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Defuse anger in the workplace with humor, Mason expert says

Colleen Rich — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:10:05 +0000

Defuse anger in the workplace with humor, Mason expert says Colleen Rich Fri, 04/28/2023 - 11:10

Whether it is pressing deadlines, overwork, or employees feeling they are not being supported, anger in a work environment can be unavoidable. Over time, the anger and frustration can compound, causing anger to spread through the entire team or organization, creating what George Mason �鶹�� expert Mandy O’Neill calls a “culture of anger.”

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In her research, O’Neill, an associate professor of management at Mason’s School of Business, found that a culture of anger not only leads to problems for individuals, such as increased alcohol consumption, work-family conflict, and high-risk behaviors, but it also presents problems for teams as a whole.

In a study of a large retail organization, O’Neill found that employee anger stemmed from a culture in which employees did not feel supported by their managers, leading to more employee absences and higher turnover. Additionally, individual high-risk behaviors can lead to a decrease in workplace safety as a whole, including safety violations, accidents, and injuries.

Mandy O'Neill. Photo by Creative Services

Recognizing a culture of anger

O’Neill explains that when dealing with anger in a team environment, whether it’s a workplace, group project, or sports team, it’s important to draw a line between a team experiencing occasional anger and a team defined by a culture of anger.

“All emotions have a social functional purpose,” said O’Neill. “Anger can serve important purposes around, for example, moral outrage against social injustice, or action tendencies that cause a person to rise up against obstacles thrown in their way.”

However, in a culture of anger, “it's not just one incident, one time that made everybody angry. Rather, it's when anger is kind of everybody’s default emotion,” O’Neill said.

Dos and don’ts

O’Neill highlights two common methods of fighting anger that can actually make matters worse. “Emotion suppression, which is essentially to put the lid on an emotion and not let it be expressed, is very destructive,” said O’Neill. “Even if you think you're not expressing [anger], it leaks out in ways that you may not necessarily be aware of or able to control.”

Additionally, O’Neill found that allowing members of a team to vent their anger without restraint can serve to intensify the anger. Paradoxically, venting can reactivate and spread anger rather than resolving or calming the feeling.

So, what can be done to help improve an angry team culture?

Through interviewing emergency responders at fire stations in the southeastern United States, O’Neill found that the most effective teams were those who supplemented feelings of anger with joviality.

“Expression of joviality and humor is a way of channeling anger in ways that actually can promote group bonding,” said O’Neill.

She also found that companionate love, "the connection felt between people whose lives are closely intertwined,” also helps fight anger. Affection and caring, for example, creates a sense of familiarity between members of a team that helps to resolve issues, and can make a jovial culture easier to foster as members of the team know how and when to use humor without going too far.

O’Neill believes that introducing joviality and companionate love to a team can help team members work with anger to turn it into a positive, productive emotion. “Anger paired with positive emotions lends itself to a very different scenario than if you have anger without these emotions,” she said.

O'Neill is actively engaged in organizational research, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods to the study of employees and organizational units. She has worked with organizations across a wide range of industries including health care, technology, emergency services, and retail.

To reach Mandy O’Neill directly, contact her at ooneill@gmu.edu.

For more information, contact Benjamin Kessler at bkessler@gmu.edu.

About George Mason �鶹��

George Mason �鶹�� is Virginia’s largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls nearly 40,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity, and commitment to accessibility. In 2023, the university launched Mason Now: Power the Possible, a $1 billion comprehensive campaign to support student success, research, innovation, community, and sustainability. Learn more at www.gmu.edu.

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Olivia (Mandy) O'Neill

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The motivational magic of workplace pairings

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 11:05:39 +0000

The motivational magic of workplace pairings Marianne Klinker Tue, 12/13/2022 - 06:05

Managers often struggle to motivate their teams, but that could be because they’re looking in the wrong place. Shora Moteabbed, an assistant professor in the Business Foundations area, believes that how employees relate to one another on a one-to-one basis is key to understanding – and influencing – workplace behavior.

Much to the chagrin of most managers, the complexity of human psychology does not cease when employees enter the office or log onto Zoom. In fact, complexity seems to be baked into our personality structure. In a widely cited paper, social psychologists Marilynn Brewer and Wendy Gardner theorized not one but three dimensions of identity: individual (who we innately feel we are), relational (how we perceive ourselves as part of a dyad, i.e., in relation to a specific person) and collective (the sense of self we derive from being part of a larger group).

Shora Moteabbed

Shora Moteabbed, an assistant professor in the business foundations area at George Mason �鶹�� School of Business, argues that academics and management thinkers alike have put most of their attention on the individual and collective levels, neglecting the centrality of dyadic partnerships as a motivating force in organizations. Her interest in relational identity runs throughout her work to date as an educator and scholar.

As a PhD candidate at ESSEC Business School in France, Moteabbed saw that many organizations were adding women directors to their board in order to display commitment to gender equality, thereby attracting and retaining highly valuable women talent. However, research by Moteabbed and Junko Takagi of ESSEC (published as a book chapter by Routledge in 2012) suggests that the mere presence of more women directors is not an effective enough motivator, in and of itself. The imaginative relationship lower-ranking women will form with a newly added female director makes a big difference.

The researchers concluded that executive women directors, i.e., those that rise from the ranks to gain admittance to the corporate boardroom, make a stronger symbolic impression on the rest of the organization than non-executive directors. Lower-ranking women are more likely to adopt executive directors as role models because they have more in common with those directors and encounter them more frequently. Therefore, the appointment of a female executive director conceivably would affect beliefs and behavior more than that of a non-executive director, and would be more conducive to the development of a talent pipeline of women leaders.

“These topics—corporate governance, diversity and leadership, etc.—are highly relevant to courses taught in the business foundations area,” Moteabbed says. “The knowledge informed by research can enrich class discussions and learning outcomes of the courses.”

In and out of the classroom, Moteabbed’s work explores how relational identity can help motivate a mutually supportive team culture. When we strongly identify with a colleague, we are more likely to want to help them. But the reasons we identify with others, as well as whom we choose to latch onto, are rooted in the aforementioned tripartite model of the self.

In an ongoing research project (co-authored by Danielle Cooper and Sherry M.B. Thatcher), Moteabbed finds that people with a more individualistic orientation bond with others whom they feel can help them achieve their instrumental goals; i.e., experts and high achievers. Relationally-oriented people seek out close connections with others, thus are more likely to identify and help others with whom they feel most connected. Those with a strong collective orientation will identify based on perceived similarity with another individual, so they can lessen any anxieties about not fitting in.

The lesson for managers is that while identity partnerships are essential to team coherence and resilience, a common team affiliation is not enough to prompt a partnership. In order to foster helping behavior on the team, managers need to know the orientation of each member of their team and identify potentially compatible partners based on that. Moteabbed says, “Managers should start dialogues and conversation, understand employees’ views and how they think about things. If they have the luxury of putting certain people together, they can ask them what they care about. To motivate people, you should find out what their motivations are based on.” When assembling student teams to tackle in-class projects, she sometimes applies her own research insights, trying to achieve a balance of skill levels and orientations so that each team can be a breeding ground for relational bonds.

Prior to joining the business foundations area at the School of Business, Moteabbed completed post-doctoral work at Mason. She worked closely with Kevin Rockmann, a professor of management at the School of Business who has published extensively on relational identity. Rockmann and Moteabbed (along with co-authors were Danielle Cooper of �鶹�� of North Texas, and Sherry M.B. Thatcher of �鶹�� of South Carolina) collaborated on a 2020 theoretical paper in Academy of Management Review that looked deeper into how identity formation within dyads can be a mutually reinforcing process with major implications for collective cultures. Soon after joining a team, the paper theorizes, an employee will find an “identity partner” based on their individual need for a sense of belonging. Their choice of partner will play a role in shaping their social integration (or lack thereof) on the team.

As an illustration, imagine a new kid in school desperate to find a social foothold. Whether the kid ends up joining a clique of straight-A students or the badly behaved misfits in the back row may have major implications for their future college prospects. In the moment, however, either social affiliation will do, as long as it satisfies the pressing need for belonging. That is why conscientious parents will be curious about their children’s friends. Managers, too, should take an interest in whether new team members are bonding with “integrators” or “gremlins”–to use the researchers’ terms. Further, managers who are attentive to relational identity will accurately perceive the dangers of harboring gremlins on the team in the first place. Every dyadic relationship is an opportunity for gremlins to spread their disaffection. Therefore, managers should make extra efforts to ensure every member of the team is as well-integrated as possible.

Across critical dimensions of organizational activity, relational identity is a major motivational force. Yet it is low on the list of managerial concerns. “Managers are mainly focused on other things, the wrong things,” Moteabbed says. “They tell their teams, ‘We have these values; we should share these values’. But individuals are more influenced by other team members about what’s going on in the team. Look at what’s happening on the dyadic level; that’s where so much of the action is.”

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Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 14:00:58 +0000

Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 11/02/2022 - 10:00

In This Story

Brett Josephson

Brett Josephson, associate dean for executive development at Mason, shares his insight on the challenges of leading a hybrid workforce.

It’s 9 am. Do you know where your team members are?

Before Covid, the answer was simple: They were – or were expected to be – in the office. The pandemic erased that certainty and accelerated the pace toward work-place flexibility. As we move forward in our post-covid work environment, employees are strongly indicating their preference for flexibility and self-determination regarding their working environment. A portion of the workforce will desire to stay at home with high flexibility, whereas others will return to the office by choice.

In my role as Associate Dean of Executive Development at George Mason �鶹��, I’m constantly talking to business leaders about their leadership and workforce struggles, concerns, as well as wins. Since Covid, a central theme of those discussions has been the complexity of managing hybrid teams. Fortunately, as we’ve all grown accustomed to the new normal, more and more managers are discovering that hybridity offers at least as many opportunities as challenges.

In my interactions with managers, I’ve seen that successful adaptation to the new normal requires managers to be intentional, purposeful, and transparent in their actions. Here are two areas managers need to consider as they continue to lead a hybrid workforce.

How to effectively monitor outcomes rather than activity. With hybrid, it is easy for managers to feel cut off from the day-to-day activities of their teams. Back when everyone was in the office, they could easily see what employees were working on. But the activity of remote workers is beyond such moment-to-moment oversight.

To recapture a sense of control, some companies have resorted to surveillance tools that use webcams, keystroke trackers, etc. to closely monitor employee activity. Like any other kind of micromanagement, though, these technologies send a discouraging signal to employees that their organization does not trust them. In some individual cases, that mistrust may be justified, but it shouldn’t be assumed for all employees.

Instead, managers need to experiment with a range of techniques to ensure not only that productivity remains high, but also that employees have the support they need to work effectively. The ideal solution will vary from team to team but could involve a mixture of interactive online tools (e.g., Slack, Teams, Google Docs), regular Zoom check-ins and one-on-one virtual meetings, even some in-person engagements and activities. It may take some time to get the recipe right – but once you do, the result will likely be maximised transparency and trust. A win-win for managers and employees alike.

Addressing power and politics. “Presentism” – the idea that leadership potential can be measured by the length of time one spends in the office – is still alive and well. Before the pandemic, employees who worked late also were more likely to receive personal attention from higher-ups who kept similar work habits, further increasing their opportunities for advancement. By the same token, it could be that employees who return to the office will enjoy an automatic political advantage over their remote-working colleagues.

The above-mentioned monitoring solutions would partly address this problem as well. Managers need a reliable way of measuring performance that doesn’t depend upon physical proximity. Beyond that, organizations should devise and implement proactive strategies for virtual mentoring, so that high potentials do not feel they have to choose between their career prospects and the flexibility of hybrid working. To be sure, any form of mentoring is time-consuming. But so is a preoccupation with office politics – a pre-pandemic obligation that could be lessened by virtual career development.

The politics of hybrid working can go in a different direction when all hands are urged to return to the office. Those with enough power may pull rank and refuse, creating an obvious hierarchical split– frontline staff commuting like it’s 2019, and higher-ups stubbornly staying at home. The perceived double standard could end up being a serious drain on morale. Yet another reason to embrace the new normal, rather than trying to force employees back to the office.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Business Voice.

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Marketing Faculty Research

Burnout and the future of B2B sales

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:38:21 +0000

Burnout and the future of B2B sales Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 09/20/2022 - 09:38

In This Story

Jessica Hoppner

Selling is inseparable from relationship management. In the past, the one-to-one "human touch" of a salesperson compensated for the standardized nature of their wares. However, today's sales environment tends towards customized solutions and co-creation with the client, especially in the B2B space. In many cases, these trends have greatly increased the network of stakeholders whom salespeople are obliged to keep happy.

Jessica Hoppner

Research shows that B2B customers benefit from being more involved in the process, but what about the sales force? Does their increased interpersonal burden translate to higher risk of burnout? George Mason �鶹�� School of Business Marketing Area Chair Jessica Hoppner's recently published paper in Industrial Marketing Management, co-authored by Paul Mills of Cleveland State �鶹�� and David A. Griffith of Texas A&M �鶹��, finds some surprising answers.

Academic explanations of burnout often rely on the job's demands-resources model, which compares workplace challenges against the tools on hand to help employees meet them. When professional demands rise sharply without a corresponding change in available resources, exhaustion followed by burnout becomes more likely.

Hoppner and her co-authors developed a set of hypotheses about the resources B2B salespeople would need to prevent burnout, given the increased responsibilities of customer participation. Their study took the form of a survey (designed with input from actual B2B sales professionals) completed by 210 salespeople. Three-fourths of the respondents reported that customer participation in their company's development process had grown significantly over the past year. The survey went on to ask how burned out they felt by their job, how much autonomy they had in their work, whether they felt sales ability was fixed or changeable and how much they felt it was worth investing time in developing skills, knowledge, and relationships. The final question was about the competitive intensity of their industry in the previous year.

Holistic analysis of the survey responses revealed that the stress of customer participation was not directly heightening the risk of burnout. Instead, B2B salespeople were rising to the occasion by reinvesting in critical resources - the aforementioned skills, knowledge, and relationships. In doing so, they became even more skilled, and better prepared to work with their customers. You could say that they turned stress into their superpower.

The intensity of their resource investment, however, was influenced by (a) their level of job autonomy and (b) their belief that sales ability can improve. The positive relationship between autonomy and salespeople's resource investment was even stronger in less competitive industries.

As Hoppner explains, "The salesperson wants to respond to these new challenges by investing in resources and getting new skills. The autonomy provided by your company influences how much you invest. The competitive environment influences whether you can invest as much. And you only have so much bandwidth as a salesperson to invest in new skills."

But investment always requires both authority and a certain amount of faith. Respondents who believed good salespeople are born not made - i.e. those with what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mind-set" about sales ability - would presumably consider upskilling a waste of time, whether or not their organization gave them the autonomy to do so. Their fatalistic thinking would prevent them from tapping the resources that might buffer them against burnout. Indeed, the "fixed mind-set" salespeople in Hoppner's sample reported not only less investment in core skills but also higher burnout than peers with a "growth mind-set" grounded in self-improvement.

In today's B2B sector, burnout prevention is a critical issue since value co-creation demands fully engaged and committed salespeople. Widespread burnout defeats the purpose of customer participation.

Hoppner recommends that sales managers remember the winning combination of autonomy and growth mind-set, particularly when customer participation is a top priority. Good B2B sales managers, she implies, will be comfortable transferring some control, especially in high-competition industries that may be more challenging on salespeople to begin with. In addition to receiving a reasonable degree of independence, salespeople should be fully trained in problem solving, project management, and other skills needed for full self-sufficiency.

It is also a good idea to promote a growth mind-set throughout the sales force, so that they will equip themselves with the resources necessary to meet their new challenges. Hoppner emphasizes that mind-sets are malleable. "A lot of times you talk about selection when hiring salespeople. But with one's belief in innate selling ability, companies have the ability to have interventions where you can train, mentor or coach people to have this growth mind-set," she says.

While burnout is a near-universal threat for workplace teams these days, Hoppner is cautious about generalizing her findings, preferring instead that their possible applicability outside of sales remain a matter for future research. She emphasizes that while every individual is different, the typical sales persona and portfolio of responsibilities may foster a preference for autonomy. This preference becomes even greater when their role undergoes a structural shift such as additional customer participation, and they need freedom to navigate those changes more effectively.

"The job autonomy is really the freedom for them to choose what makes sense for the context and what to do for the customer," Hoppner says. "How you're developing close interactions with your client, and creating custom sales solutions. It's definitely a creative endeavor because you are not sure what exactly is going to come up in the processes you're developing, and what the ultimate sale is going to be."

At the same time, she observes that in general "having employees be able to feel in control - over how they do their job and if they have the ability to learn - can help mitigate burnout when job roles change."

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Marketing Faculty Research

The secrets of embracing change in work and life

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 18:14:02 +0000

The secrets of embracing change in work and life Marianne Klinker Wed, 09/14/2022 - 14:14

In This Story

Sarah Wittman

Kevin Rockmann

Today's workforce might best be described in terms of tumult: Great Resignation, Great Retirement, Great Reshuffle, etc. In this "new normal," managers must learn to navigate a state of continual transition in their teams and organizations, while keeping up with day-to-day demands. Likewise, George Mason �鶹�� School of Business Management Professors Sarah Wittman and Kevin Rockmann believe that it is time for scholars to change the way they think about role transitions to better align their theories with our increasingly uncertain world.

Over the last few decades, management theorists have sought to understand transitions by means of attributes such as voluntariness, social desirability, and predictability — generalizable qualities that tend to encourage binary thinking with implicit value judgments attached. While such catch-all labels theoretically make it easier to compare and contrast different types of transitions, Wittman points out that at the end of the day, they may raise more questions than answers. "Attributes are not measurable, plus they’re subjective for each person," she says. "Is accepting a promotion voluntary or involuntary? There are many situations in which it would really not be voluntary."

Sarah Wittman

Along with Mailys M. George (a faculty member at EDHEC Business School), Wittman and Rockmann authored a paper for Academy of Management Annals laying out an entirely new mental model for studying role transitions. Instead of attributes, their proposed paradigm is structured around experiences – in other words, what a role-switch looks and feels like not only for the person undergoing the transition, but for everyone indirectly affected (managers, colleagues, etc.). The experience-based approach would be open-ended enough to encompass transitions in both the professional and personal spheres – as well as addressing the impact that each sphere has on the other.

To illustrate their method in action, the paper posits a hypothetical employee named Maria who enjoys a healthy work/life balance and high productivity. Maria undergoes a role-transition as she becomes the primary caregiver for her aging father. Cataloguing the attributes of her life change would hardly do justice to its magnitude. Every area of her life would be impacted, from her ability for colleagues, friends, and relatives.

The paper’s experience-based framework defines Maria’s disruption as movement across four transition dimensions – psychological, physical, relational, and behavioral. To be sure, not all transitions are as major as Maria’s – smaller ones might not involve all four types of movement. And dramatic movement in one area can easily lead to more subtle shifts in another, as when the isolation of work-from-home causes psychological strain for employees new to remote working.

Often, movement is accomplished on some levels but not on others. �鶹�� fast-paced business world particularly neglects the psychological dimension, hurrying people between roles without allowing time and scope for proper emotional adjustment. As Wittman explained in a prior paper, this can result in "lingering identities" – the spillover of inherited ideas, habits, expectations, etc. into a new role where they may not fit. People who have made the transition physically but not psychologically will generally struggle more in their role, due to their sense of not-belonging.

In addition, the movement of individuals can set the people around them into motion, an outcome Rockmann calls "collateral transitions." For example, his prior research that predates the pandemic found that individual employees’ decisions to work remotely influenced colleagues to do likewise, as the office gradually emptied out and became a lonelier place to be.

The researchers suggest that by making these kinds of complexities (among others) more accessible to scholars, their experience-based framework helps theory keep pace with reality. It may also give managers something to consider.

"We’re pointing toward a much more human perspective, not economic rationality" says Wittman. "This is not the usual conception of a worker’s utility, as measured in salary, working conditions, etc. It’s a hidden utility. It’s taking a whole-person perspective on who is the worker at work but knowing that work is not their whole lives."

In a work-appropriate way, therefore, managers need to be at least minimally aware of what is going on in their team members’ personal lives, especially during times of transition. Returning to the paper’s hypothetical employee, the success of Maria’s transition would largely depend on her supervisor being understanding of both her family situation and its likely effects on team cohesion and productivity. Further, success depends on Maria’s supervisor making sure that others are not negatively impacted by Maria’s transition and that they understand, if not the details, the general nature of why Maria’s behavior has changed. Rockmann emphatically believes that the responsibility for maintaining open lines of communication is one-way. "To be frank, that’s the job of the manager. Enforcing policies and procedures, that’s the easy part. The more difficult part of it is helping people understand one another. That’s really difficult, to take that mind-set. Someone who’s not only interested but can actively manage the relationships in order to mitigate any potential issues."

Individuals undergoing transition can use the experience-based framework to help them anticipate challenges for themselves and others. This may also unlock buried resources of resilience. Just as the border between work and life is often more permeable than theory suggests, lessons learned from successful transitions in one sphere may be translatable to the other. Widening the frame of reference can help scholars, as well as the rest of us, learn more about how to build what Rockmann and Wittman call "transition muscle."

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Resolving the Great Resignation – One Employee at a Time

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 12:31:24 +0000

Resolving the Great Resignation – One Employee at a Time Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 09/08/2022 - 08:31

In This Story

Victoria Grady

We’ve all become familiar with the pandemic-related reasons behind the upheaval in the labor market, as well as the standard-issue solutions like trying to infuse work with purpose or offering employees remote working. While these are practical suggestions, they have not restored stability to the workforce. It is our contention that any broad-brush advice for retaining employees in the current environment will be insufficient. Whether managers like it or not, employees will demand sensitivity and adjustment to their psychological needs as individuals.

In retrospect, Covid-19 was the first major disruption to professional lifestyles since the women’s movement in the 1960s. Just as “women’s lib” triggered backlash from male leaders, the shocks wrought by Covid similarly caused ripple effects – for employees of all genders, races, and walks of life. But – and this is essential – every employee experienced the disruption differently.

The operative concept here is “psychological contract,” or the intangible compensations we derive from employment. If you have worked somewhere for any length of time, chances are you have an unwritten contract with your employer. But no two people’s contracts will look the same.

For example, remote working limited the spontaneous social encounters and standing lunch dates that fulfilled extroverted employees’ psychological needs in the “before times.” Employees who placed great stock in the prestige of their employer would have felt the loss of in-person networking events that gave them the opportunity to impress others by simply handing over a business card. When these intangible satisfactions suddenly disappeared, working life became less appealing. We see this as a main driving factor of the Great Resignation that remains largely unaddressed.

Theoretically, pre-Covid psychological contracts could be restored by pretending the pandemic never happened and requiring full-time presence at the office. However, ignoring the potential convenience and flexibility of hybrid working would place companies at a disadvantage in the war for talent. Employees do not want to choose between practicality and their own psychological needs – they want both, in harmonious balance. It falls to organizations to rewrite psychological contracts for this new era.

Since no two employees will have the same contract, revisions need to happen on an individual level between employees and managers. While this sounds like a daunting task, if you are armed with some information about psychology, it is not at all impossible.

An area of developmental psychology known as attachment theory points to the fungibility of emotionally anchoring bonds. The basic nature of our attachments, as well as our ways of maintaining them, are rooted in childhood experience and thus die hard. But the specific objects of our attachments can be switched. Victoria’s recent book Stuck: How to Win at Business by Understanding Loss explains how leaders and managers can use attachment theory to help team members weather the storm of change. Applying this logic can help repair the psychological contract.

To fill the social void at lunchtime, for example, organizations could offer an opt-in service enabling hybrid employees to arrange lunches or coffees with colleagues living in their area. The “me-time” of the commute could be restored by allowing employees to block off an hour every day for thinking and reflection. Status-oriented employees deprived of self-promotion opportunities could be given the chance to share their accomplishments internally, through corporate social networks or blog posts. These examples illustrate the general purpose, which is to find adequate analogues for pre-pandemic psychological routines and attachments.

Understanding not only what losses employees are mourning but also why opens the door to exploration. You could ask, “Assuming we can’t have an in-person all-hander this year, what else could we do that would generate excitement?” Developing an answer may take time, but starting the process of rewriting the psychological contract is meaningful. It signals sensitivity and a commitment to employees’ mental health.

Together, the information shared during psychological contract-based conversations can also help organizations work out which pre-Covid rituals should be brought back. If employees are nostalgic for in-person team meetings, it may be worth trying to resurrect them. Employees’ psychological contracts will also help you determine which in-person events justify additional expenses.

All-in-all, astute managers should sustain the conversation about psychological contracts into the “new-normal” and beyond. Regular evaluations could include check-ins to make sure needs are still being met and plan necessary adjustments. That way, employees and organizations can build mutually supportive ties capable of withstanding the next inevitable surprise.

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Costello Research Health & Well-being at Work

A Brain-Based Approach to Change Management

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 19:48:37 +0000

A Brain-Based Approach to Change Management Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 03/10/2022 - 14:48

In This Story

Victoria Grady

Today’s world is changing so fast. As soon as you feel you’ve caught up, another crisis comes and knocks you for a loop. In this environment, there’s a heightened danger that we’ll fail to adapt fast enough. Inability or unwillingness to keep pace with change can leave us feeling stuck—incapable of moving forward.

Victoria Grady

If you can relate, Victoria Grady, an associate professor of management and program director of the Masters of Science in Management at Mason, has some consolation for you. Stuck-ness isn’t a sign that’s something wrong with you. It’s related to how our brains are wired. The even better news? If you understand the possibilities of the brain, you can climb out of the rut and help other people, even entire organizations, do the same.

Grady’s new book, Stuck: How to WIN at Work by Understanding LOSS, is the result of years of research and writing with her co-author Patrick McCreesh, an adjunct management professor at Mason. Stuck plumbs an area of psychology known as attachment theory, first developed in the mid-20^th century by John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst.

In brief, attachment theory concentrates on how very young children learn to regard themselves as independent individuals, apart from but still linked to primary caregivers. It’s a slow, symbolic weaning process involving so-called “transitional objects” kids use to anchor themselves psychologically as they discover more about the world. For some kids, the transitional object of choice is a favorite blanket; for others, it’s a teddy bear. As we get older, the objects change but the mechanism formed in childhood remains essentially intact.

“This is an instinctual process,” Grady says. “You cannot make this go away. The only ones who do not have this are an extremely small percentage of the population who often struggle throughout life.”

Big organizational change—e.g., shifting to remote/in-person hybrid working, or business model transformation—inevitably disturbs employees, customers, shareholders, etc. who are attached to the status quo. Yet attachment theory is not part of the usual change management toolkit. Grady suggests that could be one reason why most change management initiatives fail to achieve their desired outcome. Stuck is a call to action for the largely process-based field of change management—the best-laid plans for organizational transformation are often thwarted by human psychology.

Although each of us may be unique in our attachments and preferred transitional objects, the ways in which we latch onto these things can be generalized into a limited number of basic categories, known as attachment styles. These styles originate from early childhood, when they are encoded into the limbic, or intuitive, system within the brain.

For organizational purposes, Grady and McCreesh have identified four attachment styles: stable, autonomous, distracted, and insecure. They write, “There is no right type of attachment style and each provides different value in different situations.”

Grady and McCreesh define the four attachment styles as follows: A stable attachment style arises from having been given a “secure base” for attachments in early childhood—e.g., attentive parents or other caregivers—and is conducive to generally positive and productive relationships in life and work. Autonomous attachment styles are the product of a childhood where one has learned to be independent emotionally—these individuals often have admirable attention spans but can struggle to connect with others. Distracted attachment styles lean toward the opposite extreme: intense dependence on the support of others and strong relational orientation. Finally, insecure attachment styles veer toward social anxiety that can lead to either hypersensitivity and burnout, or (with the help of a smart manager) unswerving organizational loyalty.

Grady has co-developed a diagnostic tool called the Attachment Styles Index (ASI) that companies can use to better understand their workforce. One of Stuck’s chapters tells how the ASI was used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as the agency successfully overhauled its Flight Standards Service division. FAA change managers discerned in the data some key mismatches between team leaders’ and followers’ attachment styles, which were hindering communication and fostering mistrust. For example, stable-attachment leaders can have trouble empathizing with followers who don’t share their style of attachment. Managers who know the attachment styles of their team members can create transitional objects that provide psychological shelter through the storm of change.

Sometimes, leaders themselves can fulfill that critical transitional object function. Leaders with distracted attachment styles seem especially good at sensing the struggles of others, regardless of the individual’s respective style.

“Organizations can do better for change efforts by more effectively aligning leaders and followers based on attachment styles to create a better sense of support through change,” the authors write.

Grady says that Stuck is also pertinent for companies looking to hold onto their talent amid the Great Resignation. The pandemic played havoc with people’s workplace attachments. Using herself as an example, Grady says “The commute for me was the biggest loss. I was so used to the hour it took me to get to the office—I would think, talk, record stuff—I loved that time…We are attached to our routines. So many of my friends have lunch voids; they didn’t know how to have lunch by themselves. The organization has to respond to the changing environment.”

Managers can neither turn back time nor slow down the pace at which the world is changing. But they can work harder to understand their employees’ varied attachments and help create psychological lifelines to get people un-stuck.

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Master's in Management Program

Welcome to the Socially Awkward Workforce

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 19:43:15 +0000

Welcome to the Socially Awkward Workforce Marianne Klinker Mon, 02/14/2022 - 14:43

In This Story

Heather Vough

If you feel your social skills have atrophied, you’re not alone. After nearly two years of working from home, and much less social activity outside of work, we’re likely to commit more unintentional lapses in etiquette, or social gaffes. This is true whether your organization is trickling back to the office, or still mostly remote.

Gaffes don’t make people feel good. That’s probably not news to you. But recent research from Heather Vough, associate professor of management at Mason, argues that gaffes have potential negative consequences that go far beyond an awkward or uncomfortable moment.

Some gaffes are truly wince-inducing, such as asking a woman who isn’t pregnant when she’s due. Most, however, fall toward the less egregious end of the spectrum, like accidentally omitting a name from the invite list for a Zoom call. Citing a concept originated by her Mason colleague Kevin Rockmann, Vough says that even minor misunderstandings between colleagues can be “anchoring events,” or turning points in a workplace relationship. In the end, this could badly impact team cohesion—assuming no remedial post-gaffe action is taken.

Vough’s article in Journal of Organizational Behavior (co-authored by Harshad Puranik of �鶹�� of Illinois at Chicago and Chandra Shekhar Pathki of Nazarbayev �鶹��) uses pre-existing research on emotions to trace the possible ripple effects of social gaffes. The article shows just how complicated it can be to predict the aftermath of a gaffe. In addition to the perceptions of the gaffe-perpetrator and their ensuing attempts to save face, one must consider the victim’s response— starting with whether they even realize a gaffe occurred.

These theories and frameworks can help employees and managers repair the damage gaffes may have caused. They also indicate how, in some cases, taking the correct post-gaffe course of action can make relationships even stronger.

According to the research, once we realize we’ve committed a gaffe, we can react with embarrassment, shame, or guilt. Shame is probably the least helpful, because it leaves us no recourse. It interprets the gaffe as an extension of some flaw in ourselves, rather than an understandable misstep. Too much shame leads to psychological disengagement and eventual withdrawal from our colleagues and the organization.

An embarrassment-based reaction shrinks from the unflattering light that a gaffe casts upon our self-image. �鶹�� preferred opinion of ourselves as self-aware and socially adept is hard to maintain after we’ve goofed up in front of our colleagues. Embarrassment tends to inspire damage-control efforts that are more about saving face than making amends. For example, we may try to show off our intelligence, sensitivity, or whatever quality we feel was thrown into doubt by the recent gaffe. If the others around us don’t recognize what’s occurring, or didn’t notice the gaffe in the first place, they will think we’re merely self-involved.

Guilt-based reactions are rooted in an awareness that our gaffe may have hurt someone else. The natural next step is to try to right the wrong, either by addressing the gaffe directly or by showing emotional support to the victim, e.g. offering to pick up a shift or extending a lunch invitation. Since recipients of such gestures will almost always appreciate them, it doesn’t really matter whether the gaffe was noticed. Relationships are rarely destroyed, and often bolstered, by random acts of kindness.

When it comes to human emotions, there is no clear-cut instruction manual. However, Vough suggests some general takeaways for dealing with social gaffes, derived from her research:

If you commit a gaffe, don’t ignore it. To be sure, there’s a strong possibility that a minor gaffe will go unnoticed, but it may also loom large in the mind of a victim. At the very least, it’s worth carefully considering your next move.
At the same time, don’t be ashamed. In these times especially, we all owe each other some forgiveness and understanding for the gaffes we’re almost certain to commit. And we should apply these to ourselves as well.
Next, ask yourself whether the gaffe had the potential to hurt someone else, or if it only wounded your ego. People who take self-interested steps to repair their reputation after a gaffe may end up confusing or repelling the very person they’re most trying to impress. Your best bet is to let it go. Have faith that those who know you and your abilities will overlook the error. Sometimes a gaffe can be both hurtful to others and reflect badly on you—for example, when you mistakenly undersell someone’s contribution to a group project in a Zoom meeting and they have to correct you. The point in this case would be to forget about the ego-wounding aspects of the gaffe and focus on those that could affect the other person.
For more straightforward gaffes like the Zoom one just described, the most direct approach is usually best. A simple apology delivered as soon as possible (“I’m really sorry—of course, I knew you prepared that report but I misspoke”) should at least go a long way toward clarifying your intent and establishing goodwill.
But there are other gaffes that can’t be so easily addressed, e.g. the pregnancy mistake mentioned above. Calling the woman into a special Zoom meeting to explain that you thought her weight gain meant she was pregnant may only exacerbate the awkwardness. In these cases, there are still things you can do as far as general emotional support that may get the point across.
Remember that there is a difference between relatively innocuous gaffes and more serious incidents of disrespect or incivility. When in doubt, the victim’s experience should be centered.

Source: Harshad Puranik, Heather C. Vough, Chandra Shekhar Pathki (2021). “Oops, I did it (again)! The emotional experience, personal responses and relational consequences of social gaffes in the workplace,” Journal of Organizational Behavior

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The Strange Effects of Sexist Humor

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 20:43:16 +0000

The Strange Effects of Sexist Humor Marianne Klinker Mon, 12/06/2021 - 15:43

In This Story

Olivia (Mandy) O'Neill

What would a perfectly gender-equal workplace be like? Certainly, it would be free of gender bias in hiring, promotion, and salary. On an emotional level, it would have to be a place where no one feels excluded because of their gender. Some organizations have a longer way to go than others toward building such emotionally inclusive cultures.

Mandy O'Neill

Silicon Valley’s infamous “bro culture”, for example, comes out of tech’s long history as a male-dominated industry. It also discourages women from pursuing tech careers, helping keep the status quo in place.

As it stands, women who join tech companies must find a way to navigate a toxic workplace. Some adopt a “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude, responding in kind to a work place rife with teasing, belittling sexist banter. Mandy O’Neill, a management professor at the George Mason �鶹�� School of Business, has found that women who do so are rewarded by their peers with a status bump. Surprisingly, their male peers who engage in the same behavior take a step down in status as a result.

O’Neill’s forthcoming paper in Organization Science, written with Natalya M. Alonso of Haskayne School of Business, documents the “sexist culture of joviality” among trainees at a Latin American site run by a major U.S. tech company that will remain anonymous (let’s call it Tech.com). Past research suggests that joviality is a key characteristic of highly masculine cultures, allowing men to bond and blow off steam without violating gender norms such as strength, impassivity and invulnerability. Laughter, horseplay and joking around can also become a release valve for the discomfort and awkwardness some men feel when forced to work alongside women.

A main theme – if not the main theme – of the trainees’ non-work-related conversations was what they themselves called “Guerra de los sexos” (war of the sexes). The cohort of trainees that O’Neill and Alonso studied was fairly gender-balanced, but the program leadership was almost entirely male – in keeping with the wider gender dynamic in the tech industry. Jokes expressing a dim view of the opposite sex were routinely told in mixed company. Several women trainees showed they could dish it out as well as take it. Indeed, women who took part in the sexist banter reaped social rewards. Their peers hailed them as “bromistas”, or comedians. The bromistas seemed generally well-respected by both women and men. After one of the researchers momentarily turned bromista, relaying an overheard sexist joke to a mixed-gender group of trainees, she was praised for “learning the culture” and invited to socialize with trainees after work.

Later, the researchers statistically verified the “bromista effect” with a social network and demographics survey. The trainees were asked to nominate peers with whom they shared various kinds of relationships. Taken together, their survey responses formed a kind of map of social ties within the Tech.com training program. Bromistas were more likely to hold central positions in this web of social relationships. Put another way, they enjoyed higher esteem or status than non-bromistas as a rule. For the male trainees, however, an opposite effect was evident: The more they participated in sexist banter, the lower their status on the whole.

A follow-up survey sent to a separate set of participants in the United States, produced similar results. Respondents were each shown a description of an imaginary co-worker and asked to rate the hypothetical person’s status and social skills. There were four versions of the description, with the gender of the co-worker and their participation (or not) in sexist banter being the only differences. Again, women who participated were rated higher on both counts, while men were penalized for participation.

The second study suggests that the “sexist culture of joviality” and its implications for social status are not specific to Tech.com or the Latin American cultural context.

For O’Neill and Alonso, social sophistication helps explain these unexpected findings. Bromistas are rewarded for fitting into a culture where sexist humor is a common pastime. But men who enthusiastically promote this culture are seen as lacking tact – like a boy still behaving according to the rules of the “no girls allowed” clubhouse after his friends have all discovered dating. Therefore, it seems that even as men and women go along with the culture of bros and bromistas, they may secretly resent it and view it as out of date.

While this study appears to show that women can thrive within masculine cultures over a fairly short period, there are long-term consequences to keep in mind. O’Neill’s 2010 paper in Journal of Organizational Behavior found that MBAs who preferred an “aggressive”, masculine working culture – regardless of their sex -- earned more money four years after graduation, with women benefiting even more than men from this preference. Eight years post-degree, however, the men in the sample had pulled ahead, while the women had begun to disengage from their careers. In a world that still has pronounced gender disparities, the old cultural values won’t get us to equality.

O’Neill’s past work has shown that workplace joviality can be channeled in directions that are emotionally healthier for both men and women. Her 2017 Academy of Management Journal article explored the emotional culture of another male-dominated world – that of U.S. firefighters. Firehouses where goofing around took place within an atmosphere of companionate (caring and compassionate) love had fewer problems with self-destructive behavior and health issues, O’Neill found. Despite being a small minority in this extremely masculine setting, women firefighters were very much included in the playful, supportive environment. Tech start-ups, take note.

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