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When managing creatives, what you say is often what you get

Marianne Klinker — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 11:15:50 +0000

When managing creatives, what you say is often what you get Marianne Klinker Fri, 06/30/2023 - 07:15

A new George Mason �鶹�� study explores the complex connections between managerial feedback and creative outcomes.

The growing popularity of crowdsourcing and other forms of open innovation reflects the pressing need that companies have for creative ideas that go beyond the organizational same-old, same-old.

But once you have imaginative outsiders ready to lend you their time and attention, how do you elicit novel and useful contributions from them? It turns out to be as much about strategic communication as it is about the quality of your talent pool.

In recently published research, Pallab Sanyal, professor and area chair of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at Mason's School of Business, and Shun Ye, associate professor and assistant area chair of ISOM, focused on two types of feedback crowdsourcing participants commonly receive. Outcome feedback rates the perceived quality of the submission, with no underlying explanation (“This design is not good.”). Process feedback reveals or hints at what contest organizers are looking for (“I prefer a green background”).

Pallab Sanyal (left) and Shun Ye (right)

Sanyal and Ye analyzed data from a crowdsourcing platform covering close to 12,000 graphic-design contests over the period from 2009 to 2014. The data-set included the contest parameters, time-stamped submissions and feedback, winning designs, etc. It also allowed the researchers to track the activity of repeat entrants from contest to contest across the sample.

This put them in a good position to measure how choosing one feedback type over the other affected contest outcomes—but not in terms of “quality” as it is traditionally defined by researchers.

“The moral of the story is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whoever is the contest holder or client, whatever they think is best for their business objective, that is the highest quality.” —Pallab Sanyal

“I gave a talk at a university where I showed 25 different submissions from a crowdsourcing contest and asked people to choose which one was the highest quality," says Sanyal. "And everyone in that room picked a different one. Not only that, the one that eventually won the contest was not picked by anyone.”

“The moral of the story is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whoever is the contest holder or client, whatever they think is best for their business objective, that is the highest quality.”

With this working definition in mind, Sanyal and Ye developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for scoring all submissions by visual similarity to the eventual winning submission.

“We use the algorithm to calculate the distance between these images and the highest-quality image, to give it a score, a quality score, between zero and one,” Sanyal explains.

They found that process feedback tended to increase the affinity of the designs, i.e., they were more similar to the winning design chosen by the client on average. By contrast, outcome feedback increased the diversity of the designs.

Sanyal and Ye theorize that precise guidance in the form of process feedback can lower ambiguity and assist competitors to narrow the search space, while outcome feedback expands the search space because it leaves plenty of room for interpretation.

Very late in the contest, though, the positive relationship between process feedback and submission affinity disappeared, and may have even flipped to the negative; the professors speculate this may be due to a demotivating, “now-you-tell-me” effect.

Shifting gears from quality to quantity, Sanyal and Ye discovered that both process and outcome feedback encouraged more submissions on the whole. However, they did so in different ways.

Process feedback lured new contributors to the contest; outcome feedback spurred more submissions per contributor. But, again, both of these effects were weakened when feedback was offered late in the game. Interestingly, this contradicts previous studies, which suggest early feedback discourages new contributors from joining. Shun and Ye point out that those studies used only numeric feedback. “We show that when it comes to textual feedback, it should be provided early in the game,” Ye says.

He also comments, “What we find here can very well apply to a traditional context where, say, in an organizational setting, a manager wants a creative solution, or holds a brainstorming session.

“If managers feel that the submissions are converging very quickly, but they want more innovative solutions, they can provide outcome feedback. Or they may observe, ‘Wow, the submissions are all over the place. Doesn’t look like it’s close to what I have in mind.’ Then it’s best to start to provide some process feedback.”

Whichever feedback type they choose, managers should offer it promptly so as to maximize the impact. At the same time, they should be careful to avoid turning their preferences into self-fulfilling prophecies through strongly worded process feedback.

Sanyal uses an illustrative example from his own life: “Many times, if my kids are stuck with something, I hear them and I say, ‘You are on the right track. I won’t tell you the solution, I will only tell you that you’re on the right track.’ So give some overall ideas, but don’t constrain the solution space too much.”

Their work was published in Information Systems Research.

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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

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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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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

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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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Police Body Cams Are Making NYC Safer

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 16:29:36 +0000

Police Body Cams Are Making NYC Safer Marianne Klinker Tue, 12/07/2021 - 11:29

In This Story

Brad Greenwood

In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s use of “Terry stops” – otherwise known as “stop-and-frisk” – violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. For years leading up to the decision, civil rights advocates pointed to the disproportionate number of stops to which African-Americans and Latinos in the city were subject as evidence of unfair targeting.

As per the judge’s orders, the NYPD underwent a one-year pilot program in which officers representing five precincts volunteered to wear body-worn cameras (BWC). This paved the way for a phased department-wide BWC rollout involving all 35,000 NYPD officers, starting in 2018.

BWC has been a controversial element within the broader debate about police violence in the U.S. The idea is to increase accountability and strict adherence to the law, for both the police and the public, by creating an objective record of every interaction. However, some argue that BWC recordings can be misleading. What the camera sees is not always the same as what the officer does. Theoretically, police who anticipate BWC footage may be deceptively used against them may reduce their interactions with the public when possible. If so, their reticence might put people at risk.

Making matters murkier, the research on BWC has mostly delivered mixed results. Some studies have shown arrests declining after BWC adoption; others have noted arrest increases; still others have found no change. The inconsistencies may be due to the specialized contexts and short duration of these studies – most dealt with small-scale trials in out-of-the-way places like Rialto, CA and Mesa, AZ.

Brad Greenwood

For Brad Greenwood, a professor of information systems and operations management at the George Mason �鶹�� School of Business, the NYPD – one of the world’s largest urban police forces – mandating BWC across the board on an indefinite basis was a research godsend. His forthcoming paper in Journal of Law, Economics & Organization (co-written by Mitchell E. Zamoff of �鶹�� of Minnesota and Gordon Burtch of Boston �鶹��) is by far the most extensive analysis of BWC’s impact in a major American city.

The researchers combed through publicly available datasets detailing all NYPD stops, as well as arrest records and civilian complaint databases for the period January 2017-December 2019. The BWC rollout was complete by the end of 2018, so the three years covered by the study enabled the researchers to draw before-and-after comparisons for all 77 New York City police precincts.

The results of the study showed three clear patterns. First, fears that BWC would deter police from doing their job appeared unfounded. In fact, the number of investigative stops increased by nearly 17% after police were equipped with BWC.

Second, citizen complaints against police decreased by roughly 20% post-BWC, after accounting for the increase in stops. The category of complaint that saw the biggest decline was so-called “abuse of authority” – allegations of mistreatment or intimidation that may include improperly stopping, threatening, or seizing property from citizens. Of all the types of complaints investigated by NYC’s Citizen Complaint Review Board, abuse of authority is the most common.

Third, after adoption of BWC, the likelihood that a stop resulted in arrest went down by 16%.

Taken together, the findings indicate that, far from inhibiting police work, BWC emboldened police to undertake more investigative activity than they had before, without crossing the line into abuses of authority. Knowing they were being recorded also gave civilians an additional reason to be on their best behavior when stopped by the police – as perhaps reflected in the decline in arrests.

It isn’t clear from the data whether the change in outcomes was coming more from the officers’ side, from civilians, or a fairly even split. That is a question for future studies to resolve. Whatever the exact cause or causes, the study establishes that BWC had the intended beneficial effect in New York City.

That’s not to say that the program worked miracles, however. Citizen complaints alleging improper use of force, for example, did not decline but remained flat after accounting for the rise in stops.

Another caveat has to do with costs. By now, most large police departments in the U.S. have already adopted BWC. Smaller police departments with more modest budgets may have difficulty paying for cameras, training officers to use them properly and preserving vast archives of video evidence. They will have to decide whether the advantages of BWC outweigh the considerable costs for their town or city. By quantifying the positive effects of BWC, this study could enrich such cost-benefit analyses.

That’s the kind of contribution Greenwood intends to make with his research. He strives for data-driven insights that sidestep the ideological polarization that bogs down so many pertinent societal debates in the U.S. nowadays. “Objective and verifiable facts allow us to make decisions that are informed by data and improve outcomes for everyone”, Greenwood says. His research agenda is also evident in a study from earlier this year finding that black infant mortality rates were 50% lower when the doctor looking after the new-born was also black. Its data tells a sobering story about healthcare inequality that cries out for action without making ideologically loaded claims.

More broadly, Greenwood believes his NYPD findings also play into the hot-button issue of IT-enabled workplace surveillance. Here, too, there are complex trade-offs. Companies must weigh the prospect of pushback from employees who feel too closely watched against concerns about the bottom line and workforce accountability. The NYPD example may help organizations identify cases that may call for more monitoring rather than less – namely, where workers exercise a good deal of individual discretion, can push back against controls and may put themselves and/or others at risk in the course of their work.

Source: Mitchel E. Zamoff, Brad Greenwood, Gordon Burtch (2020). “Who Watches the Watchmen: Evidence of the Effect of Body-Worn Cameras on New York City Policing”

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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

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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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