Key to Good Boss-Employee Relationships: First Impressions and Then Performance

Topic: Leadership, Personality, Performance
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Article: The development of leader–member exchanges: Exploring how personality
and performance influence leader and member relationships over time.
Authors: Nahrgang, J.D., Morgeson, F.P., and Ilies, R.
Reviewed By: Samantha Paustian-Underdahl

 The relationships that form between leaders and their employees have been associated with a number of workplace outcomes including employee satisfaction, performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors. However, little research has examined how these leader-member relationships develop over time. Nahrgang, Morgeson, and Ilies (2009) followed 330 leader-member dyads over an eight-week period of time to see how personality and performance impacts the quality of these relationships.

The authors found that within each two-person team, there were different levels of leader-member relationship quality. In other words, some relationships between a leader and members were stronger than others. However, in general all relationship quality increased over time and then stabilized. The authors also found that leaders based their first impressions of each leader-member relationship on how extraverted each team member appeared to be. The members however based their first impressions of the relationship quality on how agreeable their leader seemed.

These perceptions changed after the leaders and members became more familiar with one another, however. Actual behavior, rather than personality became more important for relationship quality as the leaders and members interacted over time.

How Can You Be So Rude!?

Topic: Job Performance, Work Environment, Culture
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Article: Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers’ on routine and creative tasks
Blogger: Benjamin Granger

Now here’s a topic that might make you ball your fists: Rudeness in the workplace.  Have you ever been treated rudely by a coworker or supervisor?  Have you ever seen rude behavior at work?  If so, you are not alone.  Perhaps as many as 25% of employees report witnessing rudeness on a daily basis (For some reason, the DMV crosses my mind).

One intriguing idea that may not have crossed your mind is that rudeness not only adversely impacts the victims, but onlookers as well.  To explore this idea, Porath and Erez (2009) conducted three experiments to find out if and how witnessing rudeness affects employees’ task performance, citizenship behaviors (going above and beyond what is required at work), and creative performance.

Interestingly, the results of studies one and two suggest that witnessing either a supervisor or peer exhibit rudeness to another had a negative impact on the onlookers’ performance.  Specifically, compared to those in the control groups (witnessed no rudeness), those who witnessed rude behavior performed less well on a creative task and reduced their citizenship behaviors (e.g., helpfulness).

In the third study, Porath and Erez found that the effect of witnessing rudeness depends on the competitive context.  That is, when onlookers were in competition for resources with a peer, witnessing that peer being treated rudely did not have as strong an effect on performance as opposed to a cooperative context.  In other words, witnessing a competitor being treated rudely doesn’t bother us so much.

All in all, Porath and Erez’s results suggest that simply witnessing rudeness at work can negatively impact employees’ performance (scary, right?).  At the very least, these findings should be a warning to organizational leaders that rudeness within the workplace can be even more detrimental to the workforce than they might have thought.

Porath, C.L. & Erez, A. (2009). Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers’ on routine and creative tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109, 29-44.

Effective Goals CAN Fly Under the Radar

Topic: Goals, Job Performance
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Article: An exploratory field experiment of the effect of subconscious and conscious goals on employee performance.

Author: A. Shantz, G.P. Latham

Featured by: Benjamin Granger

Do subconscious goals lead to improved employee performance?

What exactly are subconscious goals?  Unlike conscious goals, employees are unaware of subconscious goals.  When they become aware of them, they become conscious goals.  In other words, subconscious goals may drive employee behavior automatically as they are below their conscious awareness.

In order to test the idea that subconscious goals can lead to improved employee performance, Shantz and Latham (2009) used a technique that is known as priming.  Priming is a method (often used by psychological researchers and savvy managers of course) of manipulating an individual’s goals without them being aware of it.  For example, in their study, Shantz and Latham used a large color photo of a woman winning a race (picture of Sonia O’Sullivan).  In the pilot stages of the study, simply viewing this photo led study participants to brainstorm more uses of a coat hangar than those who did not view the picture (fascinating, don’t you think?).

Importantly, Shantz and Latham put subconscious goals to the test using employees from a university fund-raising call center.  

Understanding the Ethical Leadership Waterfall

Topic: Ethics, Leadership 
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 
Article: How low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle-down model. 
Author: D.M. Mayer, M. Kuenzi, R. Greenbaum, M. Bardes, R. Salvador
Featured by: Benjamin Granger

Past research has shown that organizational leaders play a substantial role in influencing the behaviors of their subordinates (monkey see, monkey do).  In fact, there is some evidence that leaders’ behaviors play an important role in predicting how likely employees engage in counterproductive or unethical behaviors.

In an effort to better understand how and why ethical (or unethical) executive behaviors influence subordinate behaviors, Mayer, Kuenzi, Greenbaum, Bardes, and Salvador (2009) tested a trickle-down process, wherein leader behaviors influence the behaviors of those below them. 

Specifically, Mayer et al. found that executives’ ethical behaviors did indeed influence employees’ deviant and counterproductive behaviors, albeit indirectly through the behaviors of middle managers and supervisors.  In other words, it appears that top managers’ ethical behavior directly influences the behavior of middle level supervisors who then influence the behavior of the employees below them.  

But why do top managers’ ethical behaviors affect employees’ behaviors?  Mayer and colleagues suggest that managers and supervisors serve as models that employees follow and emulate.

The Best Things in Life are Free…Except Advice Apparently

Topic: Decision Making
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Article: Do we listen to advice just because we paid for it? The impact of advice cost on its use.   
Blogger: Benjamin Granger

Now, presumably, expensive advise is really good advice, right?  I mean, if a consultant charges big bucks, then she must know what she is doing, right?

In a series of experiments, researcher Francesca Gino (2008) found that regardless of how accurate advice actually is, people tend to value and rely more heavily on expensive advice than on free advice.  In other words, given the same exact recommendations, participants in Gino’s experiments tended to accept and follow advice when they paid money for it!  When the advice was free, people tended to neglect it.  (So the moral of the story is, quit your current job and start charging people lots of money for your advice!  They might just take it!)

Gino’s findings are eye-opening since they suggest that it may not necessarily be true that expensive advice = good advice.  We (and organizations) may simply ASSUME this to be true!  (And everyone knows what happens when we ASS U ME!)

But let’s put our decision maker hats on for a moment and think about what happens when we pay money for professional advice or recommendations.

Anything you can do, I can do better

Topic: Feedback, Decision Making
Publication:  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Article:  Use of absolute and comparative performance feedback in absolute and comparative judgments and decisions. 
Blogger:  James Grand

Few people missed Michael Phelps’ performance during this past Summer Olympics—8 gold medals in 8 races, setting 7 world records in the process (the one race he didn’t get the world record? He only set the new Olympic record...slacker). 

But when Phelps went into these competitions, his self-proclaimed goal was to win gold medals, not set new records.  Examining these standards of performance more closely, we see a great example of what psychologists refer to as comparative versus absolute performance.  Winning a gold medal (or being told where your performance ranks among your co-workers) is comparative in nature, as the outcome is measured relative to how one ranks among the field of others regardless of “actual” performance.  Setting a record (or obtaining a specific score on a performance evaluation), on the other hand, places the outcome on an absolute scale; as it provides feedback in relation to how one performs relative to an objective standard regardless of how one ranks among others. 

However, an important question arises from the example above: which accomplishments do individuals see as the better indicator of performance? 

These are all questions answered by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory and empirically tested in a recent article published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Moore & Klein, 2008, Vol. 107).  In short, Festinger stated that although individuals compare themselves to others to make sense of their abilities and performance, if given information about both they prefer and will most readily use absolute standards.  The experimental study by Moore and Klein largely supported this claim, finding that the effect of feedback in relation to absolute performance had greater influence on people’s future performance-related behaviors, confidence in future performance, and the positive experience of their performance outcomes than comparative feedback.

For businesses, this suggests that although workers may be interested in knowing their standing among their peers, providing them with information regarding their performance compared to objective metrics may be more beneficial from an individual and organizational perspective.

For Phelps, he should be thinking 2012 will be a breeze.

Moore, D. A., & Klein, W. M. P. (2008). Use of absolute and comparative performance feedback in absolute and comparative judgments and decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 107, 60-74.

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.