Bridge Burning and the six other ways to quit your job

Just as Paul Simon sang about 50 ways to leave your lover, a new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests there are seven ways to leave your employer. This research is the first to give us a map of "resignation styles," as well as their causes and their impact on others.

The researchers Anthony Klots and Mark Bolino generated their taxonomy of resignation styles from several sources, including a survey of 53 students who described the way they resigned from a previous full-time job position and 423 more people surveyed online who had resigned from their full-time job in the past year, 38 per cent of whom were women, average age 38. Here are the seven styles of saying “I quit” that the researchers identified:

• The most common (31 per cent) was By The Book, involving a face to face conversation accompanied by a resignation letter, openness about the reason for departure, and a standard notice period.
• 29 per cent took a Perfunctory approach – going through the motions above, but in a clinical fashion, without elaborating on their reasons for leaving.
• Grateful Goodbyes (nine per cent) were positive and involved willingness to make the departure as painless as possible for the supervisor and team.
• In eight per cent of cases, the supervisor was kept In The Loop, with the resignation the culmination of a process that was out in the open, such as applications and acceptance to graduate school.
• Nine per cent of cases were Avoidant, minimising contact with the boss through a third party like HR, or by sending a message over the weekend to break the news.
• Impulsive Quitting, a style that has been described in past research, occurred in four per cent of cases, and typically involved a precipitating incident or building frustrations reaching breaking point. In these cases, the quitting conversation was the end of the relationship: “she screamed and cussed at me and hung up the phone ... I left and never picked up the phone for her again.”
• Finally, ten per cent were Bridge Burners – one short and sweet description being “Told my boss to —— off.” In such cases notice periods were, unsurprisingly, short.

Klots and Bolino found that people who burned bridges or impulsively quit reported higher levels of abuse from their supervisors, and a perception that they were treated unfairly, compared to those leaving more gracefully.

In a final study, the researchers were interested in the impact of these different types of departures on managers and supervisors. Nearly five hundred adults were asked through an online experiment to reflect on the resignations they had received (median two experiences) and then pay attention to a hypothetical scenario where a subordinate resigned in one of the seven styles, before reporting their levels of positive and negative emotions.

Overall participants on the receiving end of a resignation reported more negative emotions than positive ones, but their positive emotions were higher, and negative ones lower when the approach used was by the book, grateful, or signified being kept in the loop (where positive emotions actually outweighed the negative). The researchers call attention to perfunctory resignations, which were far more common than the overtly hostile styles, but led to similarly negative reactions; at least in this experimental context, a clinical but formally impeccable departure can still be upsetting.

When research looks at the impact of different workplace practices, a key measure is often employees’ ‘intention to leave’. The current work reminds us that once you decide to leave, you also have a choice in how to leave, with implications for supervisors, team members, and the organisation more broadly. Klotz and Bolino open their paper with a particularly dramatic example of these ripple effects – banking executive Greg Smith’s NY Times article, published after his resignation, deriding former employer Goldman Sachs in a way that shocked customers and rocked the company. In addition, organisational turnover can show contagion-like effects, and by differentiating different forms of turnover, this work helps us understand when resignations are likely to matter most.
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Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Emphasising that science involves collaboration and helping others increases its appeal as a career

Scientific work is unfairly perceived by many people as a solitary, even lonely enterprise, concerned with abstracted goals rather than helping others. While some scientific work calls for a quiet room (at the least, noise-cancelling headphones), the reality is that the enterprise as a whole involves plenty of communal aspects, from collaboration and discussions to teaching and mentoring. In new research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers from the University of Miami have explored whether, by emphasising its communal goals, science could be made a more attractive career choice, especially to women who are underrepresented in the field.

In a first study, Emily Clark’s team asked a gender-balanced sample of 165 students to read a description of a fictional scientist’s day-to-day activities. For half the participants, the scientist’s tasks were described as being tackled solo (“he looks up relevant past research to consult about the procedure”) whereas other participants read a description modified to emphasise communal behaviours (“he meets some of his lab group in the lab and consults with them about the procedures”).

In a survey that followed, male and female participants exposed to scientific communal behaviours were more likely to agree that entry-level science roles “fulfil goals such as intimacy, working with people, and helping others in general” – showing that the manipulation worked – and these participants expressed more positivity about the idea of pursuing a scientific career themselves. This was true to the same extent whether the scientist was presented as a woman or a man – a surprising result given that people usually see women as having more communal interests, so you'd think a female scientist performing communal activities would have had an additive effect.

However, a second study suggested that science’s communal credentials can be boosted when female scientists are depicted as having stereotypically female interests outside of their lab work. Here, 156 student participants rated their personal interest in communal goals like intimacy and helping others, before reading a description of one of two female scientists. The two characterisations were identical in their work activities but differed in the hobbies they pursued in their free time: one enjoyed more gendered activities like yoga and knitting, the other gender-neutral ones like photography and running.

A subset of participants who read about the more explicitly gendered scientist gave higher ratings of science as communal, and rated science more positively. These were the participants who had said they cared strongly about communal goals – they apparently "read" the characterisation more closely, and made more of the implications.

What does this research mean for what science institutions should do? Firstly, that to frame science as communal, women role models are more of an asset when allowed to be seen as women. This isn’t to advocate that women scientists should feel a burden to act more stereotypically (which would put them in a double bind, given recent findings), but that marketers and communicators should accept that a more three-dimensional account of women scientists is likely to make more of an impact than a nominal use of the occasional female face on a website or a scattering of feminine names throughout some literature. Secondly, that a very straightforward way to send the message about science’s communal nature is simply to demonstrate it in action, ensuring that the interactive experience of scientists – no matter their gender – is visible and accessible.

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Clark, E., Fuesting, M., & Diekman, A. (2016). Enhancing interest in science: exemplars as cues to communal affordances of science Journal of Applied Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12392

--further reading--
Hey girls: Science helps people!
Social, creative - that's physics!
Encourage students into science by targeting their parents

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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When staff absenteeism seems catching, it could be the team culture that's sick

When the morning alarm carves us out of our slumber, restoring the previous night’s raspy throat and foggy head, we have a decision to make: get up and go, or call in sick. What happens next is influenced by workplace norms about whether absence is commonplace or exceptional, a current pulling us towards the office or letting us settle back into bed. But new research in Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processing from a Dutch-Canadian team, led by Lieke ten Brummelhuis, suggests this isn’t automatic: we’re more likely to fight against the tide when we care about our team, and when we know our absence will cost them.

The researchers asked 299 participants recruited online – American adults with an average of 20 years job experience and who worked in a team of three or more members – to imagine either that over the last three months someone had been absent from their team almost every week, although the understaffing had finally ended, or that their full team had been present throughout that period. Next they were to imagine that they were feeling a little out of sorts, although not actually ill, and were considering calling in sick to their workplace. The participants’ simply had to say whether they would choose to call in sick. Finally, they completed a survey about their attitude toward their real-life team.

As expected, participants asked to imagine high absence in their team were more likely to decide to call in sick, but still a majority did not. Ten Brummelhuis’ team looked at the 19 per cent who did take a sickie, finding that they considered their relationship with their real-life team to be more transactional in nature – for instance by affirming statements like “I watch very carefully what I get from my team, relative to what I contribute.” Meanwhile, the 81 per cent who chose not to call in sick were significantly more likely to sign off on statements like “My relationship with my team members is based on mutual trust.” This fits with the researchers’ thesis, based on social exchange theory, that although absence typically begets absence, this may be neutralised when the team has developed a trusting relationship rather than a tit-for-tat attitude to hassles.

The researchers next looked to deepen their understanding using actual worker absenteeism rates from a three-month period. They recruited hundreds of participants from Dutch companies in industries including health, facilities and commercial services, comprising 97 teams with an average of 8 members. Again, a given team member was more likely to take more sick days when their co-worker absence was greater. But this association was weaker in more cohesive, tight-knit teams, supplementing the finding from the online experiment. In addition, participants were less influenced by high rates of others’ absence when work within their team was highly interconnected and interdependent – when your day is made very difficult by the absence of a team-mate, you’re more aware of that cost and less prepared to inflict it on others without good reason.

Absence costs around 200 billion annually in the US economy, so understanding the factors that contribute to inessential absence matters to organisations. Tackling an absence culture where employees "repay co-workers" absence by calling in sick  means looking at the nature of work performed by a team, to amplify and clarify its interconnected nature. And it means supporting high-quality relations within a team, in which a hard week in an understaffed office isn’t earning a credit to spend later, but a matter of duty, because someone you care about needs that recovery time.

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ten Brummelhuis, L., Johns, G., Lyons, B., & ter Hoeven, C. (2016). Why and when do employees imitate the absenteeism of co-workers? Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 134, 16-30 DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.04.001

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Feminine-looking women scientists are judged less likely to be a scientist

A US investigation has found that men and women assume female researchers with more stereotypically feminine looks are less likely to be scientists and more likely to be school teachers or journalists. The superficial femininity or masculinity of male scientists, by contrast, was not related to observers' judgments about the likelihood that they were scientists. For both male and female scientists, those considered more attractive were thought less likely to be a scientist.

The findings come from two studies that involved over 250 people, recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk survey website, looking at smiling headshots of 80 men and women scientists taken from the webpages of elite US science labs. The participants did not know the origin of the photos and thought they were taking part in a study of first impressions.

The results, published in Sex Roles, echo real-life events – last year an advertising campaign by the tech company OneLogin faced accusations of fakery after some people found it unbelievable that their feminine-looking software engineer Isis Anchalee – who featured in the campaign – was the real deal. They also add to past findings that "some women in STEM [science, technology and medicine] not only minimize feminine appearance (e.g., avoid wearing make-up) but also eschew feminine traits, behaviors, and goals" presumably so as to avoid the prejudice reflected in the new findings.

The researchers said "women’s interest in STEM may ... be thwarted by the undue perception that women scientists cannot express femininity," adding "a woman who is more feminine in appearance than other women will elicit stronger perceived role incongruity and will therefore experience more prejudice." More research is needed on the long-term effects, for example "before choosing science, are feminine girls and women—because they don’t 'look like scientists'—treated differently by parents, teachers, and others?"

How to tackle the prejudice? Campaigns such as the European Commission's "Science, it's a Girl Thing" have been ridiculed, and there's evidence that overemphasising feminine role-models can be harmful. But the researchers said "we should not conclude that feminine or 'girly images' of women in STEM are uniformly harmful to fostering women’s interest in STEM. In our opinion, there is an important distinction between portraying naturalistic variation in women’s gendered appearance in STEM versus extreme, objectified or sexualized portrayals of feminine women scientists".

--But You Don’t Look Like A Scientist!: Women Scientists with Feminine Appearance are Deemed Less Likely to be Scientists

--further reading--
Girlie scientist role models could do more harm than good
Is sexism in science really over?

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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How expert schmoozers trick themselves into liking their target

Big-wigs have much to gain from ingratiating themselves with even bigger ones, because having an in with important people sways decisions made in the executive washroom, on the golf course, or over plates of wagyu carpaccio. But ingratiators face a dilemma: no-one likes a suck-up, and people at the top of the food chain have plenty of practice in detecting and dismissing them.

A new article in the Academy of Management Journal finds that company directors get around this dilemma by employing a clever psychological tactic – before meeting up with those they plan on winning over, they think about them in such a way that they come to like them more, making any flattery or ingratiation seem all the more convincing.

Participants in the study were directors at a range of large US companies, each of whom had at least one scheduled meeting with another director who had something they wanted: a say in the board membership at another company. The meetings occurred during the six months running up to the board nominations meeting, so if the participants played their cards right, maybe they would get appointed.

So what’s the best way to play? Researchers James Westphal and Guy Shani suspected that the key to successful ingratiation is to believe it. Detecting unnatural behaviour comes fairly easily, especially if you know what to look for, meaning pretenders are one feigned smile or wavering compliment away from being dismissed as a brown-noser. Acting is hard!

When we really like someone, on the other hand, we don’t need to act, just let our feelings come through. Increasing one’s authentic liking for a person would therefore be very helpful. Westphal and Shani predicted that one way to do this would be for the participants to mentally emphasise to themselves what they have in common with the director they wanted to influence. After all, there is copious evidence showing that we like more those who resemble us, and that we are more likely to credit the achievements of (and therefore respect) people like ourselves, rather than putting their success down to external factors.

In the study, the 278 participants were surveyed at multiple time points prior to their crucial meet-up(s) with other director, on how much they thought about their similarities, or about their differences. For example, a black woman prior to meeting a much older white male might choose to reflect on how they both spent some years in the same industry. The researchers also surveyed the ingratiation behaviours in the meeting itself: compliments and expressions of admiration, together with the amount of non-verbal affirmation like smiling or laughter.

The data showed that the more a participant had turned their thoughts towards what they had in common with the other director, the more their ingratiation behaviours paid off – they were more likely to get an invitation to join the board in the months that followed – presumably because their flattery was more convincing.

Furthermore, participants were more likely to adjust their thinking in this way when their counterpart was more dissimilar to them – where intentionally searching for common ground is going to be particularly important – and in these cases, use of the tactic was even more likely to be rewarded with a nomination. These effects were striking: those following this strategy to its fullest were nearly three times more likely to get a recommendation than those with an average amount of regulation of their thoughts around the meeting.

The psychological strategy uncovered in this research was certainly effective, but what we don’t know is how aware the participants were of what they were doing. Did they deliberately trick themselves into liking the other director, or was it a more automatic and instinctive process?

Either way, these results aren’t only relevant for top dogs trying to bound their way further up the hierarchy. The study provides another demonstration that changing how we think about other people has an important role in smoothing social interactions. Similar processes might help explain why social contact between out-groups is sometimes found to be helpful, and sometimes not: are the different factions looking for what they have in common, or what sets them apart? This approach is about more than a cushy seat in the board room; it’s about how divided people can find a way to sit down together.

--Psyched-up to Suck-up: Self-regulated Cognition, Interpersonal Influence, and Recommendations for Board Appointments in the Corporate Elite

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Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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What makes our work meaningful? Do bosses really make it meaningless?

The media has used the findings to demonise bosses, but such coverage forgets an important point, writes Alex Fradera

There have been times in my life where work seemed pretty pointless, on occasion because the position was a prime example of what anthropologist David Graeber calls bullshit jobs – those that give no real value back to oneself or society. But I’ve more frequently experienced the sense that a job was at some times meaningless, and at others very worthwhile. That’s a theme picked up in Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden’s new study published in MIT Sloan Management Review, where interviews with 135 people within 10 different occupations explored times when work was meaningful or meaningless.

Like myself, interviewees didn’t consider meaningfulness as a fixed property of their job. They described it arising in episodes, highly intense and memorable peaks separated by unremarkable lulls. Some cases exemplified what the work was all about, such as an academic giving what they knew to be a superb lecture, whereas others were quite outside the norm, such as a shop assistant tending to a critically ill customer.

Often, these episodes had a personal flavour, such as the participant who recalled the first music recital attended by her parents. Many involved recognising the impact their work had had on people besides themselves, whether their students’ graduation or when their engineering innovation had been translated into products used by others. These personal and transcendent aspects were easily fused, such as in the example given by a refuse collector, where, during a crisis triggered by contamination of the local water supply, he visited one neighbour after another providing clean water.

It’s tempting to assume valuable work experiences should be positive – euphoric, air-punching highs – but the interviews teemed with examples that were heavy and challenging. Nurses described end-of-life situations; lawyers, toiling through a heavy, hard case; workers, pushing together against a seemingly intractable problem. Bailey and Madden suggest that organisations and researchers both may be neglecting such poignant experiences, which don’t tally with a superficial account of positive psychology, but may be very important in making work meaningful.

Times that meant something often involved contact with family and friends, peers and particularly the people served by the job. In contrast, managers were mentioned in accounts of meaningless work: times when the interviewee felt treated unfairly, disempowered or taken for granted, or when managerial priorities separated from important relationships with peers, or disconnected them from the values that mattered most to them, such as when the bottom line was placed over the quality of work. It’s for this reason that Bailey and Madden concluded that managerial meddling is often to blame when our work feels meaningless – a claim that has attracted boss-bashing headlines in the mainstream media, such as MoneyWeb’s Bosses destroy meaningful work.

But this media coverage, while fun, forgets an important point – in all but the most dysfunctional organisations, managers have a role in determining the conditions around work, which means – as Bailey and Madden themselves note – that a deft manager can be of benefit.

How does the work have a bigger meaning; for example, how does recycled waste actually lead to the creation of new objects? How can people devoted to their work get opportunities to interact with each other, and with the people their work benefits? How can the difficult times at work – like the eventual loss of a resident at your hospice – be met with appropriate support, but also recognised as valuable? And how can grey tasks like filling out forms be reduced, or at the least, be joined up with the important stuff? Should management solve such problems, they’d fade into the background, and in all likelihood, stay unsung in interviews about meaningful work. But that won’t mean that their efforts didn’t matter, and hopefully they can take pride – and meaning – in that.

--What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless
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Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Puncturing the myth of the tireless leader – if you're sleep deprived you're unlikely to inspire anyone

Sleep deprivation makes it harder for us to inspire others, or to be inspired

There’s an archetype of the tireless leader who scorns slumber in favour of getting things done – Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, to name a few. But if you think you’re going to inspire anybody by routinely working through the night, you might want to think again. Research published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows that sleep deprivation has the specific effect of making it harder for us to charismatically inspire others. And in a double whammy, the research suggests that followers who are sleep deprived are likely to find it particularly difficult to be inspired by their leaders.

Christopher Barnes and his colleagues asked 88 business students to prepare a commencement speech (a talk meant to inspire students at their graduating ceremony), and then to deliver it in front of a video camera. Half of the participants made the speech in a state of sleep deprivation (the previous night they’d had to complete a survey every hour between 10pm and 5am), the others were fully rested.

Afterwards the students answered questions about their own performance, including their ability to engage in “deep acting” – regulating their emotions by reaching inward and trying to genuinely experience these emotions. Also, a team of judges watched the videos of the speeches and rated the students’ performances for charisma. The judges didn’t know who the students were, nor whether they were in the sleep deprived condition or not, but nonetheless they consistently rated the tired orators as less charismatic.

This result was just as Barnes and his team predicted because previous research has shown that sleep deprivation makes it harder to control our emotional displays, and that one component of charismatic behaviour is being able to embody gravity, enthusiasm, or righteousness as the situation demands. Bearing this out, sleep-deprived participants considered themselves less able during the speech to engage in deep acting. And the worse they felt they were at deep acting, the less charismatic the speech.

A second experiment turned the tables to see how observers deal with charismatic content when they are tired. The researchers cherry picked some of the more charismatic or uninspiring videos from the first experiment, and then asked 109 student participants to watch them back and rate each for their charismatic effect. Half of these participants were sleep deprived and they felt less charismatically impressed by what they heard. As this can’t be related to their own deep acting skills, what was going on? Again, the answer is emotion: the tired participants felt less positive, and this lower mood explained the degree to which sleep deprivation affected their ratings. This is because in searching for an external explanation for our feelings, we are liable to misjudge the source – in this case the students blamed their feeling flat from tiredness on the fact the orators weren’t that charismatic.

The tireless leader trope may not come out of nowhere: there is evidence for a gene that provides resistance to sleep deprivation, and the will to persevere during certain crises may temporarily outweigh the costs. But the costs – summarised here – can be substantial, including attention deficits, poorer decision making and risk evaluation, and memory lapses. Now we can add charismatic influence to that list. Moreover, role-modelling long hours risks propagating these habits to the rest of the organisation – so even leaders who have the rare ability to shake off their own tiredness will be presiding over cognitively impaired, irritable followers in no mood for their pronouncements. Forty winks are a wise investment indeed.

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Barnes, C., Guarana, C., Nauman, S., & Kong, D. (2016). Too Tired to Inspire or Be Inspired: Sleep Deprivation and Charismatic Leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/apl0000123

--further reading--
Students: it's time to ditch the pre-exam all-nighter
An afternoon nap tunes out negative emotions, tunes in positive ones

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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A small alcoholic drink could benefit business negotiations, study finds

It is a tradition in many cultures, especially in East Asia, for business negotiations to be accompanied by drinking alcohol. Motivated in part to wonder why this might be, Pak Hung Au and Jipeng Zhang, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in China, have tested the effects of a small cup of beer (350ml) on participants' bargaining behaviour.

The study in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organisation involved 114 people playing a bargaining game in pairs, some of them after a cup of beer, others after non-alcoholic beer (a test of a placebo effect) and some after juice. Each round, each player was allocated a sum of money between $1 to $10 known only to them. Each round they and their partner then had to decide whether to participate with each other or not. If both parties agreed to join together then their initial endowments for that round would be summed and multiplied by 1.2 before being shared equally.

As a pair, these rules meant the participants gained more money the more that they collaborated. However, collaboration was not financially beneficial to individual participants on those rounds in which they had a large initial endowment but their collaborating partner had only a small endowment. Generally what happened is that players opted to collaborate on rounds in which they started out with a small endowment, but chose not to when they had a larger amount. Part of the game involved deducing from any collaboration payouts and other clues how conservatively and individualistically their partner was playing, and responding as they felt appropriate.

In short, the researchers found that more collaboration occurred when both participants in a pair had had a drink of beer compared with juice (those who drank beer had an average blood alcohol concentration level of 0.0406; for reference, outside of Scotland, the UK drink drive limit is 0.08 or 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood). There was little evidence of a placebo effect, and other financial games and measures used in the study suggested the effects on collaboration were not due to any changes in risk aversion, mood or altruism. Instead, the researchers' analysis suggested that alcohol affected the way that players made inferences about their partner's negotiating stance based on their collaboration decisions and other clues. "In settings in which skepticism can lead to a breakdown in negotiation, alcohol consumption can make people drop their guard for each others’ actions, thus facilitating reaching an agreement," they explained.

The researchers warned that of course excessive alcohol consumption is associated with many health risks, and that the consumption of larger amounts of alcohol would inevitable harm business negotiations through its affects on mental performance and aggression. But they said their results do suggest that "consuming a mild to moderate amount of alcoholic drink in business meetings can potentially help smooth the negotiation process".

--Deal or no deal? The effect of alcohol drinking on bargaining

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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The psychology of why we tip some occupations but not others

It's more about altruism than trying to win approval

Why do I tip my taxi driver, but not my accountant? I mean, there’s a good reason I don’t - he would narrow his eyes at me and ask if I was feeling ok. But why, in general, do we tip in some service contexts and not others; is it simply due to a quirk of history or the result of broader psychological patterns? Cornell University’s Michael Lynn suspected the latter, and in his new study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, he outlines the evidence for various pro-tipping motives.

Lynn presented a list of 122 American service occupations – including architect, bus tour guide, shampooer – to just under 1200 participants recruited online. Their task was to rate each role on one of 13 different measures including the typical working conditions for the job, how difficult they thought the job was, how well-paid, or the crucial question of how likely they would be to tip someone doing this job for them.

Lynn had chosen these measures carefully, to test out different hypotheses about tipping and reward. For example, participants said they were more likely to give tips to the same service occupations that were perceived to be low-income, consistent with motives related to altruism and egalitarianism; after all, a bit of extra cash in my accountant’s pocket isn’t likely to lift them from want, nor to redress the scales of society.

It might also be that we tip in contexts where we might gain or lose approval from others – a social status motive. Here the results were less compelling: participants were not more willing to tip in roles where the act can be witnessed by others, which you would expect if tipping was about making yourself look good. However, tipping was more common when participants thought people in the role were usually much less happy than their customers, like the taxi drivers who take revellers to and from parties, or holidayers to airports. Lynn treats this as evidence for wanting to avoid disapproval but I wonder if the finding could be another instance of egalitarianism, using money to compensate for poorer working conditions.

Finally, participants liked to tip in situations where they felt they were in a better position than a manager to evaluate the work of an employee. It’s hard for me to know whether an X-ray technician has done a good job, but I probably have a better sense of the quality of my tour guide’s work today than his manager back at the office. This factor appears quite important, as it explains why jobs (like massage) that require more physical contact, and those that are highly customised, seem more tip-worthy.

Some of the predicted motives didn’t pan out, notably one that any classical economist might expect: that tips are used as an incentive for improved future service. If this was the case, Lynn predicted, we’d prefer to tip roles that involve repeat service, and also those involving extended contact with the customer, giving the service provider more opportunities to maximise their performance for the hope of reward. But participants preferred to tip those kind of roles less, not more. Possibly this is confounded by an unmeasured variable – maybe more contact humanises the service provider, and so the encounter becomes more personal and less transactional – but in any case, it’s a surprising result.

Sophisticated businesses may want to go against the tipping status quo: introducing tips to make the job more attractive to prospective employees and to motivate those in the job, or conversely to remove them, to standardise service and avoid tax complications. But this new research suggests such counter-normative policies may meet with resistance from customers. For example, Uber decided to discourage tipping by not allowing it through the app system. The work of these ride providers is easily evaluated and customisable, low income, and likely less fun than the experience of those enjoying the ride. The response from customers? Petitioning Uber to let them tip.

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Lynn, M. (2016). Why are we more likely to tip some service occupations than others? Theory, evidence, and implications Journal of Economic Psychology, 54, 134-150 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2016.04.001

--further reading--
Why we tip and how to get a bigger tip
Tipping is more prevalent in countries that are more corrupt

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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People who work for non-profit organisations are happier with their jobs and life in general

Working for a commercial organisation, especially in a senior position, there may be more scope for bigger pay cheques, performance bonuses and a company car, but a new study in the Journal of Economic Psychology finds that British people who work for not-for-profit organisations, including charities and social enterprises (also known as the third sector), are the real winners. Controlling for the influence of other relevant personal factors such as marital status and education, workers at non-profit organisations tend to be much happier with their lives than for-profit workers, more satisfied with their jobs (including their hours and job security), they enjoy their day-to-day activities more, and they believe more strongly that they are playing a useful role in life.

Indeed, based on what we know about the effects of higher pay on happiness, the author of the study Martin Binder estimates that a for-profit worker would have to earn an extra £27,000 per year (based on salaries between 1996 to 2008) to be as happy as a person working similar hours for a not-for-profit organisation.

The findings come from detailed data collected as part of the British Household Panel Survey from 1996 to 2008, which included answers from 12,786 people employed in private firms and 966 people employed in non-profit organisations (note, civil servants, NHS employees, military personnel and staff in higher education were not included in this analysis). Other details from the research include the finding that women and higher educated people are more likely to work for non-profit organisations, and that the higher happiness among non-profit workers is seen across all individuals regardless of their baseline happiness at the start of the study.

A weakness of the research is that it can't show for sure that working for a non-profit organisation causes greater happiness – perhaps happier people are more likely to choose to work for non-profit organisations. Another possibility is that non-profit employment may only lead to greater happiness for people who are more altruistic by nature. Arguing against this, Binder found that life satisfaction was higher among non-profit workers regardless of their score on the personality trait of agreeableness – not the same as altruism, but a useful proxy. Nonetheless, Binder recommends that "the question of self-selection needs to be further explored before one can generalise that everybody would be happier when working in the third sector".

Binder also cautions that not all non-profit work is the same – it remains to be seen if the findings would apply to particularly challenging jobs such as in private care-giving roles. That said, he concludes on an up-beat note: "The fact that people who do good also 'do it with [more] joy' than others seems a heartening finding with relevance for organising the workforce of the future."

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Binder, M. (2016). “…Do it with joy!” – Subjective well-being outcomes of working in non-profit organizations Journal of Economic Psychology, 54, 64-84 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2016.03.003

--further reading--
Volunteer staff are surprisingly committed
Why female business owners are less successful but just as satisfied
What's the difference between a happy life and a meaningful one?
Political activism is good for you

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Minimalist, anonymous rooms are probably not a good place to do teamwork

According to the philosophy of "lean space management", a minimalist workspace shorn of clutter is distraction-free and ideal for productivity. But this philosophy turns out to have slim empirical foundations, and as promoting a sense of identity at work, including personalising the work space, generally leads to better outcomes, there’s reason to expect richer, characterful workplaces to be more beneficial. A new article in the Journal of Personnel Psychology builds on this past work, showing that rich and meaningful workplace decor produces better team performance than lean spaces, even in surprising contexts.

Katherine Greenaway and her colleagues asked 54 students (45 women) to form teams of three or four members. The researchers then explained to each team that there were Red teams and Blue teams and that theirs was a Red team. This was a ruse because in reality all teams were told that theirs was a Red team. To stoke a sense of competition,  the researchers added that the participants' team performance and that of other Red teams would be compared against the rival Blue teams. The participants then had a chance to get to know their team-mates and to personalise their own team room with a poster that they made together and with red decorations.

But the teams couldn’t enjoy this for long, as a contrived double booking meant they were cast out from their room into a new work environment that they were told had recently housed another team. Some teams were rehoused in a lean, undecorated room; others in a room that had clearly been used by a Red team; and the remainder in a room that was dressed up as Blue territory.

In this new environment, the teams had to complete a task: finding words in a grid, and then using them to construct sentences. The researchers found that teams moved to a friendly Red room or an unfriendly Blue room performed better than those placed in a lean room.

Remember, the decorations were based on the arbitrary, colour-themed team allocation process, so their specifics couldn’t have been profoundly inspiring. Nor could they represent a shared and personal endeavour: in all cases, the teams’ own poster that they made and their decorative decisions were out of sight in another room.

In the case of those teams rehoused in a different Red room, some insight into their better performance comes from an attitude survey the participants took after the word task. They tended to give higher ratings to items like “I identify with the group that was in this room before us”. It seems the room triggered or sustained a general feeling of “Reds together” and the data suggested this identification drove their better performance.

What about the finding of superior team performance in a Blue-room? The researchers had predicted that being in enemy territory might spark competitive feelings that would boost performance, at least in the short-term. The teams placed in a Blue room did indeed feel more competitive but there was no sign in the data that this was linked with superior performance, so there’s still a question mark over this part of the study.

All in all, the research suggests that workspaces with a rich character are more supportive of team performance than those built for anonymity. As the authors conclude: meaning beats leaning.

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Greenaway, K., Thai, H., Haslam, S., & Murphy, S. (2016). Spaces That Signal Identity Improve Workplace Productivity Journal of Personnel Psychology, 15 (1), 35-43 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000148

--further reading--
Why it's important that employers let staff personalise their workspaces
The supposed benefits of open-plan offices do not outweigh the costs

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Study of firefighters shows our body schema isn't always as flexible as we need it to be

The results could help explain some of the many injuries
incurred by firefighters each year

Your brain has a representation of where your body extends in space. It's how you know whether you can fit through a doorway or not, among other things. This representation – the "body schema" as some scientists call it – is flexible. For example if you're using a grabbing tool or swinging a tennis raquet, your sense of how far you can reach is updated accordingly. But there are limits to the accuracy and speed with which the body schema can be adjusted, as shown by an intriguing new study in Ecological Psychology about the inability of firefighters to adapt to their protective clothing.

Indeed, the researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Fire Service Institute believe their findings may help explain some of the many injuries sustained by firefighters (of which there were over 65,000 in 2013 alone), and that they could have implications for training.

The participants were 24 firefighters (23 men) with an average age 29 and an average of 6 years experience in the job, all of whom were recruited through the University of Illinois Fire Service. The researchers led by Matthew Petrucci asked the participants to don the full protective kit, including bunker-style coat, helmet and breathing apparatus. As well as the weight and bulk of the gear affecting the participants'  ability to move freely, it also changed the participants' physical dimensions – for instance, the helmet added 21cm to their height, and the breathing apparatus added 21cm of depth to their body.

The researchers created three main obstacles designed to simulate situations in a real-life fire: a horizontal bar that the firefighters had to go under, a bar that they had to go over, and a vertical gap between a mock door and wall that they had to squeeze through. All of these were adjustable, and the participants' first task was to estimate what height bar they could manoeuvre over, what height they could manoeuvre under, and what width gap they could squeeze through. To make these judgments, the researchers adjusted the obstacles' in height or width, and for each setting the firefighters said whether they thought they could safely pass the obstacle.

For the next stage, the firefighters actually attempted to manoeuvre over, under or through the different obstacles, which were adjusted to make them progressively harder to complete. The idea was to find the lowest, highest and narrowest settings that the firefighters could pass through safely and quickly. To count as a safe passage, the firefighters had to avoid knocking off the delicately balanced horizontal bar for the over and under obstacles, and avoid touching their hands to the floor, or dumping their gear.

Despite having many years experience wearing protective gear and breathing apparatus, the results showed that there was little correspondence between the firefighters' judgments about the dimensions of the obstacles they could safely pass under, over or through, and their actual physical performance. In psychological jargon, the firefighters made repeated "affordance judgment errors", misperceiving the movements "afforded" to them by different environments.

The participants' judgments were most awry for passing under a horizontal bar – on average they thought they could pass under a bar that was 15cm lower than the height they could actually go under. Errors related to the over obstacle were a mix of over- and underestimations, and for the through obstacle 80 per cent of participants underestimated their ability by four to five cm – in other words, they thought they couldn't pass through, when actually they could. In a real life situation, this could lead to time wasting or unnecessary danger as they sought a more circuitous route.

The results suggest that the firefighters struggled to adjust their body schemas to account for their gear, and it's easy to see how this problem could lead to accidents in a burning building. It seems strange that they hadn't learnt to take account of their gear through experience, but in fact the converse was true – the more experienced firefighters made more errors. The researchers propose several explanations for this, including that specific experiences may be needed to recalibrate the body schema to specific obstacles. Also, the firefighters training in manoeuvring in their gear mostly comes at the start of their career and the benefits may have faded. Refresher training may be helpful, especially to learn one's changing capabilities with ageing.

The researchers said that their results were important because "affordance judgment errors made on a fireground could contribute to injuries attributed to contact with ceilings, doors, structural components of buildings, and other objects with slips, trips, and falls."

_________________________________

Petrucci, M., Horn, G., Rosengren, K., & Hsiao-Wecksler, E. (2016). Inaccuracy of Affordance Judgments for Firefighters Wearing Personal Protective Equipment Ecological Psychology, 28 (2), 108-126 DOI: 10.1080/

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Sorry to say, but your pilot's decisions are likely just as irrational as yours and mine

Flying a plane is no trivial task, but adverse weather conditions are where things get seriously challenging. Tragically, a contributing factor to many fatal accidents is when the pilot has misjudged the appropriateness of the flying conditions. Now in a somewhat worrying paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology Stephen Walmsley and Andrew Gilbey of Massey University have shown that pilots’ judgment of weather conditions, and their decisions on how to respond to them, are coloured by three classic cognitive biases. What’s more, expert flyers are often the most vulnerable to these mental errors.

The researchers first addressed the “anchoring effect”, which is when information we receive early on has an undue influence on how we subsequently think about a situation. Nearly 200 pilots (a mix of commercial, transport, student and private pilots) were given the weather forecast for the day and then they looked at visual displays that showed cloud cover and horizontal visibility as if they were in a cockpit, and their task was to quantify these conditions by eye.

The pilots tended to rate the atmospheric conditions as better – higher clouds, greater visibility – when they’d been told earlier that the weather forecast was favourable. Essentially, old and possibly irrelevant information was biasing the judgment they were making with their own eyes. Within the sample were 56 experts with over 1000 hours of experience, and these pilots were especially prone to being influenced by the earlier weather forecast.

Next, hundreds more pilots read about scenarios where a pilot needed to make an unplanned landing. An airstrip was nearby, but the conditions for the route were uncertain. Each participant had to solve five of these landing dilemmas, deciding whether to head for the strip or re-route. For each scenario they were told two statements that were reassuring for heading for the strip (e.g. another pilot had flown the route minutes ago) and one that was problematic (e.g. the visibility was very low). In each case, the participants had to say which piece of information was most important for deciding whether to land at the nearby airstrip or not.

Across the scenarios, the participants showed no real preference for one type of statement over another. This might sound sensible, but actually it’s problematic. When you want to test a hypothesis, like "it seems safe to land", you should seek out information that disproves your theory. (No matter how many security guards, alarms and safety certificates a building possesses, if it’s on fire, you don’t go in.) So pilots should be prioritising the disconfirming evidence over the others, but in fact they were just as likely to rely on reassuring evidence, which is an example of what’s known as “the confirmation bias”.

In a final experiment more pilot volunteers read decisions that other pilots had made about whether to fly or not and the information they’d used to make their decisions. Sometimes the flights turned out to be uneventful, but other times they resulted in a terrible crash. Even though the pilots in the different scenarios always made their decisions based on the exact same pre-flight information, the participants tended to rate their decision making much more harshly when the flight ended in disaster than when all went well.

It concerns Walmsley and Gilbey that pilots are vulnerable to this error – an example of the “outcome bias” – because pilots who decide to fly in unwise weather and get lucky could be led by this bias to see their decisions as wise, and increasingly discount the risk involved. Note that both the confirmation and outcome experiments also contained an expert subgroup, and in neither case did they make better decisions than other pilots.

The use of cognitive heuristics and shortcuts – “thinking fast” in Daniel Kahneman’s memorable phrase – is enormously useful, necessary for helping us surmount the complexities of the world day-to-day. But when the stakes are high, whether it be aviation or areas such as medicine, these tendencies need to be countered. Simply raising awareness that these biases afflict professionals may be one part of the solution. Another may be introducing work processes that encourage slower, more deliberative reasoning. That way, when pilots scan the skies, they might be more likely to see the clouds on the horizon.

_________________________________

Walmsley, S., & Gilbey, A. (2016). Cognitive Biases in Visual Pilots' Weather-Related Decision Making Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.3225

--further reading--
Just two questions predict how well a pilot will handle an emergency
If your plane gets lost you'd better hope there's an orienteer on board

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Why organisations should encourage their staff to become friends

They say you should never mix business and pleasure but in reality many of us find that we become friends with the people who we work with. No wonder, when you consider the hours spent together and the deep bonds formed through collaboration and sharing the highs and lows of the job.

A new study in Personnel Psychology is among the first to examine the effects on job performance of having more "multiplex relationships" – colleagues you work with directly who are also your friends outside of work. The researchers say these relationships are "a mixed blessing", but on balance they found that the more of them people had, the better their work performance as judged by their supervisors.

Jessica Methot and her colleagues first surveyed 301 staff at a large insurance company in southeastern United States. These staff, who had varied roles across the firm, provided a list of 10 colleagues they worked with closely in pursuit of their responsibilities and 10 staff who they considered to be friends and who they socialised with outside of work. The more overlap there was between a person's two lists, the more multiplex relationships they had. The participants also completed measures of emotional exhaustion and work-related positive emotions. Four weeks later, the participants' supervisors were contacted and rated the participants' job performance.

The more multiplex relationships that participants had, the better their job performance. What's more, this was explained in part by the fact that such relationships were associated with experiencing more positive work-related emotions, like feeling excited and proud. In short, being friends with more of colleagues appeared to be good for staff and for their employer.

However, the picture gets a little more complicated because the researchers dug deeper and found that multiplex relationships were also associated with more emotional exhaustion – presumably because of the effort involved in maintaining more complex relationships and of providing support to friends. In turn, emotional exhaustion was related to poorer work performance, hence the researchers describing workplace friendships as a mixed blessing. Overall though, the benefits to work performance outweighed the costs.

The second study was similar but involved 182 workers at three shops and six restaurants. This time the participants also completed measures of the emotional support, trust, felt obligation, and "maintenance difficulty" (the effort of sustaining and juggling relationships) experienced in their work relationships. The results were similar, with more multiplex relationships again correlating with superior work performance – and this time the association was explained in part by feelings of greater trust towards colleagues who are also friends. But once more, although the overall association was positive, there were signs that these relationships can be a mixed blessing – the more multiplex relationships a person had, the more they tended to report having difficulties maintaining their relationships, which in turn was related to poorer job performance.

We need to be aware these studies were correlational so they haven't demonstrated that work friendships causes better job performance, although that is certainly a plausible interpretation, especially in light of the mediating factors that the researchers identified. Given that having more friends at work appears to be beneficial overall, Methot and her colleagues recommended that "organisations should focus on practices that promote friendship among coworkers who can interact for work-related purposes" such as introducing friendly competition between staff, or implementing social intranet systems "that simultaneously allow employees to collaborate and share task information while getting to know each other on a social level".

_________________________________

Methot, J., Lepine, J., Podsakoff, N., & Christian, J. (2016). Are Workplace Friendships a Mixed Blessing? Exploring Tradeoffs of Multiplex Relationships and their Associations with Job Performance Personnel Psychology, 69 (2), 311-355 DOI: 10.1111/peps.12109

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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