Employees, especially minority group members, adopt Façades of conformity (FOC) when they “act as if” they embrace an organization’s values to remain employed or to succeed in that organization, found Georgetown University’s Patricia Hewlin.
Facades of Conformity can lead to employees developing “rationalizations” that enable them to carry out distasteful or even assignments, found University of Alberta’s Flora Stormer and Kay Devine of Athabasca University.
Jerome Kerviel
This may explain Jerome Kerviel’s experience at Societe General.
He was branded as a “rogue trader,” though he seemed not to personally benefit from unauthorized trades.
He and others explained his motivation to please his managers and to earn a bonus based on his trades, in the context of his “outsider status” as someone who had not attended elite universities and was not considered a “star.”
-*In what organizational contexts have you observed “Facades of Conformity” and their consequences?
University of Michigan’s Ethan Kross, Jiyoung Park, Aleah Burson, Adrienne Dougherty, Holly Shablack, and Ryan Bremner with Emma Bruehlman-Senecal and Ozlem Ayduk of University of California, Berkeley, plus Michigan State’s Jason Moser studied more than 580 people’s ability to self-regulate reactions to social stress by using different ways of referring to the self during introspection.
The team demonstrated that using non-first-person pronouns (such as “he” or “she”) and one’s own name (rather than “I”) during introspection enhanced self-distancing, or focusing on the self from a distant perspective.
Stephen Hayes
Distancing, also called “decentering” or “self as context,” allows people to observe and accept their feelings, according to University of Nevada’s Steven Hayes, Jason Luoma, Akihiko Masuda and Jason Lillis collaborating with Frank Bond of University of London.
Ozlem Ayduk
Self-distancing verbalizations were associated with less distress and less maladaptive “post-event processing” (reviewing performance) when delivering a speech without sufficient time to prepare, and when seeking to make a good first impression on others.
Post-event processing can lead to increased social anxiety, noted Temple University’s Faith Brozovich and Richard Heimberg.
Faith Brozovich
They found that participantsexperienced less global negative affect and shame after delivering a speech without sufficient preparation time, and engaged in less post-event processing.
Adrienne Dougherty
People who talked about themselves with non-first person pronouns also performed better in speaking and impression-formation social tasks, according to ratings by observers.
Participants who used self-distancing language appraised future stressors as less threatening, and they more effectively reconstrued experiences for greater coping, insight, and closure, in another study by Kross and Ayduk.
Ryan Bremner
People with elevated scores on measures of depression or bipolar disorder experienced less distress when applying a self-distanced visual perspective as they contemplated emotional experiences, noted Kross and Ayduk, collaborating with San Francisco State University’s David Gard, Patricia Deldin of University of Michigan, and Jessica Clifton of University of Vermont.
David Gard
Using second-person pronouns (“you”) seems to be a self-distancing strategy when people reflect on situations that involve self-control, noted University of North Carolina’s Ethan Zell, Amy Beth Warriner of McMaster University and University of Illinois’s Dolores Albarracín.
Ethan Zell
These findings demonstrate that small changes in self-referencing words during introspection significantly increase self-regulation of thoughts, feelings, and behavior during social stress experiences.
Self-distancing references may help people manage depression and anger about past and anticipated social anxiety.
Dolores Albarracín
-*What impact do you experience when you use “self-distancing language”?
-*How do you react when you hear others using “self-distancing language,” like referring to “you” when speaking about their own experience?
“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole,” wrote WilliamShakespeare in As You Like It. Charles Darwin decoded this observation with his update: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Incompetent performance often results from ignorance of performance standards in both cognitive skills and physical skills, found Columbia’s David Dunning and Justin Kruger of NYU in a series of experiments.
Dunning and Kruger posited that incompetent people:
Overestimate their skill levels,
Overlook other people’s skills,
Underestimate their lack of skill in relation to performance standards.
Justin Kruger
However, training may reverse this “insight blindness.”
Low-skill individuals in some cases can benefit from corrective feedback and recognize their original lack of skill after they participate in skill training.
These observations were validated byWashington State University’s Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnsonof UCLA, and Cornell’s Matthew Banner.
People also demonstrate “illusory superiority” when they estimate their ability to identify deception and to infer intentions and emotions (interpersonal sensitivity), found Columbia’s Daniel R. Ames and Lara K. Kammrath of Wilfrid Laurier University.
Daniel Ames
Their results replicated previous findings that most people overestimate their social judgment and mind-reading skills, and showed that people who demonstrate least accurate social judgment and “mind-reading” significantly overestimate their relative competence.
Lara Kamrath
Ames and Kammrath suggested that these inaccurate self-assessments are based “in general narcissistic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement.”
When performing moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers provided similarly accurate estimates of their skills.
However, when they performed more difficult tasks, best performers provided less accurate skill estimates than worst performers.
The team found that women performed equally to men on a science quiz, yet participants underestimated their performance because they assigned low judgments to their general scientific reasoning ability.
This inaccurate underestimate of abilities can dissuade many women from entering STEM careers.
The Dunning–Kruger effectmay be culturally limited because one study found that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities due to norms of humility, and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and cooperate with others.
-*How do you mitigate overestimate and underestimates of your skill performance?
-*Where have you seen inaccurate performance estimate affect long-range career achievement?
Most people choose near-term payoffs over distant benefits, often leading to poor outcomes when the future arrives.
Hal Hersfield
Many individuals have difficulty envisioning a personal future because a distant time horizon is more abstract than the tangible reality of an extended present.
This bias toward short-term rewards generally leads to inadequate planning for future eventualities, like health care and financial requirements.
However, making the intangible future more concrete alters this near-term preference.
Laura Carstensen
Volunteers received a visual aid to clearly imagining a future self by viewing a current photo of themselves or a digitally-aged photo from the same present-day view in a study by NYU’s Hal Hershfield collaborating with Daniel Goldstein of London Business School, Stanford’s William F. Sharpe, Laura Carstensen, Jeremy Bailenson, and Leo Yeykelis plus Jesse Fox of Ohio State University.
When participants interacted with realistic, immersive age-progressed renderings of themselves, they tended to defer present rewards for future monetary rewards.
Hershfield and collaborators argued that the aged photos are vivid, less-deniable glimpses of a personal future.
These images enabled people to more realistically imagine their distant future lives by enhancing their experience of “self-continuity” over time.
Jesse Fox
Financial planners, health care advisors, and life insurers have applied these findings by developing a commercial version of this future self-image, to enable people to develop more realistic savings and retirement strategies for a tangible future self.
Emily Pronin
Another team’s findings supported Hershfield’s suggestion that people view their future selves as “other” and alien rather than personally relevant and meaningful.
Christopher Olivola
Princeton’s Emily Pronin, Christopher Olivola, now of University of Warwick and Kathleen Kennedy, now of Columbia, asked participants to estimate the amount of an unsavory liquid mixture they would be willing to drink immediately and in several months to advance scientific knowledge.
In addition, volunteers estimated the amount of this liquid that another participant should drink.
Kathleen Kennedy
Most volunteers judged that they would drink more in the future and that others should drink about the same amount.
However, participants estimated that they would drink only about half as much if consumed immediately.
Quasi-hyperbolic time discounting, whichleads most people to make an inter-temporal choice for a smaller payoff in the present instead of a larger payoff in the future.
They attributed this trend to discounting a less-imaginable future payoff for a more tangible, nearer-term benefit.
Affective forecasting errors, described in a previous blog post, leading to inaccurate predictions of future choices, preferences, emotional reactions, and behaviors due to:
Projection bias — Assuming that a present state will occur at a future time in a different circumstance,
Impact bias — Overestimating future emotional responses to adverse events, and underestimating adaptability and coping,
Narrow bracketing — Considering individual decisions and outcomes without reference to context or long-term additive effects with other decisions and circumstances.
-*How do you overcome biases to plan for future goals and needs?
Sinaceur and Tiedens suggested that anger expression communicates toughness, leading most non-angry counterparts to concede more to an angry negotiator.
However, other studies report that people have more negative reactions when women display anger,
-*But what about the impact of “strategic” expressions of anger that aren’t actually felt?
Stephane Cote
Ivona Hideg
University of Toronto’s Stéphane Côté collaborated with Ivona Hideg of Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Amsterdam’s Gerben van Kleef to evaluate the impact of surface acting (showing anger that is not truly felt) on the behavior of negotiation counterparts.
Saraceur teamed with van Kleef with Rice University’s Adam Hajo, and Adam Galinsky of Columbia, and found that negotiators who shifted among angry, happy, and disappointed expressions made recipients feel less control over the outcome, and extracted more concessions from their counterparts.
-*Do affirmative self-statements actually help people perform better?
Joanne Wood
It depends, found University of Waterloo’s Joanne Wood and John W. Lee with Wei Qi “Elaine” (Xun) Perunovic of University of New Brunswick confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective.
Participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) felt worse than people who used no positive self-statement.
They also felt worse than the comparison group when they focused on how the statement was only true.
Swann, of University of Texas at Austin posited that if someone has low self-esteem, a positive self-statement is inconsistent with the person’s experience and self-assessment.
As a result, it would not have “the ring of truth”, and would not have the intended bolstering effect on self-confidence and self-esteem.
This view was validated when participants with high self-esteem felt better when they repeated the positive self-statement statement and when they focused on how it was true.
Ibrahim Senay
Ibrahim Senayof Istanbul Sehir Universitesi,Penn’sDolores Albarracin, and Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi investigated the relative impact of “declarative” self-talk, such as “positive thinking” or affirmations (“I will prevail!”) espoused by Maxwell Maltz, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Anthony Robbins.
They compared this well-known self-improvement practice with “interrogative” self-talk, such as introspective self-inquiry (“Can I prevail?”).
Dolores Albarracín
Half the participants spent one minute asking themselves whether they would complete a series of anagrams before that actually began to work on the anagrams, whereas the other half to told themselves that they would complete the task.
Surprisingly to advocates of self-affirmation, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.
Kenji Noguchi
The researchers extended and replicated the finding by asking one group of volunteers to write “Will I” 20 times before attempting to solve the anagrams.
Another group wrote “I will” 20 times, and the third group wrote “Will” 20 times.
Those were “primed” with the self-questioning “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other groups.
Albarracin suggested that “asking questions forces you to define if you really want something…even in the presence of obstacles,” so is more effective than possibly unrealistically-positive self-affirmations.
The researchers suggest that interrogative self-talk, like interrogative discussions in behavioral counseling, persuasive messages in advertising, editorials, or legal settings, and culturally “polite” behavioral requests, may elicit more intrinsically-motivated action and goal-directed behavior.
In fact, interrogative self-talk may counteract suppressors to intrinsic motivation and seems to be a learnable practice that may be transferred or “generalized” from individualized learning in counseling settings.
Subjunctive interrogative self-talk, rather than its rhetoricalcounterpart, can ignite innovation and creativity in organizational settings. Min Basadur suggested that asking oneself and other How Might We (HMW) ….? enables innovators to defer judgment and create more options without self-conscious limitations.
Tim Brown
Embracing the uncertainty of “might” enables innovators to propose ideas “that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas,” said Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown.
This type of self-interrogatory, sometimes presented in group innovation “sprints” at Google Ventures, IDEO, Frog Design or other thought-leading organizations has been effectively been combined with structured innovative problem-solving:
Understand by analyzing problems and requirements through process evaluation,
Diverge by applying constraints to “think differently,”
Decide by selecting solution to develop,
Prototype by “storyboarding” the user experience, process, obstacles,
Validate by testing prototypes with potential solution users.
-*Under what circumstances have you found ‘interrogative’ self-talk to enhance performance more than affirmative self-talk?
When employees mask their true feelings in work situations, they may engage in “surface acting” — or displaying appropriate, but unfelt facial expressions, verbal interactions, and body language.
She contrasted “surface acting” with “deep acting” in which the person:
Exhibits the emotion actually felt,
Uses past emotional experiences to elicit real emotion and empathic connection with others, in a form of “organizational method acting.”
Christina Maslach
Surface acting can lead to occupational “burnout,” characterized by emotional exhaustion and detachment from others and reduced workplace performance, noted University of California Berkeley’s Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson.
Surface Acting can also take a toll, resulting in generalized stress and reduced quality of life outside of work, according to Georgetown’s Patricia Hewlin, and supported by separate findings by University of Lethbridge’s Karen H. Hunter, Andrew A. Luchak of University of Alberta and Athabasca University’s Kay Devine.
They identified stress-inducing behaviors including:
Impression management, characterized by ingratiating behaviors in two-person relationships.
In the workplace, these can influence career outcomes, according to Georgia Tech’s Robert C. Liden and Terence R. Mitchell of University of Washington.
Even people not performing customer-facing roles may encounter situations in which they must behave in “appropriate” ways inconsistent with their true feelings, and experience similar stress spillover from “surface acting” at work.
-*How do you prevent “burnout” when workplace settings seem to require “surface acting”?
-*In what organizational contexts have you observed “Facades of Conformity” and their consequences?
Manz and Neck adapted these therapeutic concepts to business organizations and managerial relationships, while retaining key concepts including identifying cognitive errors, and developing disputation strategies, followed by replacement self-statements.
Aaron Beck
They outlined a five-step self-management process they called Integrative Thought Self-Leadership Procedure, drawing on CBT, RET and “Feeling Good”:
Observe and Record thoughts,
Analyze thoughts,
Develop new thoughts,
Substitute new thoughts,
Monitor and Maintain new, productive thoughts.
-*What practices do you use to develop and apply productive thought patterns under pressure?
People adopt differing mindsets when trying to achieve quality results and increase learning at work, according to Harvard’s David Perkins, Michele Rigolizzo, and Marga Biller.
They expanded the distinction between fixed mindset and growth mindset described by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, and assessed with a brief questionnaire.
Michele Rigolizzo
Completion mindset focuses on finishing a routine task with little mental investment. Accidental learning occurs with this stance, and employees who experience fear of failure, impersonal work environments, and monotonous tasks usually operate with this mindset.
Performance mindsetaims to complete a task without reflecting on how to can re-apply the process in the future.
Marga Biller
An example is temporarily using a technology but not investing attention to become an expert user. Incidental learningis a by-product of this mindset, described by Columbia’s Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins of University of Georgia.
Development mindsetseeks to complete a task and to learn applicable approaches when completing similar future tasks.
An example is leading an effective kickoff meeting to set the tone for productive work sessions.
Victoria Marsick
Intentional learning occurs with active involvement in observing, analyzing, and reflecting on the process.
To move beyond a Completion stance, Perkins and team suggested that organizational leaders encourage quality work and active reflection on that work to set the expectation of a Development mindset.
In addition, leaders can also implement collaboration and feedback systems with time for reflection on completed tasks.
-*How do you enable team members to adopt a Development Mindset?
One of the foundations of psychotherapy and executive coaching is the notion that provocative, well-timed, penetrating questions can provoke insight and initiative behavior change.
David Cooperrider
One example of a systematic approach to high-impact questioning isAppreciative Inquiry, developed by Case Western’s David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, and it has been integrated into interpersonal conversations including counseling, coaching, and therapy.
University of Leeds’s Tracy Sandberg and Mark Conner demonstrated the impact of provocative questions when they asked women about anticipated regret if they ignored a preventive health assessment.
Tracy Sandberg
More than 4,250 women received an invitation for cervical screening and information leaflet.
A sub-group also received a Theory of Planned Behavior questionnaire developed by University of Massachusetts’s Icek Ajzen.
Another sub-group received both the questionnaire and additional inquiries about their anticipated regrets if they didn’t participate in the screening.
Icek Ajzen
Attendance rates were higher for those who completed the questionnaire about anticipated behavior, and significantly greater for those who also completed the regret questions.
This may be an example of FoMO – Fear of Missing Out, described by University of Essex’s Andrew K. Przybylski and Valerie Gladwell with Kou Murayama of UCLA and University of Rochester.
Andrew Przybylski
Likewise, “self- prophecy” questions about intention to cheat were associated with reduced cheating among college students, found University of California, Irvine’s Eric Spangenberg and Carl Obermiller of Seattle University.
The question–behavior effect was further demonstrated in a meta-analytic study by Spangenberg with SUNY’s Ioannis Kareklas, Berna Devezer of University of Idaho, and Washington State University’s David E. Sprott.
Eric Spangenberg
“When you ask a question, it…creates a spring-loaded intention,” and reminds of social norms and past shortcomings, posited Sprott.
“It’s that disconnect between what we should do and what we know we have done that motivates us.”
David Sprott
Norm-reinforcing questions are often effective in encouraging proactive behavior aligned with recognized best practices, such as a Public Service Announcement endorsing pre-school vaccination: Ninety-five percentof parents get their kids vaccinated before kindergarten.
Will you make sure your child is up to date?
William Miller
These pointed questions are an “active ingredient” of Motivational Interviewing developed by University of New Mexico’s William Miller and Stephen Rollnick of Cardiff University, and have been associated with heightened motivation to reduce alcohol and drug consumption.
These finding point to the power of carefully-designed questions to provoke deeper self-reflection and related behavior change.
-*What questions have you used to encourage behavior change?
Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary 