Cosmetic surgery is the fastest-growing medical expenditure in the U.S, and Americans spend more on personal grooming than on reading material.
Even during the recession of 2008, Americans spent at least $200 billion on products and services to enhance their appearances, according to Stanford’s Margaret Neale and Peter Belmi, now of University of Virginia.
The team asked participants to write about a time when they felt more attractive or less attractive, and then indicate whether they agreed with statements such as, “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups,” and “Lower wages for women and ethnic minorities simply reflect lower skill and education level.”
As a result, people who rate themselves as attractive generally feel that people in lower social strata are there due to their characteristics or behaviors. These beliefs are associated with less willingness to donate money to a social equality non-profit organization (the Occupy movement).
Peter Belmi
By contrast, people who thought they were less attractive also thought they belonged to a lower-status social group, and rejected existing social hierarchies.
They attributed unequal social status to external factors often beyond the full control of those in less prestigious social groups. One example is lack of access to quality education.
Unlike self-perceptions of attractiveness, empathy and integrity were not related to people’s views of their social class and others’ place in society.
-*How have you seen appearance affect acceptance or organizational hierarchy and philanthropic giving?
Task performance, social interaction skills, and empathic attunement increase for women under stress, but not for men.
Women seek social support (“become prosocial”), but men turn toward themselves and away from others when they experience stress, according to University of Vienna’s Livia Tomova and Claus Lamm with Bernadette von Dawans and Markus Heinrichs of University of Freiburg, and Giorgia Silani, International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA-ISAS, Trieste
Claus Lamm
Tomova’s team evaluated the impact of stress on 20 women and 20 men, elicited by Clemens Kirschbaum, Karl-Martin Pirke, and Dirk Hellhammer’s (Universität) Trier Social Stress Test, in which participants delivered a speech and performed mental arithmetic in front of an audience.
Bernadette von Dawans
Tomova and team measured “self-other distinctions” during three types of tasks:
Imitated movements (perceptual-motor task): “Move objects on a shelf according to the instructions of a director,” requiring participants to “disentangle their own visual perspective” from that of the director,
Identifying one’s own emotions or other people’s emotions (emotional task), or
Making a judgment from another person’s perspective (cognitive task).
Markus Heinrichs
As a comparison, 20 men and 20 women completed non-stressful activities like “easy counting.”
Studies of stress were pioneered by Harvard’s Walter Cannon, who described the fight-or-flight response in1914, and popularized by Hans Selye of Université de Montréal.
Hans Selye
People can cope with stress by:
Seeking social support or
Reducing “internal cognitive load” that requires additional coping efforts.
One way to reduce “internal cognitive load” is to disconnect from others’ perspective and emotional experience through reducing empathy.
Besides this process of “mentalizing,” empathy also requires people to distinguish their representations of themselves from representations of others.
Clemens Kirschbaum
Women under stress “flexibly disambiguate” mental representations of themselves from others and increase “self-other distinction,” found Tomova’s research group.
This cognitive style enables women to more accurately perceive others’ perspective, enabling more empathic interaction with others in a “tend-and-befriend” approach.
In contrast, men under stress typically turn inward with “increased egocentricity” to conserve mental and emotional resources for “flight-or-flight” responses, leading to less adaptive social interactions.
Dirk Hellhammer
These differences may be rooted in gender-specific learning experiences and biological differences including higher levels of oxytocin (a hormone that mediates social behaviors) among women who experienced stress, noted Tomova’s research team.
As a result, women may seek more frequently seek social support, may interact with others more empathically, and may be rewarded with external help in a reinforcing cycle.
Nikolas Rose
Social support can improve performance and reduce stress, probably because the brain is “wired for sociality,” according to King’s College London’s Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached of Harvard.
Gender differences in performance under stress are associated with different styles of “sociality” and empathic insight.
-*How do you maintain task performance and “Emotional Intelligence” of empathy when experiencing stress?
Entrepreneurs create jobs and contribute to economic growth with early investment by financial backers who trust the perceived business proposal’s viability and the founders’ previous experience.
Brooks and colleagues enlisted 60 experienced investors to:
Evaluate videos of 90 randomly-selected presentations by entrepreneurs at three pitch contests in the US,
Comment on presenters’ appearance and effectiveness.
Fiona E. Murray
Male presenters who were rated more attractive were 36% more likely to receive funding than men judged as less attractive, but there was no difference in funding rates for women based on attractiveness ratings.
In a separate study, investors evaluated identical pitches delivered by a man or a woman, and rated male-narrated pitches as more persuasive, logical and fact-based compared with the same presentation delivered by a woman.
These finding suggest that financial backers favor attractive male entrepreneurs, leaving women entrepreneurs – attractive or not – at a disadvantage in creating new businesses, jobs, and economic growth.
This finding underscores financial backers’ preference for male entrepreneurs’ proposals, based on attractive men’s greater perceived persuasiveness than women or less attractive men.
Edward Thorndike
Previousblogposts have noted the “halo effect” of physical attractiveness leading to positive attributions of intelligence, competence, and likeability, originally described by Columbia’s Edward Thorndike.
Woods’ latest findings point to the double advantage enjoyed by attractive men seeking new venture funding.
Aspiring women entrepreneurs, on the other hand, continue to encounter significant unacknowledged disadvantages, not improved by physical attractiveness.
Eleanor Holly Buttner
However, these findings were not confirmed by University of North Carolina’s E. Holly Buttner and Benson Rosen in their investigation of bank loan officers’ funding decisions.
Loan officers, who typically make funding decisions based on the business plan and interview with the entrepreneur, evaluated a:
Business plan or
Business plan plus a videotaped interview conducted by a loan officer with a male or female entrepreneur seeking a loan to start a business.
Benson Rosen
Bankers rated their likelihood of:
Recommending loan approval of the requested amount,
Making a counteroffer of a smaller amount, which they specified.
Student volunteers’ loan funding decisions were compared with loan professionals, and the younger generation of lay people made larger counteroffers to the male entrepreneur instead of the female when they evaluated both the business plan and the loan interview, Loan officers, in contrast, made significantly more cautious and conservative funding decisions than student participants.
Another source of funding is “angel investors,” and Oregon State University’s John R. Becker-Blease and Jeffrey E. Sohl of University of New Hampshire found no difference in funding for male and female entrepreneurs.
They noted that women seek private investments substantially lower rates than men, but they are equally likely to receive investment.
“Executive Derailment” occurs when a person with an executive-level position is seen by others to “fail” in achieving the most important goals for the role, including business outcomes and interpersonal relationships. Ellen Van Velsor and Jean Brittain Leslie of The Center for Creative Leadership’s reassessed and confirmed their earlier findings on derailment dynamics.
Jean Brittain Leslie
Executive derailment can occur when:
An executive overuses or underuses a strength, resulting in a performance liability,
Superiors overlook an executive’s performance-impairing deficiencies in personality or character,
An executive encounters extreme market challenges or personal difficulties,
Career advancement leads the executive to behave arrogantly.
Derailed executives typically:
Do not achieve business objectives,
Are unable or unwilling to adapt to frequent changes,
Have interpersonal problems,
Lack broad functional experience,
Do not hire the right people and build a cohesive, readable team.
Derailment can also occur when an executive’s interpersonal skill deficits interact with adverse organizational conditions:
Unclear organizational direction, with misalignment between corporate strategy and objectives,
Lack of role mandate or clarity, in which the executive is not endowed with necessary power and authority to achieve the organization’s goals,
Lack of rapport with key stakeholders including the board, the management team, employees,
Inability to perceive, understand and respond to strategic market trends, customer priorities,
Inaccurate prioritization and abdicating accountability for delivery, execution, performance,
Unresponsiveness to rapidly changing market conditions and innovation opportunities.
Joyce Hogan-Robert Hogan
“Derailing” personality measures were empirically differentiated from “everyday” personality tendencies by Robert Hogan and Joyce Hogan, then at University of Tulsa, with Gordon Curphy, then at Personnel Decisions, Inc.
This approach differs from self-report inventories because it is based on “socioanalytic theory” to understand individual differences in work performance, and avoids biases inherent in self report.
Hogan and Hogan observed a high base rate for managerial incompetence in any organizations based on validated assessment inventories. These tools, they argue, can promote professional development by providing candid performance feedback to help managers modify dysfunctional behaviors associated with derailment. However, this quantified feedback is valuable only if inept managers are willing to receive feedback and coaching, and develop a plan to observe and modify unproductive behaviors.
Similarly, the Five Factor model’s measures correlated with leadership behaviors, reported University of Notre Dame’s Timothy Judge, and Remus Ilies of National University of Singapore, with Joyce Bono of University of Florida and Miami University’s Megan Gerhardt.
Managers hold gender biases in granting flex time requests, and most employees inaccurately anticipate managers’ likelihood of approving these proposals, found Yale’s Victoria Brescoll with Jennifer Glass of University of Texas-Austin and Harvard’s Alexandra Sedlovskaya.
Men in high-status jobs were more likely receive approval for career development, and men in low-level jobs tended to get flex time for family issues.
Both groups were more likely than women to receive requested work schedule accommodations.
Women in low-status jobs with childcare requirements were among the least likely to receive accommodations from their managers.
In addition, all employees tended to overestimate the likelihood of receiving a flexible work schedule and underestimate “backlash” after the request.
Women in high-status jobs requesting flextime for career advancement were most likely to expect their requests would be granted, yet they had a lower approval rate than men in high-status jobs.
Conversely, these schedule-accommodated men were least likely to believe they would receive flextime for career development reasons, yet they often received approval.
Brescoll suggested that men in high-status positions who are granted flex time to pursue career development achieve more rapid career advancement. In contrast, women in high-status roles who request flex time for the same purpose may “…besuspected of hiding the true reason for their request, or they may be viewed as less deserving of further training because it’s assumed that they’ll leave their jobs in the future.”
Women in the workplace encounter a “gendered wall of resistance” (schedule accommodation denials due to gender), whereas men face “status-specific resistance” (objections based on reason for flex time request), according to Brescoll.
Employees’ lack of awareness of managerial bias in granting flextime coupled with realistic concern about negative consequences of workplace accommodation requests can lead to lower productivity, unnecessary turnover and persistent social problems like child poverty and lack of upward mobility for low-wage workers.
Laurie Rudman
In fact, volunteers attributed more “feminine” traits (weakness, uncertainty) and fewer “masculine” traits (competitiveness, ambition) to male leave requestors, found Laurie Rudman and Kris Mescher of Rutgers University.
Kris Mescher
Rudman and Mescher asked volunteers of both genders and diverse ethnic backgrounds to evaluate fictional vignettes concerning men who requested a 12-week family leave to care for a sick child or an ailing mother.
When men were viewed with the “feminine stigma” of “weakness” and other traditionally-feminine characteristics, they were more likely to incur organizational penalties.
Their experimental study found that volunteers assigned lower job evaluations, less masculine and more feminine traits to employees who requested flex time than those with traditional work arrangements.
Jasmine Siddiqi
However, evaluators judged requestors as “warmer” and more “moral,” suggesting that flexibility-seeking employees may be more well-liked and judged as a desirable work colleague.
-*How do you counteract implicit biases in approving workplace flexibility arrangements?
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?
Women in Engineering or Information Technology organizations may find themselves the only person using the women’s restroom, one advantage in light of well-documented workplace challenges associated with minority status.
Men face similar challenges when they work in Human Resources, Marketing, or Communications, where more women are employed.
In fact, both women and men held implicit biases against women-dominated groups, found Research by NYU’s Tessa West, Madeline Heilman, Lindy Gullett, and Joe Magee with Corinne Moss-Racusin of Yale University.
Madeline Heilman
The team organized five-person groups to perform “a male-typed cooperative task” as quickly as possible.
Groups differed in proportion of women to men:
Group gender composition also negatively affected team cohesiveness: After 10 weeks, those who worked in groups with more women said they were less interested in working together again.
West and team suggested that women in work groups may be subject to “stigma-by-association,” when negative evaluations of a stigmatized individual spread to an associated individual.
As a result, men who work with women may be subject to a “contagion effect” and may be perceived as having similar stereotypic strengths and weaknesses.
Carol Kulik
Hugh Bainbridge
The prevalence of stigma-by-association in the workplace was conceptualized by University of South Australia’s Carol Kulik with Hugh Bainbridge of University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne’s Christina Cregan in a“masculine” performance task.
Women were evaluated as less competent at “masculine” tasks, and this negative evaluation was also assigned all group members through stigma contagion.
Michelle Haynes
NYU’s Heilman extended her work on women’s perceptions of their capabilities in an ingeniously-designed study with Michelle Haynes of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
They asked participants to work remotely with another person on tasks traditionally associated with a male role: Acting as a managing supervisor at an investment company.
Volunteers were paired with male or female “partners,” but each volunteer actually acted alone without a teammate.
In fact, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall.
Alexander Pentland
This means that a group’s performance is more dependent on interaction behaviors and norms than on individual cognitive capabilities.
These findings support Emotional Intelligence theory’s assertion that self-management and interpersonal behaviors are more important to individual achievement than measured intelligence.
Nada Hashmi
Wooley’s team assigned nearly 700 volunteers to groups ranging between two and five members to work on visual puzzles, negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments.
Collective intelligence of each group accounted for only about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.
Thomas W. Malone
The remaining 60% contribution to collective intelligence depends on members’ “social sensitivity“: Accurately perceiving each other’s emotions, and ability to more equally share conversational turns. Groups with more women excelled in both capabilities, and the team noted that accurate social perception and conversational turn-taking skills that may be further developed with attention and effort.
-*How can workplace Inclusion and Diversity programs mitigate the impact of stigma-by-association?
More than thirty years ago, University of Florida’s Marvin Shaw observed that participation in small group approximates the 80/20 Principle:
Marvin Shaw
In a 5 member team, 2 members make 70% of comments
In a 6 member team, 3 members make 70% of comments
In a 8 member team, 3 members make 67% of comments
Most of the comment contributors were men, and those who speak most are typically viewed as most influential, according to Melissa Thomas-Hunt of University of Virginia.
This suggests that women can be at a disadvantage in groups if they don’t speak up.
Conversely, men who possessed expertise were more influential than expert women.
Overall group task performance was affected by these dynamics: Groups with a female expert made less accurate assessments than groups with a male expert, perhaps because females’ expertise was discounted or ignored due to gender-related expectations for specific competencies.
They also found that women spoke equally in small groups when there were few women but the decision required unanimous vote.
One implication is that women benefit from building consensus when they are in the minority.
Powerful women who talk more than male counterparts incur backlash from both male and female observers, according to Victoria Brescoll of Yale.
A high-power woman who talked much less than otherswas judged as equally competent and capable of leading as a high-power man who talked much more than others.
Raters were less generous in their ratings of a high-power male who talked much less than others: He was judged as equally incompetent and unsuitable for leadership as a high-power female who talked much more than expected.
Women’s tendency not to speak up in groups begins well before they enter the workplace, found Harvard’s Catherine Krupnick.
She and her team investigated differences between male and female students’ participation in classroom discussion and the impact of the instructor’s gender on students’ participation.
Welch-Torres linked these behaviors to measures of self-esteem and her findings are similar to those of Stanford’s Laraine Zappert and Kendyll Stansbury who reported that female graduate students held lower self-esteem, less trust in their judgments, and greater fear of making mistakes than male graduate students.
Recommendations to help women move toward fuller participation in small groups from Melissa Thomas-Hunt and Margaret Neale of Stanford include:
Margaret Neale
Before a meeting:
Ask trusted attendees to:
Support your ideas during the meeting,
Solicit your input in the meeting,
Refer to your specific expertise during the meeting,
Set a goal for number of contributions in the first five minutes of a meeting.
In a meeting:
If interrupted: Restate, rephrase and provide specific evidence based on expertise,
Showcase others’ expertise by soliciting their input,
Create environment in which other participants have equal opportunity to participate,
Urge members to consider each alternative, rather than disregarding suggestions presented by “lower status” individual.
-*How do you ensure that your expertise is recognized and influential in small group settings?
–*What “best practices” do you apply to ensure active participation by women and minority-group members?
She studied followership of incompetent, corrupt, and evil leadership in public and business settings.
Kellerman concluded that both followers and uninvolved bystanders who do not object enable bad leaders to continue their practices.
John Darley
Supporting her contention is experimental demonstration of the powerful impact of “Bystander Apathy” by New York University’s John Darley and Bibb Latané of Columbia.
Bibb Latane
Because followers have less power and status than leaders, complacent observership can be the norm when organizations don’t establish processes to report ineffective and unethical leadership practices with protections against negative repercussions.
Given the challenges of challenging bad leadership practices, followers can increase chances of understanding organizational culture and leadership practices by conducting pre-employment “due diligence” before accepting a role,
How do you prefer to communicate with your direct reports?
How do you mentor, coach, and develop your direct reports?
How would you describe your work style?
How do you manage conflict within the team?
How will you measure success in this role after a year?
What are your three most important values?
How do your direct reports describe your management style?
How are you and your team perceived in the organizations?
To what extent do you involve your team members in decisions?
How do you support work-life balance for team members?
These queries can’t guard against unexpected circumstances like managers rapidly moving to a new group or restructurings that result in an unevaluated new manager, role, or group.
However, they may provide additional guidance to potential “warning signs” of “misemployment,” and reduce responsibility for complicity in enabling poor management styles.
-*What questions have you found most effective in assessing work style “fit” and compatibility with a potential manager? -*What “bad leader” roles have you observed in your organzation?
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?
Cosmetic surgery is the fastest-growing medical expenditure in the U.S, and Americans spend more on personal grooming than on reading material.
The team asked participants to write about a time when they felt more attractive or less attractive, and then indicate whether they agreed with statements such as, “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups,” and “Lower wages for women and ethnic minorities simply reflect lower skill and education level.”
As a result, people who rate themselves as attractive generally feel that people in lower social strata are there due to their characteristics or behaviors.
Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary 