’s Geoffrey J. Leonardelli.

◦ Sunk Costs: Participants may wish to achieve any resolution, to derive some sense of value for the invested time and effort,

◦ Image: Negotiators may wish to appear likeable,

◦ Erroneous Anchoring: People may assume that their interests and the negotiation partner’s are mutually exclusive.

◦ Strength in Numbers: Negotiators who are outnumbered by the other negotiation team tend to agree to suboptimal deals.

As a result, negotiators may overlook “integrative” (“and/both”) solutions,

Geoffrey J Leonardelli

People negotiating teams tend to be less susceptible to agreement bias when positions and interests significantly differ, found Cohen, Thompson, and Leonardelli.

Solo negotiators demonstrated more agreeable behavior, and were more likely to agree to unfavourable conditions.
When solo negotiators were joined by only one person, they avoided unfavorable agreements thanks to additional decision support.

Douglas Jackson

Agreement bias even occurs in anonymous surveys, reported Douglas Jackson, then of Educational Testing Services and Penn State.
This acquiescence bias, is triggered when people agree to survey items no matter the content.

Samuel Messick

Social desirability concern can accelerate agreements in negotiations, surveys, and life, found Jackson and his ETS colleague Samuel Messick in a factor analysis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) items.

Robin Pinkley

Inaccurate judgments can lead also to unfavorable agreements, noted SMU’s Robin L. Pinkley, Terri L. Griffith of Santa Clara University, and University of Illinois’s Gregory B. Northcraft.

Terri Griffith

Pinkley’s group demonstrated ineffective outcomes when negotiators :

Accurately processed inaccurate or incomplete information
(information availability errors),
Inaccurately processed valid or complete information
(information processing errors).

Gregory Northcraft

-*How do you guard against agreeing to bad deals?

-*How do you reduce Information availability errors and information processing errors?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women’s Likeability–Competence Dilemma: Overcoming the Backlash Effect

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Madeline Heilman

Aaron Wallen

Women face workplace challenges when they “succeed” in traditionally-male roles, found New York University’s Madeline Heilman, Aaron Wallen, Daniella Fuchs and Melinda Tamkins.

Melinda Tamkins

They found that woman who are recognized as successful in roles dominated by men, are less liked than equally successful men in the same fields.

Tyler Okimoto

Successful women managers avoided interpersonal hostility, dislike, and undesirability when they conveyed “communal” attributes through behaviors, testimonials of others, or their role as mothers, found Heilman, with University of Queensland’s Tyler Okimoto.

Frank Flynn

This competence-likeability disconnect was demonstrated by Stanford’s Frank Flynn in a Harvard Business School case of Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Heidi Roizen, who was seen as competent but disliked.

Heidi Roizen

He and Cameron Anderson of UC Berkeley changed Heidi’s name to “Howard Roizen” for half of the participants who read the case.

Cameron Anderson

These volunteers rated Heidi and “Howard” on perceived competence and likeability.

Heidi was rated as equally highly competent and effective as “Howard,” but she was also evaluated as unlikeable and selfish.
Most participants said they wouldn’t want to hire her or work with her.

Whitney Johnson-Lisa Joy Rosner

Similar negative evaluations of accomplished women was illustrated in social media mentions of Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter,

Whitney Johnson, co-founder of Disruptive Advisors and her colleague Lisa Joy Rosner evaluated “Brand Passion Index” (BPI) for Sandberg, Slaughter, and Marisa Mayer over 12 months by:

Activity (number of media mentions),
Sentiment (positive or negative emotional tone),
Intensity (strong or weak sentiment).

These competent, well-known women were not liked, and were evaluated with harsh negative attributions based on media coverage and at-a-distance observations:

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s former CEO, was described as impressive and smart, and annoying, a bully,
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s former COO, was characterized as excellent, successful working mom and bizarre,
Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, was depicted as an amazing, successful mother and destructive, not a good wife,

Laurie Rudman

The competence-likeability dilemma was demonstrated in hiring behaviour experiments by Rutgers University’s Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick of Lawrence University.

Volunteers made “hiring decisions” for male and female “candidates” competing for a “feminized” managerial role and a “masculinized” managerial role.

Peter Glick

Applicants were presented as demonstrating:

Stereotypically male behaviors (“agentic”)
Stereotypically female behaviors (“communal”)
Both stereotypically male and female behaviors (“androgynous”).

Women who displayed “masculine” traits were viewed as less socially acceptable and were not selected for the “feminized” job.
However, this hiring bias did not occur when these women applied for the “male” job.

“Niceness” was not rewarded when competing for jobs: Both male and female “communal” applicants received low hiring ratings.
Combining niceness with agency improved the “hiring” outcome for “androgynous” female “applicants.”

Rudman and Glick noted that “… women must present themselves as agentic to be hirable, but may therefore be seen as interpersonally deficient.”
They advised women to “temper their agency with niceness.”

Linda Babcock

The competence-likeability disconnect is also observed when women negotiate for salary and position, reported by Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon.
Her research demonstrated negative evaluations of women who negotiate for salaries using the same script as men.

Deborah Gruenfeld

The likeability-competence dilemma may be mitigated by integrating powerful body language with appeasing behaviors that build relationships and acknowledge others’ authority, suggested Stanford’s Deborah Gruenfeld.

She posited that many women have been socialized to adopt less powerful body language including:

Smiling,
Nodding,
Tilting the head,
Applying fleeting eye contact,
Speaking in sentence fragments with uncertain, rising intonation at sentence endings.

Some people in decision roles expect women to behave in these ways, and negatively evaluate behaviors that differ from expectations.

Body language is the greatest contributor to split-second judgments (less than 100 milliseconds) of people’s competence, according to Gruenfeld.
She estimated that body language is responsible for about 55% of judgments, whereas self-presentation accounts for 38%, and words for just 7%.

Her earlier work considered body language on assessments of power, and more recently, she investigated gender differences in attributions of competence and likeability.

The likeability-competence conflict may be reduced when women give up physical space to convey approachability, empathy, and likeability, she noted.

Posing in more powerful positions for as little as two minutes can change levels of testosterone, a marker of dominance, just as holding a submissive posture for the same time can increase cortisol levels, signaling stress, according to Gruenfeld.
She suggested that women practice “the mechanics of powerful body language.”

Alison Fragale

Women’s competence-likeability dilemma is not mitigated by achieving workplace success and status.
University of North Carolina’s Alison Fragale, Benson Rosen, Carol Xu, Iryna Merideth found that successful women and men are judged more harshly for mistakes than lower status individuals who make identical errors.

Benson Rosen

Fragale’s team found that observers attributed greater intentionality, malevolence, and self-concern to the actions of high status wrongdoers than the identical actions of low status wrongdoers.
Volunteers recommended more severe punishments for higher status individuals.

Iryna Meridith

Wrongdoers who demonstrated concern for others, charitable giving, and interpersonal warmth built goodwill that could protect from subsequent mistakes.

-*How do you convey both likeability and competence?

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©Kathryn Welds

Managing “Triadic Managers” and Navigating Office Politics

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Oliver James

Some business leaders exhibit three difficult behaviors styles: Psychopathy, Narcissism, Machiavellianism, according to British psychologist and journalist, Oliver James.
He called these people “triadic managers.”

Fictional comedies and dramas satirize the stress and distress wrought by such managers, and each element of the toxic triumvirate has been empirically investigated by clinical researchers and social scientists.

The most extensively researched of the three personality trends is psychopathy, given its relevance to law enforcement.
Psychopaths typically display:

Callous manipulation, lying, and exploitation,
Grandiosity, entitlement, and shallowness,
Impulsiveness and thrill-seeking,
Little interpersonal empathy and remorse.

Ronald Schouten

More than 3 million Americans and one in 10 on Wall Street are psychopathic, asserted Harvard’s Ronald Schouten, a former federal prosecutor, who collaborated with criminal defense attorney James Silver.

James Silver

They noted that nearly 15 percent of the general population demonstrate “almost psychopathic” behavior, and many are employed as senior executives.

Robert Hare

Senior managers are four times more likely than the general population to display psychopathic tendencies, found University of British Columbia’s Robert Hare and industrial-organizational psychologist Paul Babiak.

They differentiated three types of workplace psychopaths:

Manipulator,
Bully,
Puppetmaster.
Paul Babiak

Clive Boddy

Narcissists in global business and financial contexts share characteristics of psychopaths, noted Middlesex University’s Clive Boddy:

Grandiose sense of self-importance, superiority, entitlement,
Vanity and insatiable need for attention,
Exploitativeness,
Lack of empathy.

Katarina Fritzon

About one per cent of the general population and 16 per cent of clinical groups meet the criteria for narcissism, and they can excel in professions where they can control people and elicit adulation.
Many who excel in politics, finance, entertainment, and medicine meet these criteria.

Likewise, senior business managers were more likely than criminal psychiatric patients to have narcissistic, histrionic, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorders, reported Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon, then of the University of Surrey.

Sam Vaknin

One “successful narcissist,” Sam Vaknin, recounted his career before and after his felony incarceration for securities fraud.

Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

The third element of “triadic managers”, Machiavellianism, is characterized by:

Detachment and coldness,
Manipulation,
Calculating maneuvers to advance self-interest.

Centuries after Machiavelli’s classic book, Columbia University’s Richard Christie and Florence Geis studied the Machiavellian personality and developed a personality assessment to identify these characteristics.

Given the likelihood of interacting with psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellian personalities in business, James sought ways to deal with them in the workplace by conducted 50 interviews with “triadic managers.”
He suggested:

Developing greater acumen in recognizing psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian workplace behaviors by closely observing others and the situation,
Managing others’ “perception of one’s performance,”
Delivering measurable results,
Selectively applying psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian workplace behaviors toward offenders while appearing sincere,
Networking to maintain relationships and allies for use in moving to a new role.

-*How do you detect and interact with colleagues who manifest characteristics of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism?

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Costs of Workplace Incivility

©Kathryn Welds

“Self-Packaging” as Personal Brand: Implicit Requirements for Personal Appearance?

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Napoleon Hill

Al Ries

During the economic Depression of the 1930s in the US, motivational writer Napoleon Hill laid the foundation for “personal positioning,” described nearly forty-five years later by marketing executives Al Ries and Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

By 1997, business writer Tom Peters introduced “personal branding” as self-packaging that communicates an individual’s accomplishments and characteristics, including appearance, as a “brand promise of value.”

Tom Peters

Self-packaging can be considered “the shell of who you are” whereas personal branding can be “what sets you apart from the crowd.“

Jim Kukral

These differentiators can include visible characteristics like attire, business cards, speaking style, according to Jim Kurkal and Murray Newlands.

Daniel Lair

University of Michigan’s Daniel Lair with Katie Sullivan of University of Utah, and Kent State’s George Cheney investigated personal branding, presentation, and packaging.

George Cheney

They referred to personal branding as “…self-commodification” worthy of “careful and searching analysis“ of complex rhetoric tactics that shape power relations by gender, age, race, and class.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Talent Innovation identified some of these power relationships and potential biases facing women and members of minority groups who are expected to demonstrate aspects of personal branding, including executive presence.

These analyses suggest that personal packaging, branding, and marketing can significantly affect professional opportunities and outcomes.

-*What elements do you consider in “personal packaging” and its component, personal appearance?

-*How do you mitigate possible bias based on expectations for personal appearance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Could You Be Robbed While Drifting Into “Inattentional Blindness”?

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Apollo Robbins

Glitches in human awareness, perception and cognition are memorably illustrated in Apollo Robbins’ interactive Las Vegas, USA show, “The Gentleman Thief.”

He tells “targets” in the audience that he is about to steal from them, then uses visual illusions, proximity manipulation, diversion techniques, and attention control, to complete his imperceptible heists.
Robbins returns belongings to owners, including former US President Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service agents.

Robbins uses sleight-of-hand to help people improve perceptual capabilities. These skills can reduce traffic accidents, industrial mishaps, and security violations.

He overcame his own motor-skill deficits by monitoring the focus of a target’s attention: “If a person is focused elsewhere, a thief can put his whole hand in [a pocket] and steal.”

Kim Silverman

Like Kim Silverman, Research Scientist at Apple, Robbins creates “false assumptions…that look like reality…”

The U.S. Department of Defense deploys Robbins’ skills at its Special Operations Command research and training facility at Yale University, where he an adjunct professor, despite leaving school before university.

Barton Whaley

Defense application of these perceptual manipulation skills were identified by Barton Whaley of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and Susan Stratton Aykroyd in their Textbook of Political-Military Counterdeception.

Their historical survey of deception and counter-deception practices noted that amateur magicians’ practices were more advanced than those used by U.S. political or military intelligence analysts in the 1970s.

Stephen Macknik

SUNY Downstate’s Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde collaborated with Robbins on Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deception.
Their empirical results supported Robbins’s observation that the eye will follow an object moving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin.
Curved motions may be more novel than linear edges, so they attract greater attention and contribute to illusions.

Susana Martinez-Conde

Perceptual errors in illusions can suggest diagnostic and treatment methods for brain trauma, autism, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Observing illusion performances may help patients focus on the most important aspects of their environment, while suppressing distractions that cause confusion disorientation, and “inattentional blindness” (focusing so intently on a single task that one fails to notice things in plain sight).

Richard Wiseman

Psychologist and illusionist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire demonstrated inattentional blindness when viewers fail to notice environmental changes while they focused on a card trick.
Similarly, Transport of London’s Public Service Announcement reminds viewers that it’s easy to miss things you’re not expecting in “Did you see the Moonwalking Bear?”

Wiseman suggested that people can “recognise hidden opportunities in … life,” when they intentionally reduce perceptual blindness, in Magic in Theory: An introduction to the theoretical and psychological elements of conjuring.

Daniel Levin

Daniel Simons

University of Illinois’s Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University demonstrated that observers miss important details when they observed people passing a basketball someone in a gorilla suit walked through the action.

With Harvard’s Christopher Chabris, Simons reported that half of the observers said they did not see the gorilla when they were counting the number of ball passes by one team.

Christopher Chabris

However, the same people easily recognized the gorilla when they were not asked to focus on a distraction task.

Edward Vogel

This finding shows that most people are unable to effectively “multitask” because they have limited ability to hold a visual scene in short-term memory (VSTM), suggested University of Chicago’s Edward K. Vogel and Maro Machizawa of Hiroshima University and separately by Vanderbilt’s René Marois and J. Jay Todd.

Gustav Kuhn

Gustav Kuhn of University of London collaborated with illusionist Alym Amlani and Ronald Rensink of University of British Columbia to classify cognitive, perceptual, and physical contributors in Towards a Science of Magic:

Ronald Rensink

Physical misdirection by a magician’s gaze or gesture,
Psychological misdirection with a motion or prolonged suspense to distract from the trick’s mechanics,
Optical illusions that distort the true size of an object,
Cognitive illusions to prolong an image after the object has been removed,
Physical force and mental force influence “freely chosen” cards or other objects in magic tricks.

Rene Marois-J Jay Todd

Perceptual and cognitive illusions can cause people not to see things that are present.
This effect can lead to overlooking interpersonal cues, life opportunities.
and more dangerously, inattention in traffic accidents, and victimization.

Mindful awareness helps people pay attention to the present experience and to opportunities while mitigating potential perceptual misinformation.

-*How to you maintain focus to reduce “inattentional blindness”?

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Women Balance on the Negotiation Tightrope to Avoid Backlash

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Linda Babcock

Women less frequently negotiate initial salaries than men, leading to a long-term wage disparity, reported Carnegie-Mellon University’s Linda Babcock.

Hannah Riley Bowles

Women who did negotiate were negatively evaluated by both men and women participants in a lab study, found Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai.
These volunteers reported less desire to work with women who asked for more money.

Lei Lai

Both male and female evaluators said they disliked “demandingness” among women who negotiated, and said they preferred “nicer” non-negotiators.
However, reducing women’s degree of assertiveness did not improve evaluators’s perceptions of women negotiators.

These findings support Babcock’s results: When male and female volunteers asked for salary increases using identical scripts in controlled lab situations, participants liked men’s style, but disliked the same words from women.
Women negotiators were considered “aggressive” unless they smiled, or displayed a warm, friendly manner.

The social reaction to women negotiators was improved when female participants:

Justified the salary request based on a supporting “business case,”
Communicated concern for organizational relationships.

Applying these tactics did not improve women’s negotiation outcomes, but improved other people’s reactions to women negotiators.

In contrast, women negotiators improved both social and negotiation outcomes when they justified the salary request based on the relationship.

Women who smile and focus on the interpersonal relationship fulfill gender role expectations, leading to greater approval by male and female observers.

Kathleen McGinn

Bowles, with Harvard colleague Kathleen McGinn and Babcock, suggested that “situational ambiguity” and “gender triggers” modify women’s willingness to negotiate.

When women have information about the potential salary range and whether the salary is negotiable, they are more likely to negotiate.
Women can improve their negotiation outcomes by asking:

the salary range,
which elements of the compensation package are negotiable.

Daniel Pink

Effective negotiation is a survival skill, according to Dan Pink:
“The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.
It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives.”

He noted that effective persuaders and “sellers” collaborate in “inspecting” a negotiation and “responding” to the negotiation through “interpersonal attunement.”

Pink suggested ABC negotiation skills:

– Attunement: Aligning actions and attitudes with others,

– Buoyancy: “Positivity,” optimism, asking questions,

– Clarity: Helping others identify unrecognized needs that can be fulfilled by the negotiation proposal.

Joan Williams

UC Hastings College of the Law’s Joan Williams offered strategies to address documented wage discrepancies.

As more women negotiate salaries, managers may view this as an expected practice.

What is the best negotiation pitch you’ve heard for a job-related salary increase or role promotion?
How did the person overcome objections?
How did the person manage the relationship with the negotiating partner?

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Training or Mentorship to Build Leadership Skills?

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Peter Harms

Leadership development services are at least a USD $134 billion annual expenditure in the US, leading many to question the estimated and actual Return on Investment (ROI).

Paul Lester

A six-month study of U.S. Military Academy cadets at West Point provided answers.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Peter Harms collaborated with Paul Lester of the U.S. Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Directory, U.S. Military Academy’ Sean Hanna, Gretchen Vogelgesang of Federal Management Partners, and University of Washington’s Bruce Avolio to evaluate:

– Sean Hanna

-Candidates’s readiness to receive candid feedback from multiple sources,
–Mentoring from a supportive leadership coach,

-Realistic advancement opportunities in the organization.

Bruce Avolio

Participants were randomly assigned to an individual mentorship program or classroom-based group leadership training.

Those who participated in the mentorships were significantly more likely to report increased confidence in assuming a leadership role than those in the classroom training.

The mentoring group’s effectiveness was significantly related to the mentorship coaches’ ability to:

Establish a trust-based collaborative relationship,
Provide support,
Offer candid observational feedback,
Advocate for cadets who exercise leadership.

Additionally, participants who reported greatest gains in leadership skills and confidence were:

Open to receiving candid feedback from mentors,
Willing to receive challenging developmental feedback.

The least expensive approach to leadership development did not produce the greatest results, suggesting the value of individualized leadership coaching.

Ted Kaptchuk

The powerful effect of individual attention was demonstrated when attention from experts provided a placebo effect for 250 patients with documented symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).

Those who received the most individualized attention in three no-treatment conditions reported the greatest symptom relief even though they received no medical intervention and participants were informed that the “treatment” was a placebo, reported Harvard’s Ted Kaptchuk.

The most important “active ingredient” in leadership development training may be personalized attention, followed by candidates’s willingness to receive candid feedback and to implement recommendations.

-*How has personalized mentoring helped you develop leadership competencies?

Self Compassion, not Self-Esteem, Enhances Performance

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Juliana Breines

Self-compassion is treating one’s own mistakes with the same support and compassion offered to others, and it is more important than self-esteem to develop skills and performance, found University of California, Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen.

Self-compassion enables people to accept their mistakes and shortcomings with kindness.
It also enables equanimity when people are aware of painful thoughts and feelings.
Self-compassion is optimised when people accept responsibility for disappointing performance outcomes, and use this information to improve future performance.

Serena Chen

In Breines and Chen’s research, volunteers considered a personal setback with either:

self-compassion or
self-esteem enhancement (focusing on one’s positive qualities and accomplishments).

People who practiced a self-compassion tended to view personal shortcomings as changeable, and said they felt more motivated to improve performance by avoiding the same mistake.

Another task induced failure, then provided an opportunity to improve performance in a later challenge.
Participants who viewed their initial test failure with self-compassion devoted 25 per cent more time to preparing for future trials, and scored higher on the second test than those who focused on bolstering their self-esteem.

Self-compassion can enhance performance, suggested Breines and Chen, because it enables more dispassionate assessment of actions, abilities, and opportunities for future improvement.
In contrast, self-esteem-bolstering thoughts may narrow focus to consider only positive characteristics while overlooking opportunities for improvement.

Robert McCrae

Self-compassion measures were related to positive personality characteristics outlined in Robert McCrae and Paul Costa’s five factor model of personality known by the acronym OCEAN:

Paul Costa

Openness (curious vs. consistent/cautious)
Conscientiousness (organised vs. careless)
Extraversion (outgoing vs. reserved)
Agreeableness (friendly vs. unkind)
Neuroticism (nervous vs. confident)
in a study by Kristin Neff and Stephanie Rude of University of Texas, and Kristin Kirkpatrick of Eastern Kentucky University.

Kristin Neff

Neff’s team found that higher levels of personal well-being, optimism, initiative, conscientiousness, curiosity, happiness were associated with self-compassion.
Higher self-compassion was also related to lower anxiety and depression.

In contrast, self-criticism, was associated with imagined assessments by others and comparisons with other people.

Mark Baldwin

McGill University’s Mark Baldwin found that participants who imagined an important person providing evaluative feedback experienced more negative self-evaluations, self-criticism, and negative moods.

Compassionate self-appraisals enable people to perform better and experience more positive moods than self-critical evaluations.

-*How have you applied self-compassion to improve performance?

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Author Archives: kathrynwelds

About kathrynwelds

Writing Power Primer Increases Efficacy in High-Stakes Performance

Career Advancement as Contest–Tournament: How to Win

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

Managing “Triadic Managers” and Navigating Office Politics

“Self-Packaging” as Personal Brand: Implicit Requirements for Personal Appearance?

Could You Be Robbed While Drifting Into “Inattentional Blindness”?

Training or Mentorship to Build Leadership Skills?

Self Compassion, not Self-Esteem, Enhances Performance

About kathrynwelds

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