Tag Archives: cognitive dissonance

Rationalisation: Coping or Complacency?

Women’s Self-Advocacy: Self-Promotion and Violating the “Female Modesty” Norm

Corinne Moss-Racusin

Some women experience anxiety when required to showcase their accomplishments and skills.
They also understand that self-promotion, personal marketing, and “selling yourself” can be required to be achieve recognition and rewards at work, particularly in the U.S..

Gender norms about “modesty” can contribute to women’s discomfort in highlighting their accomplishments.
These implicit rules advocate that women:

hold a moderate opinion of their skills,
appear humble and avoid pretentiousness,
disclaim personal responsibility for success,
accept personal responsibility for failure.

Laurie Rudman

In contrast, many American men proactively showcase their skills, and observers see self-promoting men as “competent,” “capable,” and “confident.”
Men who do not advertise their successes generally experience “backlash” like women who self-promote, according to Skidmore’s Corinne Moss-Racusin, Julie Phelan of Langer Research Associates, and Rutgers’ Laurie Rudman.
They concluded that anyone who behaves contrary to expected gender stereotypes may be less favorably evaluated and advance more slowly in careers.

Marie‐Hélène Budworth

Women from cultures that value cooperation, collaboration, and collective accomplishment face limited career advancement if they conform to these norms in self-promoting work cultures, found York University‘s Marie‐Hélène Budworth and Sara L. Mann of University of Guelph.

Deborah A. Small

Likewise, women who adhere to implicit “female modesty” expectations are less likely to ask for promotions and salary increases.
This reluctance contributed to women’s long-term pay disparity according to University of Pennsylvania’s Deborah A. Small, Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland’s Michele Gelfand and Hilary Gettman.

Peter Glick

However, if women violate “modesty norms,” they can experience discrimination in hiring, promotion, and wages, reported Rutgers’ Rudman and Peter Glick of Lawrence University.
Likewise, Yale’s Victoria Brescoll noted that these “norm violators” can experience other adverse interpersonal consequences.

Mark Zanna

People who violate norms typically experience physical arousal including discomfort, anxiety, fear, nervousness, perspiration, increased heart rate, reported University of Waterloo’s Mark Zanna and Joel Cooper of Princeton.

However, if participants attribute this physical activation to “excitement” rather than norm violation, they were more likely to:

Engage in self-promotion,
Express interest in self-promotion,
More effectively describe their accomplishments.

Jessi L Smith

Despite women’s and some men’s career “double bind,” people can consciously communicate more effectively about their successes, demonstrated in studies by Montana State University’s Jessi L. Smith and Meghan Huntoon.

More than 75 women wrote sample essays for a merit-based scholarship valued up to USD $5,000.
One group was composed essays about their own accomplishments whereas another group wrote about another person’s accomplishments.

Andrew Elliott

They also completed Achievement Goal Questionnaire – Revised by University of Rochester Andrew Elliot and Kou Murayama of Tokyo Institute of Technology to evaluate “performance approach” and “performance avoidance.”

The laboratory contained a black box described as a “subliminal noise generator.”
Half the volunteers were told the box produced “inaudible but potentially uncomfortable ultra-high frequency noise,” and they were later asked to evaluate “the effects of extraneous distractions on task performance.”
The remaining participants received no information about the black box.

Victoria Brescoll

Women who could attribute their experience to the “noise generator” produced higher-quality, more convincing descriptions of their achievements, measured by being awarded significantly higher scholarships prizes.
These women also said they were more interested in the task, which is typically associated with greater intrinsic motivation to showcase personal accomplishments.

In contrast, women who violated the “modesty” norm without reference to the “noise generator” said they:

Reported less interest in describing their achievements,
Negatively evaluated their performance,
Produced lower-quality essays,
Reported fear of failure.

Women perceived as displaying their accomplishments in essays were negatively evaluated by judges, who awarded significantly less to people wrote about their own accomplishments rather than about someone else’s.

Leon Festinger

One “workaround” for this self-promotion trap is to reciprocally advocate for colleagues.
This strategy highlights colleagues’ accomplishments as organizational policies evolve to encourage everyone’s self-promotion.
An example is Google’s self-nomination process for advancement and promotion, coupled with reminder emails to submit self-nominations.

When people redefine showcasing their professional accomplishments as “part of the job,” they tend to perform more effectively and experience less cognitive dissonance.

How do you manage the norm against women “bragging” and showcasing their accomplishments?

RELATED POSTS:

©Kathryn Welds

Does Customer Recommendation Predict Company Growth?

Leave a reply

Fred Reichheld

Net Promoter Scores gauge customer loyalty, expressed by willingness to recommend and advocate the company’s products and services to others.

Its creator, Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company, posited that NPS is a more meaningful measure of a company’s relationship with its customers than customer satisfaction metrics because, he argued, it is correlated with revenue growth.

Richard Owen

Satmetrix Executives Richard Owen and Laura Brooks further articulated this linkage between customer loyalty and revenue growth.

NPS’s customer loyalty metric is based on 10-point ratings in response to just one question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?

Laura Brooks

“Promoters” respond with a score of 9 or 10 whereas “Detractors” provide ratings of 0-6, and scores of 7 and 8 are ignored in this system, leading to the question of why they are included.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters.

Timothy L. Keiningham

Critics, including Ipsos Loyalty’s Timothy L. Keiningham, Bruce Cooil of Vanderbilt, BI Norwegian School of Management’s Tor Wallin Andreassen, and Lerzan Aksoy of Fordham, argue that American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is an equally accurate predictor of revenue growth.

They reinforced the frequently-replicated finding that actual behaviors, including positive and negative “word of mouth (WOM)” are better predictors than attitudes about possible future behaviors, in their evaluation of longitudinal data from 21 firms and 15,500-plus interviews from the Norwegian Customer Satisfaction Barometer.

Claes Fornell

Likewise, University of Michigan’s Claes Fornell, Forrest V. Morgensen, and M.S. Krishan, with Sunil Mithas of University of Maryland, found that “it is possible to beat the market consistently by investing in firms that do well on the ACSI.”

Companies that invest in initiatives to increase customer satisfaction, reflected in higher scores than competitors on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), also performed better in measures of market value.

More surprisingly, they found that these higher returns are associated with lower stock market risk, probably due to “stock market imperfections” that require time to adjust to news of strong ACSI performance.

Bob Hayes

Similarly, customer satisfaction and loyalty researcher Bob Hayes contended that “likelihood to recommend” measures the same construct and has the same predictive value of business growth as customer loyalty questions such as:

Overall satisfaction
Predicted likelihood to purchase again, evaluated through his Purchasing Loyalty Index (PLI)
Number of referrals through “word of mouth” and “word of mouse,” calculated in his Advocacy Loyalty Index (ALI)
Resistance to defection to competing offers, measured with his Retention Loyalty Index (RLI).

Hayes Customer Loyalty Grid

Hayes’ findings reinforced the caveat that actual behavior is a more accurate than attitudes about likely future behavior, also demonstrated by University of Connecticut’s V Kumar, J Andrew Petersen and Robert Leone in their analysis of telecoms and financial service customers willing to recommend their service provider.

V Kumar

Only about one-third of these potential Advocates actually recommended the provider, and only about 13% of those referrals actually led to new customers.
Kumar and team called this the “promise gap” and suggested that it can be mitigated by delivering beyond customer expectations, even when a customer complains.

Neil Morgan

Indiana University’s Neil A. Morgan and Lopo Leotte Rego of University of Iowa added a wrinkle to critiques of Net Promoter Scores as the sole necessary indicator of customer satisfaction.

Like Keiningham’s team and Hayes, they found that recommendation intentions (“net promoters”) have “little to no predictive value.
Unlike Hayes, their results found little predictive strength for actual behavior in average number of recommendations.

Instead, Morgan and Rego argued for multiple measures of customer satisfaction as the best predictor of revenue group.
Additionally they found that Top 2 Box satisfaction scores – the sum of percentages for the top two point on surveys of purchase intent, satisfaction or awareness – provided “good” predictive value.

Daniel Schneider

The Net Promoter Score also had the lowest predictive validity when compared to three other scales by Stanford’s Jon Krosnick and Daniel Schneider, with Intuit’s Matt Berent and Hays Interactive’s Randall Thomas.

To improve the NPS, the team recommended replacing the 11 point unipolar rating scale with a 7 point bipolar scale from positive to negative impressions.

Jon Krosnick

Their work replicated Hayes’ finding that liking and satisfaction with a company are highly significantly predictors than the likelihood of recommending, so Krosnick’s team recommended including questions like:

Overall, how satisfied are you with the each of the following companies?
How much do you like or dislike each of the following companies?

They uncovered correlations among measures of customer experience, and showed that liking is the best predictor of the number of recommendations and satisfaction.

Leon Festinger

Customers typically form more positive evaluations after the decision to purchase, probably due to validating purchase choices and reduce cognitive dissonance of purchase dissatisfaction, described by Stanford’s Leon Festinger.

These findings suggest that Reichheld’s claim of NPS as “the only question you need to ask” may be unsubstantiated, and that multiple measures of customer experience are more accurate predictors of a company’s revenue performance.

-*How credible is “willingness to recommend” a company as a predictor of its revenue growth?

Follow-share-like www.kathrynwelds.com and @kathrynwelds

Twitter @kathrynwelds
Blog – Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary
Google+
LinkedIn Open Group Psychology in Human Resources (Organisational Psychology)
Facebook Notes:

©Kathryn Welds

Interpersonal Envy in Competitive Organizations and the “Search Inside Yourself” (SIY) Antidote

2 Replies

Workplace envy is rarely discussed, although it is a logical outcome of competition for scarce resources: Recognition, advancement, power, reputation, compensation in explicit or implicit organizational “tournaments.”

Jayanth Narayanan

National University of Singapore’s Jayanth Narayanan, Kenneth Tai, and Daniel McAllister broached the near-taboo of workplace envy as an inevitable outgrowth of social comparison and related “cognitive dissonance” in attempting to self-regulate or return to emotional and equity “homeostasis.”

Daniel McAllister

They differentiated malicious envy from benign envy and argue that the latter can drive performance through emulating admired outcomes.

This process, called firgun in Hebrew, is characterized by happiness, envy, and support of others, and is positively related to organizational success.
Mudita in Buddhist texts, refers to similar feelings of vicarious joy at another’s success and good fortune.

Hidehiko Takahashi

Narayan and team posit that envy is pain at another’s good fortune, and Hidehiko Takahashi’s team at Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences demonstrated that the social-emotional pain of envy is a variation of the physical pain experience.

Their fMRI study found that the emotional pain of workplace envy is physically manifested in activation of the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex.

Nathan DeWall

As such, Nathan DeWall of University of Kentucky and colleagues reported that Tylenol™ reduces behavioral and neural responses associated with social pain in two fMRI studies.

Narayanan argues that envy exerts its differential effect on workplace behavior through each individual’s specific:

Core self-evaluations (self-esteem, self-efficacy, locus of control, and neuroticism),
“Referent cognitions” regarding warmth, likeability, and competence of the envied person
Perceived organizational support

Workplace envy, they argue, can affect:

Social undermining
Prosocial behavior
Job performance

Narayanan and team proposed that those with higher self-esteem are less prone to negative workplace behaviors when experiencing on-the-job envy.

They propose that people are less likely to socially undermine the envied individual when the envied person is viewed as both warm-likeable and competent.

Similarly, they suggest that people who think their organization values them and their work, and supports their work and career development efforts are less likely to decrease job performance when envious at work.

Chade-Meng Tan

Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade–Meng Tan proposes the mindfulness-based program “Search Inside Yourself” (SIY) as a way to self-manage workplace envy and other painful social experiences, by developing skills in:

Trained attention
Self-knowledge and self-mastery
Creating useful mental habits.

-*How do you manage workplace envy when you notice it in yourself or others?

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

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

Tag Archives: cognitive dissonance

Rationalisation: Coping or Complacency?

Women’s Self-Advocacy: Self-Promotion and Violating the “Female Modesty” Norm

Does Customer Recommendation Predict Company Growth?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: