Tag Archives: Performance

Perception of CEOs’ Non Verbal Leadership Behaviors Affect IPO Valuations, Predict Financial Performance

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Elizabeth Blankespoor

Elizabeth Blankespoor

Favorable first impressions of CEOs can affect new companies’ valuations and can predict near-term performance.

Perception of CEO non-verbal behavior during IPO road show presentations was associated with higher valuations at each IPO stage, found Stanford’s Elizabeth Blankespoor, Greg Miller of University of Michigan, and University of North Carolina’s Brad Hendricks.
These findings underscore the importance of road show presentations and presenters’ credibility to investors, underwriters, analyst, and financial media.

Greg Miller

Greg Miller

Blankespoor’s team noted that for most investors, the road show is the first time they see the CEO in the two-week interval between setting the initial proposed price and determining the final offer price.
As a result, Blankespoor and colleagues posit “a tight link between perceptions and valuation.”

Participants in their investigation were hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing task website, to view videotapes of CEOs presenting IPO roadshow, then to rate the speakers for competence, attractiveness, and trustworthiness.

Brad Hendricks

Brad Hendricks

At least 40 people viewed each series of 30-second video clips from 224 actual road show presentations between 2011 and 2013, with modified audio to muffle words while retaining vocal pitch and rhythm.

After controlling for other factors that could affect stock price like CEO age, experience, and education, companies with higher-rated CEOs on a composite score of competence, attractiveness, and trustworthiness ratings received a larger price increase for the proposed offering price and the revised price for secondary markets.

Mechanical TurkFor each 5% increase in CEO composite perception score, the final market price was 11% higher, and CEO perceived competence and attractiveness had a significant impact on firm valuation.
However, trustworthiness alone had no effect.

These initial perceptions also correlated with companies’ early performance, based on stock prices up to 12 months after the IPO, suggesting that “…investors … glean real additional information about the CEO from … nonverbal behavior and … perceptions of management are signals for firm value.”

Gotham Research GroupBloggers as well as traditional media outlets are important arbiters of CEO reputation.
In a commissioned analysis of 10 well-known institutional bloggers by the Gotham Research Group, perceptions of CEO authenticity were significantly related to bloggers’ evaluations of CEO competence and performance.

Candor, bluntness, fearlessness, specificity, plain words, examples from stories, warmth, frequent contact with customers and employees, and acknowledging challenges and worthy competitors are all essential to setting a credible tone, according to this report.

Weber ShandwickIn fact, Public Relations firm Weber Shandwick noted that 49% of company reputation is attributed to CEO reputation, and 60% of market value is attributed to company reputation.
Perception of a CEO, the firm argues, has significant influence on market value, underscoring empirical findings by Blankespoor’s team.

-*What non-verbal behaviors and attributes signal “leadership” and “executive presence” to you?

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Power, Confidence Enhance Performance Under Pressure    

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Sonia K. Kang

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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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Individual Talent Surplus Can Reduce Team Performance 

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Roderick Swaab

Roderick Swaab

More talent on a team doesn’t always increase team performance, particularly when team member must coordinate their efforts.

In fact, status conflicts based on talent differences can undermine team coordination during hand-offs for interdependent tasks, found INSEAD’s Roderick I. Swaab and Michael Schaerer, with Eric M. Anicich and Adam Galinsky of Columbia and VU University Amsterdam’s Richard Ronay.

Michael Schaerer

Michael Schaerer

Swaab and colleagues confirmed that most people believe there is a linear relationship between talent and performance:  They expect that more talent is consistently associated with improved performance.

However, the research team found an exception to this presumed rule when they analyzed National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball team and player data from 2002 through 2012.

They evaluated team performance in interdependent game tasks in basketball, a “zero sum game” because when one player shoots other players lose the opportunity to shoot at that time.
As a result, basketball players must coordinate efforts to position team members for as many shots as possible in a limited time.

Richard Ronay

Richard Ronay

In contrast, Swaab’s group studied independent sports performance in baseball.
In this game, players hit the ball in an assigned order and one player’s turn at bat does not eliminate another player’s turn to hit.
Further, each baseball player may hit a home run independent of other teammates’ batting skill, so each individual’s talent additively contributes to the team outcome.

Adam Galinsky

Adam Galinsky

Swaab’s team found that more talent is not associated with better performance when team members needed to coordinate interdependent tasks, as in basketball.
They called this the “too-much-talent effect”:  “When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.”
In this case, they concluded that role differentiation is essential for optimal performance during interdependent tasks to ensure diverse capabilities in addition to willingness to collaborate.

Boris Groysberg

Boris Groysberg

This finding can be generalized to business organizations, which may experience decreased team performance if highly talented team members are unable to collaborate on interdependent tasks.
In addition, a surplus of top talent can undermine an organization’s profitability due to the high cost of attracting and hiring “stars.”

This “too-much-talent” effect was also demonstrated among Wall Street sell-side equity research analysts by Harvard Business School’s Boris Groysberg and Jeffrey T. Polzer with Hillary Anger Elfenbein of Washington University.

Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Increasing the number of talented analysts increased the firm’s overall performance to a point, then more stars actually decreased performance.
This effect was especially prominent when strong performers were concentrated in a small number of sectors.

As in professional sports, this “too-much-talent” effect could reflect a suboptimal integration and collaboration among analysts with similar expertise, controlling for individual performance, department size or specialization, or firm prestige.

Jennifer R. Overbeck

Jennifer R. Overbeck

Laboratory studies with volunteers confirm observations of the “too-much-talent” effect among professional athletes and Wall Street analysts, in research by University of Utah’s Jennifer R. Overbeck, Joshua Correll, and Bernadette Park.

They concluded that task groups need a few high-status members as leaders, and many more member-followers to contribute and implement work while supporting group direction.

Arthur Colman

Arthur Colman

When this “status sorting” is not explicit, Overbeck and team noted that a differentiated status hierarchy will evolve as status-seeking members vie for authority.
In rare cases, status sorting must be implemented through organizational design and responsibility definition, echoing earlier observations by University of California San Francisco’s Arthur D. Colman and W. Harold Bexton of the A.K. Rice Institute.

  • How have you managed “too-much-talent” effect in organizations?
  • To what extent do you encourage “status sorting” in your organization?

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Reduce “Time Famine” By Doing for Others

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Feeling “starved for time,” with “too much to do and too little time to do it”? University of Michigan’s Leslie Perlow identified the subjective experience “time famine” among software engineers, whose productivity was reduced based on frequent interruptions by others, a pervasive “crisis mentality,” rewards linked to “individual heroics.”

Cassie Moligner

Cassie Moligner

One counterintuitive remedy for “time famine” is giving time by helping other people.
This use of time increased feelings of “time affluence” in a study by Wharton’s Cassie Moligner, Zoë Chance of Yale, and Harvard’s Michael I. Norton.

Ernst Pöppel

Ernst Pöppel

Volunteers judged that they “did a lot with their time,” and had more available time when they helped others.
Mogilner and colleagues analyzed people’s “‘elementary time experiences,” described by Ernst Pöppel of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Francis Wade

Francis Wade

As Francis Wade of 2Time Labs pointed out, people cannot increase actual chronological time, but individual time experiences can vary based on physiological state, emotion, and context.

Moligner’s team compared people’s perceptions of time abundance when they:

  • Did something for someone else by writing an encouraging note to a gravely ill child or helping an at-risk student by editing his or her research essay for 15 minutes,
  • Spent 10 minutes doing something “for yourself that you weren’t already planning to do today,”
  • Spent 30 minutes doing something for someone else “that you weren’t already planning to do today,”
  • “Wasted” time on a low-meaning task by counting the letter “e” in multiple pages of Latin text,
  • Gained unexpected “free” time when they learned that “all essays had been edited,” so they could leave early.

Spending time on others seemed to “expand the future” and increase the perceived amount of available time, compared with spending time on oneself or “finding” free time.
In fact, people who unexpectedly gained fifteen minutes actually spent less time on a later required task than those who invested time helping another person.
This suggests that spending time pro-socially may increase one’s future work efforts, whereas finding free time may diminish work motivation.

Michael DeDonno

Michael DeDonno

Perceived time pressure undermined learning performance more than actual time constraints on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), found Florida Atlantic University’s Michael DeDonno and Heath Demaree of Case Western.

The team told more than 80 volunteers that time available for the task was “insufficient,” whereas they advised another group of more than 80 people that they had “sufficient” time to complete the task.
The time available to both groups was identical and adequate to complete the IGT, which asks participants to select from four decks of cards to win as much “money” as possible.

Heath Demaree

Heath Demaree

Two of the decks yield higher payoffs or “positive utility” whereas the remaining two decks render less favorable winnings, offering “negative utility.”
To win, participant learn which decks offer the greatest payoff in the shortest time for 100 trials.

Each group of more than 80 volunteers was separated into two sub-groups given different amounts of time between card selections to consider the task, while the total time available remained the same.

People who thought they had insufficient time for the task achieved lower payoff than volunteers who believed they had enough time.
Since both groups had the same amount of time, the performance difference was attributed to their beliefs about time constraints, suggesting the importance of focusing on the task rather than on potential time limits.

Steven J. Karau

Steven J. Karau

Actual time constraints affected both group interactions and task performance in a planning task evaluated by Southern Illinois University’s Steven J Karau and Janice R Kelly of Purdue.

They asked 36 groups of three volunteers to complete a planning task while group interactions were videotaped and coded using the Time-by-Event-by-Member Pattern Observation (TEMPO) system, developed by Texas Tech’s Gail Clark Futoran, Janice Kelly of Purdue, and University of Illinois’s Joseph McGrath.

Gail Clark Futoran

Gail Clark Futoran

Twelve of the groups had inadequate time, whereas another twelve groups had optimal time for task completion, and the final twelve groups has more than enough time.

Group performance was evaluated based on:

  • Length,
  • Originality,
  • Creativity,
  • Adequacy,
  • Issue Involvement,
  • Presentation quality,
  • Optimism,
  • Action orientation.

The groups that had greater time constraints actually focused less on the task than groups with more time, supporting Karau and Kelly’s recommendation to maintain task focus when performance time is limited to optimize performance.

Janice Kelly

Janice Kelly

Time constraints differentially affected each performance evaluation, and one way to mitigate the impact of time constraints is to shift focus from perceived time scarcity and stress to attend to the task.

-*How do you maintain task focus when perceiving time pressure?

-*To what extent does investing time in other people give you the sense of greater “time abundance”?

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Low Field Magnetic Stimulation To Improve Mood, Learning, Performance?

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Michael L. Rohan

Michael L. Rohan

An unexpected observation during a diagnostic MRI brain scan may provide relief for people with medication-resistant, life-threatening depressive disorders.
People diagnosed bipolar disorder (BPD) who had diagnostic MRI brain scans, reported rapid mood elevation after the procedure.

Rinah Yamamoto

Rinah Yamamoto

The magnetic resonance imaging procedure was not intended to be therapeutic, but this unexpected finding led a team from Harvard directed by Michael L. Rohan, and including Rinah T. Yamamoto, Kenroy R. Cayetano, David P. Olson, Caitlin T. Ravichandran, Oscar G. Morales, Gordana Vitaliano, with Cornell colleagues  Steven M. Paul and Bruce M. Cohen in developing Low Field Magnetic Stimulation (LFMS) that reproduces the rapidly oscillating (1 kHz, <1 V/m) electromagnetic field.

They evaluated this device’s potential to provide mood elevation to more than 40 people diagnosed with depression associated with bipolar disorder (BPD) and more than 20 people diagnosed with major depressive disorder in a randomized, double blind, controlled study.

Steven M. Paul

Steven M. Paul

Participants received a single, 20-minute treatment of 256 microsecond pulses separated by 1 millisecond, then Rohan’s team immediately evaluated mood using the Visual Analog Scale (VAS), the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS-17), and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scales.

They found substantial mood improvement following LFMS electric stimulation throughout the cerebral cortex, compared with a sham “treatment” for both volunteer groups.

Andre R. Brunoni

Andre R. Brunoni

In fact, six weeks of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) was equally effective as antidepressant Sertraline (Zoloft) for 120 participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder, reported University of São Paulo’s Andre R. Brunoni, Leandro Valiengo, Alessandra Baccaro, Tamires A. Zanão, Janaina F. de Oliveira, Alessandra Goulart, Paulo A. Lotufo, and Isabela M. Benseñor, with Paulo S. Boggio of Mackenzie Presbyterian University and Harvard’s Felipe Fregni.
Both treatments were more effective than either alone when Brunoni’s team combined Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) with Sertraline (Zoloft).

Marom Bikson

Marom Bikson

The typical current dose used in tDCS is a thousand times lower than the dose used in Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), and may enable neural connections to rewire, depending on the position of current flows, found City College of New York’s Marom Bikson and Abhishek Datta, with Peter Bulow of Columbia University, Seton Hall University’s Fortunato Battaglia, John W. Stiller of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Princeton’s Sergei V. Karnup, and Teodor T. Postolache of University of Maryland.

tDCS has also shown potential to improve learning and motor skill performance – with caveats.

Peter E. Turkeltaub

Peter E. Turkeltaub

One study demonstrated tDCS’s impact on improved word reading efficiency among 25 right-handed volunteers, due to increased left lateralization of the brain’s posterior temporal cortex (pTC), reported Georgetown’s Peter E. Turkeltaub with Jennifer Benson of University of Michigan, collaborating with Roy H. Hamilton and H. Branch Coslett of University of Pennsylvania and City College of New York’s Abhishek Datta and Marom Bikson.

The team asserted that these findings offer a low-cost, accessible treatment option for people with below-average reading skills and developmental dyslexia.

Roi Cohen Kadosh

Roi Cohen Kadosh

Likewise, tDCS brain stimulation during numerical learning over five days enhanced people’s ability to learn a new number system based on arbitrary symbols – with significant improvement enduring up to 6 months in a study by University of Oxford Roi Cohen Kadosh, with Sonja Soskic, Teresa Iuculano, Ryota Kanai, and Vincent Walsh of University College London.

However, these benefits came with costs when the team compared volunteers who received electrical stimulation to:

  • Posterior parietal cortex, implicated in numerical cognition,
  • Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, involved in learning and memory.
Sonja Soskic

Sonja Soskic

The team also provided a “sham” treatment that caused no change in brain activity to another.
Volunteers who had the parietal area electrical stimulation learned the new number system more quickly than those who got sham stimulation.

Teresa Iuculano

Teresa Iuculano

However, the cost was slower reaction times when they applied the learned skill to novel tasks.
Those who received prefrontal stimulation were slower than the control group to learn the new numerical system, but they performed faster on the new test at the end of the experiment.

Shinichi Furuya

Shinichi Furuya

Skilled physical performance selectively improved with noninvasive Transcranial Stimulation (tDCS) among musically-untrained volunteers, but not for highly-trained musicians, found Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media’s Shinichi Furuya, Matthias Klaus and Eckart Altenmüller, with Michael A. Nitsche and Walter Paulus of Georg-August-University. 

Vincent Walsh

Vincent Walsh

Further caveats come from University College London’s Vincent Walsh, who critiqued this and other studies, for potential shortcomings, including:

  • Inadequate control experiments,
  • Speculation about brain areas excited and inhibited by tDCS,
  • Real-world relevance of small effects noted in lab experiments.

-*To what extent does electrical brain stimulation offer appealing therapeutic and performance benefits?

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Task Switching Skills Improved With Musical Training

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Ira Hyman

Ira Hyman

“Multitasking” is more accurately described as “task switching” because people typically can’t effectively sustain split attention.
However, it is possible to alternate between two mental tasks, but there is a “cognitive switching cost” in decreased speed and performance accuracy.

S. Matthew Boss

S. Matthew Boss

One vivid example of performance decrements when performing simple “multitasking” is illustrated in a study of walking while using a mobile phone, conducted by Western Washington University’s Ira E. Hyman Jr., S. Matthew Boss, Breanne M. Wise-Swanson, Kira E. McKenzie, and Jenna M. Caggiano.

Ira Hyman-Unicycling Clown Attentional BlindnessThey found that walking and talking caused most volunteers to experience “inattentional blindness” to unicycling clown.

Breanne M Wise-Swanson

Breanne M Wise-Swanson

In addition, the “multitasking” participants walked more slowly, changed directions more frequently, and were less likely to acknowledge other people than individuals.

Hyman and team concluded, “Doing more than one task at a time, especially more than one complex task, takes a toll on productivity,” and went on to note the dangers of driving while talking on a phone.
In fact, a previous blog reviewed the evidence for reduced driving performance when listening to music, a less-demanding activity than texting or talking on a telephone.

Ranate Meuter

Ranate Meuter

Even switching between two well-practiced languages can reduce cognitive processing speed, found Queensland University of Techology’s Renata Meuter and University of Oxford’s Alan Allport.

They asked bilingual participants to name numerals in their first language or second language in an unpredictable sequence.
Participants responded more slowly when they switched to the other language, indicating a “cognitive switching cost.”

Volunteers named digits associated with a background color in their first language or second language.
They named digits in their second language more slowly, but were slower in their first language after the language changed from the previous cue.

Jeffrey Evans

Jeffrey Evans

Involuntary persistence of the second-acquired language interfered with participants actively suppressing their original language, leading to delays when responding in their more well practiced “birth tongue,” they argued.

As tasks become more complex, the performance-hampering effects of task switching increase, according to United Stated Federal Aviation Authority’s Joshua Rubinstein with Jeffrey Evans, and David Meyer of University of Michigan, who evaluated switching between different task like solving math problems or classifying geometric objects.

David Meyer

David Meyer

Like Meuter and Allport, they noted that people switching tasks navigate two stages of “executive control:”

  • Goal shifting: “I want to do this now instead of that,”
  • Rule activation: “I’m turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this”.Rubinstein’s team estimated that traversing these phases can reduce productivity by much as 40 percent, and noted that the problem is compounded for individuals with damage to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Linda Moradzadeh

Linda Moradzadeh

However, musical training seems to reduce the costs of task switching, found York University’s Linda Moradzadeh, Galit Blumenthal, and Melody Wiseheart.
This team matched more than 150 similar age and socioeconomic status participants who were also:

  • Monolingual musicians (averaging 12 years of musical training) or
  • Bilingual musicians (averaging 12 years of musical training) or
  • Bilingual non-musicians or
  • Monolingual non-musicians.
Galit Blumenthal

Galit Blumenthal

Volunteers performed task switching and dual-task challenges, along with intelligence and vocabulary measures.
Musicians demonstrated fewer global and local switch costs compared with non-musicians and bilingual volunteers.
This finding contrasts other results regarding bilingualism’s advantage for task switching performance in a previous blog post.

Melody Wiseheart

Melody Wiseheart

In addition, Moradzadeh’s team found no benefit of combining bilingual expertise with musical training to reduce task-switching costs,

These results suggest that musical training can contribute to increased ability to shift between mental sets in both task switching and dual-task efforts, thanks to “superior ability to maintain and manipulate competing information in memory, allowing for efficient “global” or holistic processing.”

-*To what extent do you find “multitasking” an effective practice to accomplish cognitive tasks?

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Paradox of Potential vs Achievement in Job Search

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Zachary Tormala

Zachary Tormala

When hiring or promoting, the person’s potential can trump actual accomplishments, according to Stanford’s Zakary Tormala, with Jayson Jia of University of Hong Kong and Harvard’s Michael Norton.

Jayson Shi Jia

Jayson Shi Jia

The paradox of potential occurs because possibility seems to engender greater interest and cognitive effort due to its uncertain outcome, in examples ranging across:

  • Basketball player evaluations,
  • Hiring decisions,
  • Salary offers,
  • Graduate school admissions recommendations,
  • Judgments of artistic talent,
  • Intentions to visit an untried restaurant.
Michael Norton

Michael Norton

Tormala and team demonstrated this effect by presenting identical statistics for a hypothetical NBA basketball player, then describing the data “predictions” or as “actual performance.”
Participants were more likely to judge that the player would become an All-Star player when they viewed “predicted” statistics rather than “actual” performance records.

Volunteers also evaluated a job applicant more favorably when the person performed well on an “Assessment of Leadership Potential” rather than on an “Assessment of Leadership Achievement.”

Tormala’s group extended the investigation to evaluate impact of an upcoming comedian’s ”accomplishment” compared with “potential” when they posted different Facebook advertisements:

  • “Critics say he has become the next big thing”
  • “Critics say he could become the next big thing.”

The “potential” ads produced more than three times more click-throughs and five times more fan ratings.

In other studies, Tormala and team compared descriptions of an achievement and potential:

  • “This person has won an award for his work”
  • “This person could win an award for his work.”

“Potential” stimulated greater interest and cognitive information processing, resulting in more favorable reactions to the target person.

Derek Rucker

Derek Rucker

With Stanford colleague Daniella Kupor and Derek D. Rucker of Northwestern University, Tormala and Norton found that the preference for potential disappeared for people who don’t like uncertainty, and in situations that require higher degrees of certainty.

They noted that when people thoughtfully consider challenging decisions, such as in a Blackjack game, bystanders form positive impressions of others and become more willing to be influenced by them.
However, observers form negative opinions of people who “overthink” simple choices (demonstrate lack “thought calibration”), and are less willing to be influenced by them.

The appeal of potential applies to abstract enjoyable experiences, according to Southern Methodist University’s T. Andrew Poehlman and George Newman of Yale.

T Andrew Poehlman

T Andrew Poehlman

They found that the lure of “potential” makes people more likely to “consume inferior performances” in the present, but may not enjoy them.

Poehlman and Newman argued that “potential” is less influential when experienced in the past, and is less attractive when potential is associated with utilitarian dimensions.

George Newman

George Newman

These findings point to the value of:

  • Positioning one’s own “potential” as well as others’ “potential” to increase persuasiveness of support and advocacy,
  • Considering whether candidates with “potential” seem more appealing than those with greater experience – and whether potential is the appropriate selection criterion.

-*How frequently do you see people hired, promoted, and rewarded for “potential” instead of actual achievement?

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Brief Aerobic Exercise Increases Attention, Reading Performance

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Michele Tine

Michele Tine

As little as 12 minutes of aerobic exercise increased selective attention and reading comprehension scores for low-income young adults at a highly selective, ”academically elite” (“Ivy League”) US undergraduate university, reported Dartmouth College’s Michele T. Tine and Allison G. Butler of Bryant University.

Alison Butler

Alison Butler

Even these highly-skilled participants, admitted to one of the US’s top academic institutions, had significantly different scores on Selective Visual Attention (SVA) and reading comprehension pre-test tasks, depending on their socio-economic status.

Courtney Stevens

Courtney Stevens

Selective Visual Attention (SVA) is the ability to focus on visual targets while ignoring irrelevant stimuli, and an “Executive Function” (EF) required for academic and on-the-job learning, according to University of Oregon’s Courtney Stevens and Daphne Bavelier of University of Rochester.

Specifically, selective attention predicts skills in:

according to University of Oregon’s Stevens with Brittni Lauinger and Helen Neville.

Daniel Hackman

Daniel Hackman

Executive Functions, like Selective Visual Attention (SVA,) are positively correlated to socioeconomic status, found University of Pennsylvannia’s Daniel A Hackman and Martha J Farah, indicating that people with financial advantages often perform better on Executive Function tasks than people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Eric Zillmer

Eric Zillmer

One well-validated measure of Selective Visual Attention (SVA) is the d2 Test of Attention, rapid trials of a manual letter cancellation task, developed by Rolf Brickenkamp and Eric Zillmer of Drexel University.
Participants Tine and Butler’s investigation indicated when they observed the target character among visual distractors.

John Best

John Best

One intervention to increase Executive Function skills, including Selective Visual Attention (SVA) is aerobic exercise, according to University of British Columbia’s John Best.

James Williams

James Williams

In addition to increasing Executive Functions, aerobic exercise increases levels of cortisol and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).
These elements are associated with cognitive performance including Selective Visual Attention (SVA), reported Texas Tech’s Lee T Ferris and Chwan-Li Shen with James S Williams of Texas State University, as well as University of Dublin’s Eadaoin W. Griffin, Sinead Mulally, Carole Foley, Stuart A. Warmington, Shane M. O’Mara, and Aine M. Kelly.

Éadaoin W Griffin

Éadaoin W Griffin

Likewise, stress increases levels of cortisol, and lower-income people tend to experience more chronic stress, leading to higher levels of cortisol, according to Northwestern’s Edith Chen and Gregory E. Miller with Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie, and separately by Cornell University’s Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg.

Edith Chen

Edith Chen

Tine and Butler investigated these diverse findings by asking volunteers to:

Gary Evans

Gary Evans

Items include:

  • My parent was fired from his/her job
  • I was a victim of a crime
  • A close friend or family member had health problems
  • My parents divorced or separated
  • I had problems being liked by classmates

Participants also completed three reading comprehension tasks from Sharon Weiner Green and Ira K. Wolf’s GRE Preparation items.

Douglas Williamson

Douglas Williamson

After 45 minutes, participants monitored heart rate to ensure that it was within 10 beats per minute of pre-test measures of resting heart rate.
Brief aerobic exercise sessions eliminated the gap between “Executive Function” performance scores for talented volunteers from lower-income and high-income backgrounds.

Lower-income participants who exercised aerobically had reading comprehension scores comparable to their higher-income counterparts, around 90%,
Likewise, people who exercised significantly improved Selective Visual Attention (SVA) scores, but the video-viewers’ scores did not change, suggesting that exercise was the “active ingredient” in these performance improvements.

In addition, volunteers who exercised and reported higher chronic stress level achieved higher SVA scores and greater SVA score improvement than those who reported less chronic stress.
Cognitive performance improvements were maintained 45 minutes after exercise.

These findings suggest aerobic exercise as an effective, low-cost intervention to reduce achievement differences between people from lower-income and more affluent backgrounds, and this could contribute to increasing the number of diverse applicants in selective higher education settings and skilled employment – as well as increasing endurance, cardiac health, and reducing stress.

-*How have you seen workplaces encourage participation in aerobic exercise for the next generation of potential employees as well as current employees?

-*Do organizations receive more benefit from reducing health care costs and health-related absences or from increasing attention, innovation, and productivity?

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Musical Training Enhances “Executive Functions” of Planned Behavior, Cognitive Performance

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Jennifer Zuk

Jennifer Zuk

Christopher Benjamin

Christopher Benjamin

Musical training is associated with well-developed “executive functions (EF)” – the cognitive capacities that enable intentional, controlled behavior and strong academic performance, according to Harvard University’s Jennifer Zuk, Christopher Benjamin, Arnold Kenyon, and Nadine Gaab.

“Executive functions (EF)” include:

John Best

John Best

Executive functions are required for academic readiness and long-term achievement, according to University of British Columbia’s John R Best, Patricia H Miller of San Francisco State University, and University of Virginia’s Jack A Naglieri.

Specific activities improve EF skills, even among children:

  • Kimberley Lakes

    Kimberley Lakes

    Martial arts, found University of California, Irvine’s Kimberly D. Lakes and William Hoyt

  • Lisa Flook

    Lisa Flook

    Mindfulness training, shown in research by UCLA’s Lisa Flook, Susan L. Smalley, M. Jennifer Kitil, Brian M. Galla, Susan Kaiser-Greenland, Jill Locke, Eric Ishijima, and Connie Kasari

  • Laura Chaddock-Heyman

    Laura Chaddock-Heyman

    Physical exercise, noted by University of Illinois’s Laura Chaddock, Michelle W Voss, Matt VanPatter, Matthew B. Pontifex, Charles H. Hillman, Arthur Kramer with Kirk I Erickson of University of Pennsylvania and Ohio State’s Ruchika S Prakash.

Individuals with musical training demonstrate enhanced:

  • Lisianne Hoch

    Lisianne Hoch

    Mathematical achievement, found Auckland University of Technology’s Lisianne Hoch and Barbara Tillmann University of Lyon.

Zuk and team compared adult working musicians and non-musicians, as well as children with at least two years of musical training and those with no previous musical training on cognitive ability tests of verbal fluency, mental processing speed, and working memory.

Nadine Gaab

Nadine Gaab

Adult musicians showed enhanced performance on measures of cognitive flexibility, working memory, and verbal fluency, compared to non-musicians.

Children performed a separate mental task while their brains were scanned using fMRI technology, and musically-trained children showed enhanced performance on measures of verbal fluency and cognitive processing speed.

They also showed significantly greater activation in supplementary motor area (SMA), pre-supplementary area (pre-SMA), and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) during rule representation and task-switching tasks, compared to musically-untrained children.

This research suggests that current trends to eliminate arts programs in public schools could have a negative impact on development of academic achievement and job-related cognitive skills.

By implication, musical training may correlate with strong performance in pre-professional intern experiences and long term job performance, and remains to be verified by researchers and job recruiters.

-*Have you observed a relationship between musical training and on-the-job performance?

-*To what extent do physical exercise, martial arts, and mindfulness training increase cognitive task performance?

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Work with Experts – But Don’t Compete – to Improve Performance

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Francis Flynn

Francis Flynn

People can improve performance on tasks ranging across:

Emily Amanatullah

Emily Amanatullah

when performing individually but alongside an outstanding performer, according to Stanford’s Francis Flynn and University of Texas, Austin’s Emily Amanatullah.

They attributed performance enhancement to increased mental focus and physical effort, motivated by:

Robert Zajonc

Robert Zajonc

  • “Social facilitation” due to the expert role model’s mere presence, described more than 50 years ago by Robert Zajonc, then of University of Michigan
  • “Social comparison” with “skillful coactors,” demonstrated by University of North Carolina’s John Seta.

    John Seta

    John Seta

However, performance declined when people competed directly with a strong performer, Flynn and Amanatullah reported.
They concluded that “high status coactors” enable people to “psych up” performance when not competing, but become “psyched out” when challenging the expert, based on their analysis of Masters golf tournament statistics over five years.

Ray Reagans

Ray Reagans

High status co-actors can achieve their influential position through demonstrated skill or their greater awareness of status dynamics due to better ability to “self-monitor,” found Flynn and Amanatullah with Ray E. Reagans of Carnegie Mellon and Daniel R. Ames of Columbia University.

Daniel R Ames

Daniel R Ames

People with greater self-monitoring ability tend to more effective in managing their “exchange relationships,” and generally establish a reputation as a generous “exchange partner.”

As a result, they are typically more likely than low self-monitors to be sought out for help and to refrain from asking others for help.

“Co-action,” organizational status differences and interpersonal “exchange” all occur in organizations when employees work independently but in near proximity with others, and when people collaborate toward shared goals.

These finding suggest that working near expert colleagues can enable improve performance among co-workers, but competition for salary increases, promotions, access to special training, and other perks can undermine individual achievement by provoking anxiety.

Flynn and Amanatullah recommended that organizations and employees can showcase desired skillful performance by role models, while enabling employees to earn rewards and incentives through individual efforts rather than competition.
This recommendation may be impossible to implement in hierarchical organizations that identify “high potential” employees and differentiate performance through “stack ranking.”

-*How do you avoid the “psych out” effect of competing with highly skilled performers?

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