Category Archives: Resilience

Resilience

Gender Transitions Show Gender Differences in Pay, Workplace Experience

People who change gender continue to use their education and experience at work. However, many of these people report that their compensation, degree of respect, and recognition at work changed following gender change.
This suggests that gender can directly affect compensation and workplace interactions.

Two Stanford professors’ personal experiences in gender transition were highlighted by University of Chicago’s Kristen Schilt.

Joan Roughgarden – Jonathan Roughgarden

Stanford’s Joan Roughgarden, was an evolutionary biologist for more than 25 years as Jonathan Roughgarden before she made her male-to-female (MTF) transition.
Known for her work integrating evolutionary theory with Christian beliefs (“theistic evolutionism”), she reported feeling less able to make bold conjectures and no longer had “the right to be wrong.”

Her experience contrasts with Stanford colleague, neurobiologist Ben Barres, who made scientific contributions as Barbara Barres until after he was 40.

Barbara Barres – Ben Barres

After his female-to-male (FTM) transition, Ben delivered a lecture at Whitehead Institute, where an audience member commented, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but, then, his work is much better than his sister’s.”

Schilt surveyed FTM and MTF to compare earnings and employment experiences before and after gender transitions with questions similar to 2002 Current Population Survey (CPS) survey items:

Last job before gender transition,
First job after gender transition,
Most recent job.

Kristen Schilt

Female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs) reported that as men, they had more authority, reward, and respect in the workplace than they received as women, even when they remained in the same jobs.

Height and skin color affected potential advantages enjoyed by FTM.

Tall, white FTMs experienced greater benefits than short FTMs and FTMs of color.
In contrast, MTF reported reduced authority and pay, and often harassment and termination.

University of Illinois’s Donald McCloskey, for example, was told by his department chair “in jest” that he could expect a salary reduction when he became Deirdre McCloskey.

Deirdre McCloskey

However, salary reduction was no joke for MTFs in Schilt’s survey sample.
Participants reported significant losses of 12% in hourly earnings after becoming female.

Additionally, MTFs transitioned on average 10 years later than FTMs, delaying the loss of financial advantages attributable to male gender.

FTMs, however, experienced no change in earnings or small positive increases up to 7.5% in earnings after transitioning to becoming men.

Any gender transition was associated with risks of harassment and discrimination, reported more frequently in “blue-collar” jobs, particularly for those with “non-normative” appearance and not consistently “passing” as the other gender.

These “naturalistic experiments” confirm continuing gender-based pay discrepancies.

-*To what extent have you observed these gender-linked differences in compensation and workplace credibility?

RELATED POSTS:

©Kathryn Welds

“Surface Acting” At Work Leads to Stress Spillover

Leave a reply

David Wagner

Situations outside the workplace can affect employees’ productivity, commitment, mindset, attitudes, and health.

Similarly, experiences at work can affect employees’ quality of life at work and outside of work.
Workplace Employee Assistance Programs, on-site medical centers, concierges, meals, and fitness centers are intended to address this bi-directional influence to improve employee retention and productivity.

Christopher Barnes

When employees suppress their true feelings about work experiences, they engage in “surface acting” as they display appropriate, but unfelt facial expressions, verbal interactions, and body language.

Brent Scott

Surface acting at work was associated with emotional exhaustion, work-to-family conflict, and insomnia outside of work for more than 70 volunteers in a high stress public service occupation, found Singapore Management University’s David T. Wagner, Christopher M. Barnes of University of Washington, and Brent A. Scott of Michigan State University.

Arlie Hochschild

“Emotional labor” was Arlie Hochshild’s earlier term for “surface acting” in customer service interactions when employees present prescribed verbalizations and emotions.

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” at work can lead to occupational “burnout,” characterized by emotional exhaustion, detachment from others, and reduced workplace performance, noted University of California Berkeley’s Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson.

Céleste Brotheridge

In contrast, high emotional labor with deep acting was associated with a greater sense of personal accomplishment in research by University of Regina’s Celeste Brotheridge and Alicia Grandey of Penn State.

Veikko Surakka

Recipients of “surface acting” are usually accurately detect that it’s an inauthentic display, according to University of Tampere Veikko Surakka and Jari K Hietanen of University of Helsinki.

Patricia Hewlin

Similarly, “Facades of Conformity,” impression management, and
unwilling compliance are associated with generalized stress and reduced quality of life outside of work, according to Georgetown’s Patricia Hewlin, University of Lethbridge’s Karen H. Hunter, Andrew A. Luchak of University of Alberta, and Athabasca University’s Kay Devine.

These three experiences are defined as:

Kay Devine

Facades of Conformity (FOC), or behaviors enacted to appear that an employee embraces organizational values.
These behaviors usually are associated with non-participative work environments, minority status, and high self-monitoring.

Terence Mitchell

Impression management, characterized by ingratiating behaviors in two-person relationships which can favorably influence career outcomes, according to Georgia Tech’s Robert C. Liden and Terence R. Mitchell of University of Washington.

Compliance, or publicly stating changed beliefs in response to external pressures, without truly modifying personal convictions, according to Leon Festinger.

Leon Festinger

Most people at work encounter situations in which they choose to behave in “appropriate” ways that are inconsistent with their true feelings, and may experience similar stress spillover from “surface acting” at work.

-*How do you prevent “burnout” when workplace settings seem to require “surface acting”?

 RELATED POSTS:

©Kathryn Welds

Coaching Can Increase Goal Achievement, Performance

5 Replies

Anthony Grant

Coaching is a collaborative process to facilitate coachees’ self-directed learning, personal growth, and goal attainment, according to University of Sydney’s Anthony Grant.

He integrated practices from solution-focused approaches and cognitive-behavioral interventions into Solution-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral (SF-CB) Coaching and a “Coach Yourself” program with Jane Greene.

Participants reported increased:

Goal attainment,
Quality of life,
Mental health

John Franklin

on the Self-Reflection and Insight Scale, developed with Macquarie University colleagues John Franklin and Peter Langford.

Two types of empirical studies provide evidence about coaching’s efficacy:

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), in which participants receive one of several interventions or no intervention.
This is considered the more credible research approach.
Peter Langford

Quasi-Experimental Field Studies (QEFS), which use “time series analysis” but not random participants to measure outcomes.

Linley Curtayne

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) found several effects among executives who received 360-degree feedback and four coaching sessions over ten weeks:

Lower stress, according to Grant with University of Sydney colleagues Linley Curtayne and Geraldine Burton,

Geraldine Burton

Greater goal attainment compared with an eight week educational mindfulness-based health coaching program, reported by University of Sydney’s Gordon B. Spence, Michael J. Cavanagh and Grant,

Gordon Spence
- Increased goal commitment, and environmental mastery, compared with peer coaching among adults in a Solution Focused/Cognitive Behavioral (SF/CB) life coaching program, according to research by Spence and Grant,

Michael Cavanagh

Increased cognitive hardiness, mental health, and hope among female high school students in a 10 session solution-focused cognitive-behavioral (SF-CB) life coaching program, found University of Wollongong’s L.S. Green, Grant, and Josephine Rynsaardt,

Lindsay Oades
- Increased goal striving, well-being, hope, with gains maintained up to 30 weeks, reported by Grant and Green with University of Wollongong colleague Lindsay G. Oades.

C. RIck Snyder

Increased hope is crucial to pursue any goal, according to University of Kansas’s C.R. Snyder, Scott T. Michael of University of Washington, and Ohio State’s Jennifer Cheavens.

Individuals seeking change are more effective when they:

Develop one or more ways to achieve a goals (“pathways”),
Use these routes to reach the goal (“agency”).

Edward Deci – Richard Ryan

Three additional elements contribute to goal achievement, suggested University of Rochester’s Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan:

Competence,
Autonomy,
Relatedness.

According to their Self-Determination Theory (SDT), these characteristics are associated with increased:

Goal motivation,
Enhanced performance,
Persistence,
Mental health.

Kristina Gyllensten

The other category of research, Quasi-Experimental Field Studies (QEFS), reported that coaching for managers of a federal government:

Increased expectations of self-efficacy and goal achievement, in research by Will J.G. Evers, Andre Brouwers and Welko Tomic of The Open University.

Stephen Palmer
- Decreased anxiety and stress among UK finance organization participants, in findings by Kristina Gyllensten and Stephen Palmer of City University London.

These empirical studies validate coaching’s contribution to participants’ increased goal attainment and increased satisfaction, well-being, and hope.

-*How do you “coach yourself” and others toward increased goal attainment and performance?

-*What are the “active ingredients” of effective coaching practices?

RELATED POSTS:

©Kathryn Welds

Mindfulness Meditation Improves Decisions, Reduces Sunk-Cost Bias

4 Replies

Sigal Barsade

Andrew Hafenbrack

“Sunk-cost bias” is the tendency to continue unsuccessful actions after time and money have been invested.
Frequent examples include:

Holding poorly-performing stock market investments,
Staying in unsatisfying personal relationships,
Continuing ineffective military engagements.

Zoe Kinias

In these cases, people focus on past behaviors rather than current circumstances, leading to emotion-driven decision biases.

Brief meditation sessions can help decision makers consider factors beyond past “sunk costs,” reported Wharton’s Sigal Barsade, with Andrew C. Hafenbrack and Zoe Kinias of INSEAD.

Meditation practices can:

Increase focus on the present moment,
Shift attention away from past and future actions,
Increase positive emotions.

Kirk Brown

The team asked volunteers to complete Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, developed by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Kirk Brown and Richard Ryan of University of Rochester.

Richard Ryan

They also measured participants’ ability to resist “sunk cost” bias using Adult Decision-Making Competence Inventory, developed by Leeds University’s Wändi Bruine de Bruin with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon and RAND Corporation’s Andrew M. Parker.

Wändi Bruine de Bruin

In a decision task, participants could take an action or to do nothing, as a measure of sunk-cost bias.
Taking action indicated resistance to the sunk-cost bias, whereas those who took no action were influenced by the sunk-cost bias.

Baruch Fischhoff

Volunteers who listened to a 15-minute focused-breathing guided meditation were more likely to choose action, resisting sunk-cost bias, than those who had not heard the meditation instruction.

Andrew M Parker

Barsade’s team noted that, “People who meditated focused less on the past and future, which led to them experiencing less negative emotion. That helped them reduce the sunk-cost bias.”

Jochen Reb

Mindful attention enabled negotiators to craft better deals by “claiming a larger share of the bargaining zone” in “fixed pie” negotiations, found Singapore Management University’s Jochen Reb, Jayanth Narayanan of National University of Singapore, and University of California, Hastings College of the Law’s Darshan Brach.
Effective negotiators also expressed greater satisfaction with the bargaining process and outcome.

Jayanth Narayanan

Mindful attention also leads to a lower negativity bias, the tendency to weigh pessimistic information more heavily than positive, reported Virginia Commonwealth University’s Laura G. Kiken and Natalie J. Shook of West Virginia University.

The team assessed negativity bias with BeanFest, a computer game developed by Shook, with Ohio State’s Russell Fazio and J. Richard Eiser of University of Sheffield.

Natalie Shook

Participants associated novel stimuli with positive or negative outcomes during attitude formation exercises.

Russell Fazio

Volunteers who listened to a mindfulness induction correctly classified positive and negative stimuli more equally, expressed greater optimism, and demonstrated less negativity bias than those in the control condition.

J Richard Eiser

Mindful attention improves decision-making and enhances negotiation outcomes by reducing biases linked to negative emotions.

As a result, taking a brief mental break (“time-out”) during decision-making can improve choices and can reduce the possibility that “the wrong emotions cloud the decision-making process.”

-*How do you reduce bias in making decisions and crafting negotiation proposals?

RELATED POSTS:

©Kathryn Welds

Employee Workplace Friendships: Global Comparisons

Leave a reply

Workplace friendships positively affect task performance, and Americans report fewer friendships at work than employees in other countries.
The result could be reduced productivity and competitive disadvantage for U.S. companies in world markets.

Karen Jehn

Teams composed of friends outperformed acquaintance groups in decision making and effort tasks, reported University of Melbourne’s Karen A. Jehn and Priti Pradhan Shah of University of Minnesota.

Likewise, workplace friendships were associated with more effective performance in a meta-analytic study of more than 160 groups with nearly 78,000 employees by David A. Harrison of University of Texas and colleagues.

Even employees’ perceptions of workplace friendship opportunities affected job involvement and job satisfaction.

Christine M. Riordan

These perceptions indirectly affected organizational commitment and turnover intent among more than 170 employees in a small electric utility, found Adelphi University’s Christine M. Riordan and Rodger W. Griffith of Ohio University.

Olenka Kacperczyk

Fewer than one-third of Americans reported having a close friend at work, one indicator of employee engagement according to The Gallup Organization.
Workplace friendships in the U.S. have significantly declined over the past three (3) decades, but continue to be strong social connections in Polish and Indian organizations, noted MIT’s Olenka Kacperczyk with Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, and Wayne E. Baker of University of Michigan in an unpublished working paper.

Jeffrey Sanchez-Burkes

They conducted surveys across the U.S., Poland, and India and determined that fewer than one-third of Americans reported inviting their closest colleagues to their homes, compared with two-thirds of Polish participants and nearly three-quarters Indian employees.

The discrepancy in amount of off-work time spent with workplace friends in different national groups is significant: Just under half of Indian survey volunteers reported going on holiday with closest co-workers, whereas one-quarter of Polish workers and only 6% of Americans said they shared a holiday with colleagues.

Richard Nisbett

Americans were also significantly less concerned with social interactions during work tasks, compared with Mexican and Mexican-American participants, found University of Southern California’s Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks with Richard E. Nisbett and Oscar Ybarra of University of Michigan.

Oscar Ybarra

After volunteers from each cultural background watched a four-minute video of two people working together, Mexicans and Mexican Americans more accurately recalled social and emotional group content.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans also preferred workgroups with a strong interpersonal orientation, and said that group work performance could be improved by focusing on socio-emotional elements.

Robert D. Putnam

This focus on socio-emotional performance more greatly influenced group task success than the group’s ethnic composition.
This suggests that Americans’ trend toward social disengagement, described as ‘bowling alone’ by Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam, could undermine their productivity.

Adam Grant

One explanation for national differences is that in the U.S., long-term employment is less secure than in countries with labor protection statues.
As a result, people often don’t expect to stay in one role, so they remain detached from colleagues to prepare for voluntary or involuntary job changes.
Wharton’s Adam Grant suggested that “We view co-workers as transitory ties, greeting them with arms-length civility while reserving real camaraderie for outside work.”

Some observers attribute interpersonal disengagement to newer models of working, such as telecommuting and working remotely.

Ravi S. Gajendran

However, evidence from more than 45 studies including about 12,000 employees showed that “telecommuting had no generally detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships,” particularly when people came to an office at least half the time, according to University of Illinois’s Ravi S. Gajendran and David A. Harrison of University of Texas.

Even if workplace relationships don’t become friendships, brief encounters can be high-quality connections characterized by respect, trust, and mutual engagement.

Jane Dutton

These interactions energize participants, suggested University of Michigan’s Jane E. Dutton, and may mitigate potential decreases in employee engagement and collaborative productivity.

-*To what extent do you have strong workplace friendships?

-*How have you seen workplace friendships affect work quality and productivity?

Related Posts:

Working From Home: Calculating Cost, Time, Environmental Savings

©Kathryn Welds

Women Undermine Salary Negotiations with Excessive Gratitude

Leave a reply

Andreas Leibbrandt

Candid self-disclosure hurt women’s salary negotiation outcomes when they revealed that a salary exceeded their expectations, in a study by Monash University’s Andreas Leibbrandt and John A. List of the University of Chicago.

John List

Some women applying for administrative assistant jobs were told that the wages were “negotiable,” and these women achieved higher pay offers than women who received no information. Volunteers in the no-information group frequently revealed that they were willing to work for a lower hourly rate, and they received lower average salary offers.

Edward E. Jones

Though this approach likely leads to lower salary, it could be considered strategic ingratiation to enhance the future working relationship>
However, this approach could lead the negotiation partner to question the applicant’s judgment and confidence.
In addition, this maneuver may delay salary increases because the candidate expresses satisfaction with the original offer.

Strategic ingratiation is observed in several behaviours, according to Duke University’s Edward E. Jones:

-Self-presentation: Self-enhancement or “one-down” humility, providing favors or gifts,

-Flattery: “Other-enhancement” by sharing credible positive comments,

-Agreement: Opinion-conformity and matching non-verbal behaviour.

Steven H. Appelbaum

Positive outcomes from “strategic ingratiation” included promotion or pay increase, observed in a study by Concordia University’s Steven H. Appelbaum and Brent Hughes.

This contradictory finding was explained by situational and individual factors including:

Machiavellianism,
Locus of control,
Work task uniqueness.

Jeffrey Flory

In another of Leibbrandt and List’s randomized field studies, collaborating with Concordia colleague Jeffrey Flory, men did not wait for permission to negotiate when no statement was made about salary discussions.

In fact, male participants said they prefer ambiguous salary negotiation norms or“competitive work settings” in which salary negotiation was typically expected.

Women frequently do not negotiate unless given explicit permission.
but when they are invited to negotiate, they obtained higher salaries as frequently as men

Leibbrandt, List, and Flory concluded that women accept “competitive” workplaces when “the job task is female-oriented” and the local labor market offers few alternatives.

Women who seek higher salaries benefit from proposing their “aspirational salaries” rather than waiting for permission to negotiate.
Women negotiators can achieve better outcomes when they offer moderate expressions of gratitude and avoid revealing their “reserve” salary figure.

-*In what work situations have you benefited from applying ‘strategic ingratiation’?

-*To what extent have you seen expressions of gratitude in negotiation undermine bargaining outcomes?

RELATED POSTS:

©Kathryn Welds

Loneliness as Health Risk; Reframing Can Help

1 Reply

Julianne Holt-Lundstad

Loneliness increases mortality risk by 26 percent, comparable to health risks of obesity, cigarette smoking, and excessive alcohol use, according to Brigham Young University’s Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker, Tyler Harris, and David Stephenson.
Loneliness harms people’s health in addition to triggering emotional discomfort.

Timothy Smith

Loneliness and social isolation differ.
Some people report feeling lonely in the presence of others, whereas socially isolated people may not report loneliness.
However, both loneliness and social isolation increased risk for mortality in a meta-analysis of more than 3 million participants in studies of loneliness, social isolation, and living alone.

Megan Knowles

Lonely individuals benefited more from learning to cope with social performance anxiety than from developing social skills, found Franklin & Marshall College’s Megan L. Knowles, Gale M. Lucas of University of Southern California, Florida State University’s Roy Baumeister, and Wendi L. Gardner of Northwestern.

Gale M. Lucas

More than 85 volunteers completed a loneliness self-report, then identified emotions expressed on computer-presented faces.
Self-described lonely people out-performed non-lonely people when social sensitivity tasks were described as measures of “academic aptitude.”

Roy Baumeister

However, lonely participants performed worse when tasks were presented as tests of “social aptitude.”
These volunteers also reported difficulty forming and maintaining friendships, suggesting that social anxiety leads to “choking” in social “performance” situations.
The result is continued loneliness.

Wendi Gardner

Lonely people may be more socially competent than the non-lonely: They were more skilled at remembering social information in studies by Northwestern’s Wendi L. Gardner, Cynthia L. Pickett of University of California Davis, and Ohio State University’s Marilynn B. Brewer.
The team assessed social recall by presenting volunteers with a simulated computer chat task that provided brief acceptance or rejection experiences, then a diary containing both social and individual events.

Cynthia L. Pickett

When social anxiety could be reattributed to an external cause , task performance increased.
Volunteers consumed a non-caffeinated energy beverage and were told that any jitters they might experience could be attributed to the “caffeine” they’d just consumed.
This explanation provided a plausible but false rationale for anxious feelings.

Alison Wood Brooks

Similarly, Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks found that reframing nervousness as “excitement” helped people perform better on stressful tasks.

An additional coping approach for lonely people is modifying personal mindsets following social loss cues.

Carol Dweck

Fixed mindset, identified by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, is a belief that personal capabilities are limited to present capacities.
This perspective is similar to security-oriented, prevention-focused behaviors of lonely people observed by University of Southern California’s Lucas with Knowles, Gardner, Daniel C. Molden and Valerie E. Jefferis of Northwestern.
This mindset can lead to fear, anxiety, protectiveness and guardedness.

Daniel Molden

In contrast, growth mindset is similar to promotion-focused responses like attempts at social engagement.
This developmental mindset holds that personal capabilities can expand based on commitment, effort, practice, instruction, and correcting mistakes.
This view enables teamwork, collaboration, and social interaction.

Marilynn Brewer

To demonstrate these effects, Lucas’s group gave volunteers cues of acceptance or rejection.
People who received positive primes were more likely to develop a promotion-focused growth mindset.
These participants also reported more effective social thoughts, intentions, and behaviors.

People who experience social anxiety and loneliness can reduce social avoidance by reframing discomfort as “excitement” and by embracing learning and new experiences in a growth mindset.

-*How do you manage loneliness?

Related Posts:

Workplace Incivility is Contagious, Damaging

Leave a reply

James Bartlett

Workplace incivility has measurable negative consequences including reduced employee engagement and productivity, according to North Carolina State University’s James E. Bartlett and Michelle E. Bartlett with Florida Atlantic University’s Thomas G. Reio.

Trevor Foulk

Rudeness in the workplace is contagious and leads people to be vigilant for subsequent slights, reported University of Florida’s Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum, and Amir Erez.
They suggested that low-level workplace hostility enables similar behavior throughout the organization, leading to eroded culture and productivity.

Andrew Woolum

Ninety volunteers practiced negotiation with partners, and those who rated their initial negotiation partner as rude were more likely to be rated as rude by a subsequent partner.

Participants seemed to assimilate and convey the first partner’s rudeness.
The effect persisted during the week between the first and second negotiations.

Amir Erez

Foulk’s team staged interactions between an apologetic late-arriving participant and the study leader, who responded neutrally or rudely.
Then, volunteers completed a timed task to distinguish real words from nonsense words.

Participants who observed the leader’s rude response more quickly identified rude words in a task than participants who had observed the neutral interaction.
Observing rude interactions can “prime” people’s awareness and sensitivity to future uncivil interactions.

Walter Mischel

People who witnessed rudeness were more likely to be rude to others, confirming the impact of observing aggression on future behavior, earlier demonstrated in often-cited “Bobo” experiments by Stanford’s Walter Mischel, Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross.

Mischel’s experiment with Bobo doll

Foulk’s group also observed this priming effect when volunteers watched a video of a rude workplace interaction, then answered a fictitious customer neutral-toned email.
Participants’ responses were more likely to be hostile than those who viewed a polite interaction before responding.

“Rudeness will flavor the way you interpret ambiguous cues,” noted Foulk, who contended that harsh interactions can reduce collaboration and trust in the workplace.

-*How do you stop the spread of workplace incivility?

Related Posts:

Organizational Trust vs “Only the Paranoid Survive”

Leave a reply

Organizational life can be punctuated by uncertainty, leading to mistrust.

Andy Grove

Intel’s former Chairman, Andy Grove, explained his success in guiding the company through a critical product flaw, which threatened Intel’s brand value, noting “Only the Paranoid Survive.”

Christel Lane

However, organizational paranoia’s counterpoint, trust, is associated with productivity, creative problem-solving, employee commitment and retention, found University of Cambridge’s Christel Lane and Reinhardt Bachman of University of Surrey.

Reinhard Bachmann

Likewise, Alan Fox catalogued negative consequences of suspicion in work settings.
Roderick Kramer of Stanford also confirmed that people in organizations often misconstrue and overvalue suspicions, leading to low collaboration and isolation at work.

Roderick Kramer

He observed that people with fewer resources or less power engage in self-protective behaviors, accompanied by increased hypervigilance, consistent with findings by Princeton’s Susan Fiske.

Susan Fiske

These strategies increase the possibility of “paranoid social cognition,” and may lead people to engage in:

-Idiosyncratic interpretations of interactions,

-Sinister attribution error,

-Perception of conspiracy, highlighted by Rutgers’ Ted Goertzel.

Ted Goertzel

To balance “prudent paranoia” with organizational trust, Kramer recommended considering alternate interpretations from people likely to hold different views.

-*How do you balance organizational trust and “prudent paranoia”?

RELATED POSTS:

Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

Leave a reply

Sreedhari Desai

Anxious people were more likely to act with self-interested unethical behavior in studies by University of North Carolina’s Sreedhari Desai and Maryam Kouchaki of Northwestern.

Maryam Kou

Anxiety was also associated with increased threat perception and decreased concern about personal unethical actions in simulated subordinate–supervisor pairs.

Desai noted that “individuals who feel anxious and threatened can take on self-defensive behaviors and focus narrowly on their own basic needs and self-interest.
This can cause them to be less mindful of principles that guide ethical and moral reasoning – and make them rationalize their own actions as acceptable.”

Charles Carver

Engaging in unethical behaviors may offer more options and greater control over outcomes, found University of Miami’s Charles Carver and Michael Scheier of Carnegie Mellon.
Unethical behavior was also associated with feelings of greater autonomy and influence, particularly in ambiguous situations, according to Ohio State’s Roy Lewicki.

Michael Scheier

People who violate ethical norms can experience a ‘cheater’s high‘ instead of guilt, found University of Washington’s Nicole E. Ruedy and Celia Moore of London Business School.

Roy Lewicki

Cheaters in Ruedy’s research reported emotional uplift and self-satisfaction instead of guilt, and Paul Ekman of University of California, San Francisco referred to this exuberance among some cheaters as “duping delight.”

Nicole Ruedy

In Ruedy’s studies, nearly 180 people completed a four-minute anagram task to earn $1 for every correctly unscrambled word.
Participants then rated current feelings from positive to negative, both before and after the task.

Celia Moore

Volunteers’ actual answers on the task were compared from imprints between their answer sheets to determine which participants reported inaccurate results.

More than 40% of these volunteers wrote in additional answers to increase their earnings, and reported significantly positive feelings after cheating on the task.

Even when Ruedy’s team told volunteers that researchers knew participants may be providing inaccurate reports in an insoluble anagram task, more than half the participants reported implausibly high scores.

Cheaters had higher levels of positive affect even when confronted with the team’s awareness of their potential deceit.
They also showed higher levels of self-satisfaction and feeling clever, capable, accomplished, satisfied, and superior.

Earning more money didn’t add to the “cheater’s high,” suggesting a top threshold for positive feelings associated with cheating.

Maurice Schweitzer

These findings suggest that organizational leaders can increase employee quality-of-life and diminish unethical workplace behaviors by clarifying roles, which reduces anxiety.

Leaders also can reduce employees’ anxiety by:

Paul Ekman:

Setting realistic expectations for employee workload,
Adopting Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) and flex time,
Emphasizing the value of experimentation, flexibility, and innovation.

-*How have you seen high-anxiety workplaces affect employees’ ethical judgment?

Related Posts:

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

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

Category Archives: Resilience

Gender Transitions Show Gender Differences in Pay, Workplace Experience

“Surface Acting” At Work Leads to Stress Spillover

Coaching Can Increase Goal Achievement, Performance

Mindfulness Meditation Improves Decisions, Reduces Sunk-Cost Bias

Employee Workplace Friendships: Global Comparisons

Women Undermine Salary Negotiations with Excessive Gratitude

Workplace Incivility is Contagious, Damaging

Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: