
Michael Zyphur and colleagues assigned 92 groups of between 4 and 7 undergrads to an on-going task that involved meeting twice a week for 12 weeks, and included creating a professional management-training video. Six weeks into the project the researchers measured the participants' testosterone levels via saliva samples. They also asked all members in each group to vote on each others' status. Then six weeks after that, at the end of the project, the researchers measured each group's collective efficacy by summing members' confidence in their group's ability to succeed.
The key finding was that groups made up of members whose status was out of synch with their testosterone level tended to have the lowest collective efficacy. The researchers think that testosterone-status mismatch within a group probably has a detrimental effect on that group's collective confidence. However, another possibility, which they acknowledge, is that a lack of group confidence leads to a mismatch between testosterone levels and status among group members.
Co-author Jayanth Narayanan told the Digest that his team need to replicate their finding in a work setting. "Perhaps workplace settings might enhance these effects. Perhaps some types of work environments might attenuate these effects. These are open questions at this stage," he said.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
2 comments:
In my experience in clinical practice, middle-aged men who have become irritatingly bossy with their family, stubborn, insisting on "their way or the highway", and exaggerated body language of alpha male, tend to have high daily cortisol and/or skewed cortisol biorhythm, low-ish DHEA, and low-ish or overtly low testosterone (and BTW often estrogen-suggestive body fat distribution in the overweight ones). So, I'd like to see the above research repeated on older adults -- I don't think high or low testosterone automatically determines who is leader or follower and thus the confidence of the group in them.
The low-testosterone people need a little Obama, maybe.
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