Tag Archives: Francesca Gino

Writing Power Primer Increases Efficacy in High-Stakes Performance

Adam Galinsky

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

Francesca Gino

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

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

David Dubois

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

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

Joris Lammers

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

Derek Rucker

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

Sian Beilock

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

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

-*How do you prepare for challenging professional interviews?

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

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Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

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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, Celia Moore of London Business School, Harvard’s Francesca Gino, and Maurice E. Schweitzer of Wharton.

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.

Francesca Gino

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?

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Power, Confidence Enhance Performance Under Pressure

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Sonia K. Kang

Role-based power can affect performance in pressure-filled situations, but has less impact on lower pressure environments, according to University of Toronto’s Sonia K. Kang, Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley’s Laura J. Kray and Aiwa Shirako of Google.

Kang’s team assigned more than 130 volunteers to same-gender pairs in three negotiations experiments.
Half the participants acted as a “recruiter” (high-power role) or as a “job candidate” (low-power role) in negotiating salary, vacation time, and related benefits.

Adam Galinsky

Volunteers were told that performance either reflected negotiation ability or was unrelated to ability.
Participants in high power roles tended to perform better under pressure when they were told their negotiation performance was an accurate reflection of ability.
Kang attributed this result to participants’ higher expectations for success based on the higher power role.

Job candidates who thought their negotiation performance indicated their skill level performed significantly worse than those who thought that the exercise was a learning experience unrelated to their negotiating capabilities.

Claude Steele

Results were similar to Claude Steele of Stanford’s findings for stereotype threat and stereotype uplift, in which individuals from marginalized groups perform less effectively than members of higher-power groups, linked to negative self-attributions and expectations.
Low-power negotiators counteracted underperformance when they self-affirmed their performance.

Laura Kray

Kang and team concluded that “relative power can act as either a toxic brew (stereotype/low-power threat) or a beneficial elixir (stereotype/high-power lift) for performance… (because) performance in high pressure situations is closely related to expectations of behavior and outcome… Self-affirmation is a way to neutralize … threat.”

Aiwa Shirako

In another experiment, 60 male MBA students were paired as the “buyer” or “seller” of a biotechnology plant.
The sellers held a more powerful role in this situation, and were more assertive, reflected by negotiating a higher selling price, when they thought performance reflected ability.
In contrast, buyers performed worse when they thought negotiating performance reflected ability.

Kang’s team extended this scenario with 88 MBA students (33 male pairs and 11 female pairs), who were told the exercise would gauge their negotiating skills.
Before the negotiation, half of the participants wrote for five minutes about their most important negotiating skill, while the remaining half wrote about their least important negotiating skill.

Francesca Gino

Buyers who completed the positive self-affirmation performed significantly better in negotiating a lower sale price for the biotechnology plant, effectively reducing the power differences between the buyer and seller.

Based on these findings, Kang, like Harvard’s Francesca Gino, advocates writing self-affirmations rather than simply reflecting on positive self-statements about job skills and positive traits to enhance confidence and performance.

-*How do you mitigate differences in role-based power and confidence when performing under pressure?

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Beware of Seeking, Acting on Advice When Anxious, Sad

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Just as wise grandmothers advise, it’s best to avoid decisions when upset, anxious, or sad.

Maurice Schweitzer

Maurice Schweitzer and Alison Wood Brooks of Wharton and Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino validated Grandmother Wisdom in eight experiments that demonstrated anxiety’s impact on lowering self-confidence, impairing information processing, and impeding ability to distinguish advice from neutral advisors and those with a conflict of interest.

Alison Wood Brooks

They found that people experiencing anxiety tend to seek advice and act on it, but they are less able to differentiate poor advice from valid recommendations, and these results are applicable to making decisions about crucial medical treatment, financial investments, or even guidance counseling.

Francesca Gino

The team evoked anxious feeling among volunteers by presenting potentially frightening film clips and music, and asked them to judge a person’s weight based on a photograph or number of coins in a jar or solve a complex math problem.

Participants were offered money for correct judgments, and the opportunity to receive advice from others when they were uncertain.
Those who heard the scary music or saw the alarming film clip rated themselves as less confident of their decision, and were more likely to ask others for advice.
These effects were not observed when volunteers were shown a film clip that could provoke anger.

Schweitzer, Brooks, and Gino concluded that people vary in their receptivity to advice based on:

Advisor’s characteristics, such as expertise, consistent with Cialdini’s observation
Robert Cialdini
Perceived difficulty of the decision
Decision maker’s emotional state when receiving advice

The researchers advised decision-makers to:

Monitor their internal states for anxiety
Use feedback from multiple sources when making important decisions
Work toward developing increased self-confidence
Evoke calm state, often possible with systematic breathing or mindful attention and equanimity

Catherine Hartley

Catherine Hartley, then of New York University and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University contributed to the neuroeconomic analysis of anxiety’s impact on decision- making when they reported that brain structures responsible for regulating fear and anxiety are also involved in economic decision-making under uncertain conditions.

Elizabeth Phelps

Specifically, the amygdala is crucial in learning, experiencing, and regulating both fear and anxiety and it is also implicated in decision-making in situations of potential loss.
The prefrontal cortex is specialized in controlling fear and is also involved in decisions containing risk elements.

Hartley and Phelps suggest that techniques for altering fear and anxiety may also improve economic decisions-making.

Rajagopal Raganathan

Rajagopal Raghunathan, then of New York University and Michel Tuan Pham of Columbia University demonstrated the same connection between anxiety and making decisions about gambling and job selection.

Michel Tuan Pham

They conducted three experiments and found that sad individuals select high risk / high-reward gambling and job options, whereas anxious individuals are biased in favor of low-risk / low-reward options.

Raghunathan and Pham posit that anxiety tends to motivate people to reduce uncertainty whereas sadness moves people to replace rewards.
They suggest suggesting two different decision biases related to mood states.

Raghunathan and Pham add to Schweitzer, Brooks, and Gino’s recommendations for mitigating decision bias:

“Monitor feelings”
Consider alternate options
Speculate on future moods and preferences if each option were selected: “What would I feel better about . . .?”

-*How do you mitigate the potential decision bias when anxious or sad?

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Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

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

Tag Archives: Francesca Gino

Writing Power Primer Increases Efficacy in High-Stakes Performance

Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

Power, Confidence Enhance Performance Under Pressure

Beware of Seeking, Acting on Advice When Anxious, Sad

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