143 posts · 57,979 views
The British Psychology Society's Occupational Digest is a blog dedicated to how psychology matters in the workplace. It follows the success of the award-winning BPS Research Digest which reports on psychology of every flavour. The Occupational Digest continues this spirit of reporting what matters, but keeps its sights firmly on what matters at work. This extends beyond academic findings to knowledge gathered through case studies and expert testimony. The purpose is to share evidence to help us understand work and make the most of it. It is funded by the Division of Occupational Psychology and is intended for occupational psychology practitioners together with a wider audience who care about putting psychology to work, including HR professionals, occupational psychologists, managers, consultants, and students. The site will initially focus on providing clear reports on recent research findings, and will evolve from this to the needs of its audience.
Alex Fradera
143 posts
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- June 14, 2013
- 10:03 AM
- 86 views
Starting negative may help you be creative
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Positive emotion has long been recognised as facilitating creativity, through broadening thinking and allowing exploratory mental wandering. Conversely, high negative emotion tends to lead to narrow focus on salient, possibly threatening environmental features (such as an impending deadline or difficult conversation), which has lead many to discount it as an impediment to creativity. But recent research suggests that prior states of negative emotion can improve subsequent creative activity.The p........ Read more »
Bledow, R., Rosing, K., & Frese, M. (2012) A Dynamic Perspective on Affect and Creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 56(2), 432-450. DOI: 10.5465/amj.2010.0894
- June 7, 2013
- 09:41 AM
- 55 views
Do we make too much of workplace conflict between women?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
This month, the Women's Business Council released a report revealing that underuse of women's workplace potential costs the economy £160 billion.As well as structural issues, such as inadequate workplace childcare, psychological factors can also provide obstacles to an unrestricted workplace. A recent paper by Leah Sheppard and Karl Aquino suggests one may be the tendency to overstate the consequences of female-female workplace conflict. There is a pedigree of research into female-f........ Read more »
Sheppard, L., & Aquino, K. (2012) Much Ado About Nothing? Observers' Problematization of Women's Same-Sex Conflict at Work. Academy of Management Perspectives, 27(1), 52-62. DOI: 10.5465/amp.2012.0005
- May 30, 2013
- 05:02 AM
- 75 views
What happens to an organisation when people leave?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Today, one of your colleagues is packing the contents of his desk into a cardboard box. A few weeks back you were at a leaving do for someone in another department. On the personal scale, these can be sad events. But what does turnover augur for the organisation? Different studies show different things, for example that sales suffers, benefits or is unaffected by turnover rates. Contrasting hypotheses exist, but a meta-analysis by Tae-Youn Park and Jason D. Shaw takes us from the theories into t........ Read more »
Park, T., & Shaw, J. (2013) Turnover rates and organizational performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), 268-309. DOI: 10.1037/a0030723
- May 24, 2013
- 09:05 AM
- 67 views
Status shifts in groups as extraverts disappoint and neurotics overdeliver
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
New research suggests that the higher status bestowed on extraverts in new groups may drop as their contributions become better understood. In the meantime, neurotic people may see their lower status improve.Corrine Bendersky and Neha Parikh Shah investigated this in two studies. The first examined how 44 student teams working on MBA assignments over 10 weeks attributed status and competence to individual members. One week after forming, each member was asked to rate the other 3 to 5 members' gr........ Read more »
Bendersky, C., & Shah, N. (2012) The Downfall of Extraverts and Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process of Status Allocation in Task Groups. Academy of Management Journal, 56(2), 387-406. DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0316
- May 21, 2013
- 04:53 AM
- 49 views
Does it take two to tango to get win-win negotiation outcomes?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Negotiation training has been shown to lead to positive outcomes for parties on both sides of the table, identifying 'win-win' solutions and helping the wheels of the world turn more amicably. But many studies focus on consequences when both negotiators are trained using the same methodology, when the reality is that a counterpart from another organisation may be trained differently or not at all. What happens then? A study by Alfred Zerres and colleagues finds out.The study recruited 360 busine........ Read more »
Zerres, A., Hüffmeier, J., Freund, P., Backhaus, K., & Hertel, G. (2013) Does it take two to tango? Longitudinal effects of unilateral and bilateral integrative negotiation training. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(3), 478-491. DOI: 10.1037/a0032255
- May 16, 2013
- 09:18 AM
- 56 views
Experienced job interviewers are no better than novices at spotting lying candidates
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
This post was written by Christian Jarrett and originally found on the BPS Research Digest blog. For the penultimate round of the TV show The Apprentice, the competing entrepreneurs must face a series of interviews with a crack team of hardened executives. The implicit, believable message is that these veterans have seen all the interview tricks in the book and will spot any blaggers a mile off. However, a new study provides the reality TV show with a reality check. A team led by Mar........ Read more »
Reinhard, M., Scharmach, M., & Müller, P. (2013) It's not what you are, it's what you know: experience, beliefs, and the detection of deception in employment interviews. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43(3), 467-479. DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01011.x
- May 13, 2013
- 08:56 AM
- 64 views
Who pays the biggest price for managing emotional displays in the workplace?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Understanding workplace demands on our emotions is one of our popular topics. Recent research combines two issues we've reported on previously: surface acting, the form of emotional labour that involves expressing emotions you don't genuinely feel, and affect spin, a measure of the variability of a person's emotional experiences. The paper suggests that overall, surface acting places greater demands on people high in affect spin.Daniel Beal and colleagues ran their study with 64 restaurant serve........ Read more »
Beal, D., Trougakos, J., Weiss, H., & Dalal, R. (2013) Affect Spin and the Emotion Regulation Process at Work. Journal of Applied Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0032559
- May 6, 2013
- 04:18 AM
- 33 views
Wish you were here!" - how a postcard can help attract the best talent
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
In 2004, in Silicon Valley, Google posted a huge billboard ad featuring a mathematical problem. The answer led to a web address with yet another puzzle to crack. People who successfully followed this intellectual treasure hunt ended up being invited in for a job interview.This is an extreme example of a recruitment principle spelled out in a new article by psychologists in Belgium. They say that distinctive recruitment procedures are the secret to attracting more and better job appli........ Read more »
Cromheecke, S., Van Hoye, G., & Lievens, F. (2013) Changing things up in recruitment: Effects of a ‘strange’ recruitment medium on applicant pool quantity and quality. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/joop.12018
- April 29, 2013
- 06:05 AM
- 83 views
Accountability provokes more team-focused behaviours in leaders who are outsiders
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Sometimes leaders epitomise the group they seek to lead, such as a former trucker heading a transport trade union. In other cases leaders are less prototypical; while they may have the attributes for the role, they 'come from outside'. How might leaders from these two moulds respond when the workplace demands more accountability for their actions? A team led by Steffen Giessner of Erasmus University set out to know more, investigating the team-oriented behaviours that leaders engage in whe........ Read more »
Giessner, S., van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W., & Sleebos, E. (2013) Team-Oriented Leadership: The Interactive Effects of Leader Group Prototypicality, Accountability, and Team Identification. Journal of Applied Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0032445
- April 23, 2013
- 06:23 AM
- 118 views
Workplace psychopathy: what consequences does it have?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Continuing our report on Smith and Lilienfeld's review of workplace psychopathy (part one here), we turn to the consequences it has - for leadership, for the organisation, and for unethical, even criminal behaviour. Leadership effectsIs psychopathy behind 'dark-side' and maladaptive approaches to leadership? Last post discussed a study by Babiak et al study looking at rates of psychopathy. The study also collected 360 data, and that data suggests that high scorers tended to be seen as weaker in ........ Read more »
Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013) Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18(2), 204-218. DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007
- April 22, 2013
- 05:25 AM
- 115 views
Workplace psychopathy: the knowns and unknowns
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Workplace psychopathy was an obscure, unknown issue prior to the mid-1990s, but hundreds of popular accounts have been published since then. A measured review by Sarah Francis Smith and Scott Lilienfield gets to the heart of what we really know about the phenomenon. There is a lot to cover so we're publishing about it in two posts.Psychopathy? It's complicatedFrom the off, the authors raise how complicated the issue is. Many studies rely on psychopathy and outcome data from single sources, leavi........ Read more »
Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013) Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18(2), 204-218. DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007
- April 19, 2013
- 03:44 AM
- 95 views
Highly extraverted sales people perform more poorly
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
What sales manager wouldn't hire extraverts? They tend to be comfortable in interactions, naturally display enthusiasm and confidence for their own ideas, and can be firm and persistent when they meet with resistance to their agenda. Scrutinise many sales forces and you'll probably spot this reasoning at work.Yet research finds weak and sometimes inconsistent relationships between sales performance and extraversion, with three meta-analyses finding the summed effects to amount to .07 - a non-sig........ Read more »
Grant, A. (2013) Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463706
- April 12, 2013
- 04:54 AM
- 116 views
ADHD at work: helping others over getting the task done?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
New research looking at how ADHD affects performance at work. The condition has a high prevalance, with 4.4% of American adults estimated to have it, and a body of research suggests that it can influence work outcomes like productivity, work conflict and turnover. Jonathon Halbesleben, Anthony Wheeler, and Kristen Shanine have just published research suggesting that ADHD may have consequences via two routes: encouraging behaviours that are not pointed at intended goals, and eroding the benefits ........ Read more »
Halbesleben, J., Wheeler, A., & Shanine, K. (2013) The moderating role of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the work engagement–performance process. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18(2), 132-143. DOI: 10.1037/a0031978
- April 8, 2013
- 04:56 AM
- 98 views
'Figuring out what they're after': a common thread between assessment performance and job performance?
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
A while back we shared a review of the Ability To Identify Criteria (ATIC), suggesting that difference in how people perform on a selection process like an interview is due partly how good they are at figuring out what the process wants to hear. The article suggested that this may not be entirely bad, as ATIC appears to have a role in job performance as well. Now the authors have published empirical work looking closer at this issue. Their data suggests that figuring out situational demands may ........ Read more »
Jansen A, Melchers KG, Lievens F, Kleinmann M, Brändli M, Fraefel L, & König CJ. (2013) Situation assessment as an ignored factor in the behavioral consistency paradigm underlying the validity of personnel selection procedures. The Journal of applied psychology, 98(2), 326-41. PMID: 23244223
Kleinmann, M., Ingold, P., Lievens, F., Jansen, A., Melchers, K., & Konig, C. (2011) A different look at why selection procedures work: The role of candidates' ability to identify criteria. Organizational Psychology Review, 1(2), 128-146. DOI: 10.1177/2041386610387000
- March 26, 2013
- 05:46 AM
- 120 views
Some of us are more suited to productive conflict
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
If you're interested in how team conflict can be beneficial, here's more research on the issue from Bret Bradley and colleagues, this time focusing on team member personality. Although we know that certain personality traits affect whether conflict occurs - for instance, less agreeable people are more likely to find themselves in a clash - this research investigated what matters when it occurs. Bradley and colleagues figured that two traits might be critical. People more open to experience are m........ Read more »
Bradley, B., Klotz, A., Postlethwaite, B., & Brown, K. (2013) Ready to rumble: How team personality composition and task conflict interact to improve performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), 385-392. DOI: 10.1037/a0029845
- March 22, 2013
- 10:47 AM
- 164 views
Forcing a smile at work? Mindfulness can help
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Mindfulness is a way of operating that involves paying attention to events in a nonjudgmental way, and psychological research is corroborating its benefits, reported for millennia in other fields of knowledge. A new paper by Ute Hülsheger and her colleagues takes a neat angle by focusing on one mechanism through which mindfulness might act: reducing reliance on an unproductive emotion regulation strategy, surface acting. As we've discussed before, surface acting involves adjusting or cont........ Read more »
Hülsheger, U., Alberts, H., Feinholdt, A., & Lang, J. (2013) Benefits of mindfulness at work: The role of mindfulness in emotion regulation, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), 310-325. DOI: 10.1037/a0031313
- March 19, 2013
- 06:55 AM
- 146 views
Expressing your proactive potential depends on attachment style
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Employees who engage in proactive behaviours tend to be an asset to the workplace; they're less phased by obstacles, more likely to pursue new opportunities, and take more efforts to master their environment. While organisations have a role in cultivating proactivity, so do our personal traits. However, a recent paper by Chia-huei Wu and Sharon Parker suggests that this influence itself depends upon our 'attachment style', a common term in therapeutic fields and finding wider application elsewhe........ Read more »
Wu, C., & Parker, S. (2012) The role of attachment styles in shaping proactive behaviour: An intra-individual analysis. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(3), 523-530. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02048.x
- March 12, 2013
- 12:18 PM
- 143 views
Grow, broaden, maintain: HR practices and how they matter for older workers
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
In the last issue of the Human Resource Management Journal, Dorien Kooij and colleagues investigate how general HR practices might have differential effects for younger and older employees. Given the ageing workforces prevelant in the West, it's an increasingly relevant issue.800 respondents to a much larger survey were randomly selected to form eight equally sized age groups, ranging from those below 20 to an over-50 group. Participants reported their experiences of HR practices that could infl........ Read more »
Kooij, D., Guest, D., Clinton, M., Knight, T., Jansen, P., & Dikkers, J. (2013) How the impact of HR practices on employee well-being and performance changes with age. Human Resource Management Journal, 23(1), 18-35. DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12000
- March 6, 2013
- 07:12 AM
- 201 views
How disclosing conflicts of interest can pass the burden to the customer
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
We habitually consult experts to advise on personal and professional matters, but their recommendations can be coloured by conflicts of interest. Commonly advisors are required to disclose conflicts: armed with this information, the consumer can account for bias before making decisions. But evidence shows it's hard to make such adjustments. And new research by Sunita Sah, George Loewenstein and Daylia Cain suggests moreover that disclosure may make consumers feel obliged to follow the advi........ Read more »
Sah, S., Loewenstein, G., & Cain, D. (2013) The burden of disclosure: Increased compliance with distrusted advice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(2), 289-304. DOI: 10.1037/a0030527
- March 1, 2013
- 07:04 AM
- 207 views
Fitting the office to our evolutionary niche
by Alex Fradera in BPS Occupational Digest
Imagine a workplace in harmony with our true nature. That's the aspiration held out by Carey Fitzgerald and Kimberley Danner in a recent paper surveying insights from environmental and evolutionary psychology and considering what they say about our work environments. The fundamental observation from which all else follows is that we are creatures evolved to live a life substantially in touch with nature and our own natural patterns. The workplace? Commonly, not so much...Take greenery. There is ........ Read more »
Fitzgerald CJ, & Danner KM. (2012) Evolution in the office: how evolutionary psychology can increase employee health, happiness, and productivity. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10(5), 770-81. PMID: 23253786
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