A matter of evidence

I [Alex] spent last week at the BPS' Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference, from which I'll be reporting for much of the remaining month. A conference highlight was a late night chat with Prof Rob Briner of the University of Bath. Rob is a keen advocate of evidence-based practice, and as the Digest exists to help the world of work operate better through judicious use of evidence, I was keen for his views on what we're doing right and what we can do better.

As well as a bunch of tips and suggestions for me to explore, there were a few wider themes that I think are worth communicating.

Single articles are useful up to a point...

They remind us of the process that sits behind the evidence, the actual running-a-studyness of science: sample sizes, participant demographics, choice of statistics, study limitations. On top of this, they can be encapsulated relatively simply, meaning they get shared or form the beginning of discussions that get people to reflect on the evidence in a particular area.  And they do provide some evidence but only from one study.

....but Reviews are where it's at if you really want to use evidence

Narrative reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses all have their own features, but share in common that they look across the research to find patterns and trends. And the aggregate level is the most important level of evidence. 

In other words, the findings of any single study may be interesting and provide insight but what is much more important is what the whole body of evidence is suggesting. Reviews can present clear findings about a body of evidence or be complex and contradictory and messy but we need to know what the evidence as a whole is suggesting before we can use it in practice.

Due to this, the Occupational Digest will now cover a review every month, either something just published or a fairly recent review that speaks to an issue of current interest.

In addition, when covering single articles, I'll aim to provide a second reference beyond the article itself, to a review that addresses the topic the article concerns itself with. Hopefully this will provide you, the readership, with signposting to help you find out more.

Further reading

Briner, R.B. (1998).  What is an evidence based approach to practice and why do we need one in occupational psychology?  Proceedings of the British Psychological Society Occupational Psychology Conference, 39-44. (pdf link)

The dark side of behaviour at work

Jon Sutton

The face that launched a thousand peer-reviewed journal articles beamed down from the stage as self-confessed 'well adjusted workaholic' Professor Adrian Furnham (University College London) began his keynote. Quips were in ready supply, but Furnham is much more than a crowd pleaser: this was a talk steeped in history and theory.

According to Furnham, there are 70,000 books in the British Library with leadership in the title. But most leaders don't succeed, they fail, with a base rate of bad leadership collated from various studies of 50 per cent. This is due to incompetence (not having enough of something, or being promoted beyond the job they are good at), or derailment (having too much of a characteristic, such as self-confidence, or creative quirkiness). It's this later problem that Furnham focused on, identifying three root causes: troubled relationships, a defective or unstable sense of self; and ineffective responses to change.

Furnham highlighted three fundamental issues. Firstly, organisations 'select in', for the traits they think will help an employee be a success, rather than 'selecting out' for what is going to cause problems. Secondly, it's assumed that competencies are linearly related to success. And thirdly, employers fail to see the dark side of bright side traits and the bright side of dark side traits. For example, what if a self-confident leader pursues a risky course of action built on overly optimistic assumptions?

How do we characterise what makes a leader destructive? Furnham feels that the early 'trait' approach to leadership failed because 'the list of traits grew remorselessly, leading to confusion, dispute and little insight'. Trait theory also ignored the role of both subordinates and situational factors.

This oversight was rectified in the work of Tim Judge – who Furnham called 'the best living occupational psychologist' (see Digest coverage here)– which showed the 'toxic triangle' of destructive leaders, susceptible followers and conducive environments.

The influence of the model was clear in Furnham's own consideration of the 'Icarus syndrome'. High flyers fall through poor selection, flawed personality, no or poor role models, and because they are rewarded for toxicity in the organisation.

Furnham then cantered through some typical personality disorder problems in plain English: arrogance, melodrama, volatility, eccentricity, perfectionism etc. I was struck by the simple, neo-psychoanalytic conception of Karen Horney from 1950: people move away from others, towards them or against them (something covered recently). 

Furnham outlined some just published research on the differences between private and public sector dark side traits, with private sector more likely to move against others through manipulation or creating dramas whereas public sector managers were more likely to show moving away traits such as withdrawal, doubt, or cynicism.

A series of his own studies, generally with huge samples, elucidated sex differences in dark side traits and their relationships with career choice and success. From all this, Furnham distilled some key implications for selection and recruitment. Consider using 'dark side' measures; beware excessive self-confidence and charm; do a proper bio-data and reference check; and get an expert to 'select out' for you. As for management, the message was to beware fast-tracking wunderkinds, and to seek a mentor, coach or at least a very stable deputy to keep these individuals on the rails.

'Just as a good leader can do wonders for any group, organisation or country,' Furnham concluded, 'a bad one can lead to doom and destruction. Understanding and developing great leaders is one of the most important things we can do in any organisation.'

Furnham, A., Hyde, G., & Trickey, G. (2013). Do your Dark Side Traits Fit? Dysfunctional Personalities in Different Work Sectors Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1111/apps.12002

Further reading

Timothy A. Judge, Ronald F. Piccolo, Tomek Kosalka, The bright and dark sides of leader traits: A review and theoretical extension of the leader trait paradigm, The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 20, Issue 6, December 2009, Pages 855-875, ISSN 1048-9843, 10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.09.004.

One personality to rule them all?

Alex Fradera

Until recently I was pretty ignorant of the idea of a general factor of personality, a situation which undoubtedly hurt my psychology-nerd cred. I'm back on track now, thanks to an afternoon spent in Rob McIver's symposium on the matter.

The general factor of personality, or GFP, is analoguous to g, the intelligence quotient that predicts to differing degrees the multiple intelligences - verbal, musical, numerical -that sit below it. (The symposium reminded us that whereas Spearman posited g in the 1900s, and Thurstone the differential intelligence model in the twenties, it took until the 1950s for Phillip Vernon to reconcile the models).

While practitioners who use personality emphasise its differential qualities - many facets, no one right profile - the academics who advocate GFP say that on the contrary, there is such a thing as having lots of personality, and that this global factor is meaningful, predicting a range of life outcomes. 

Critics say this may be down to statistical artefacts, such as an individual's desire for social desirability influencing all their questionnaire responses. So this symposium took us into the science, and particularly what it means for practitioners.

The first session, given by Rainer Kurz of Saville Consulting, was the most technical in focus, introducing a way to get a GFP simply by summing raw scores on each Big Five personality measure. It's an intuitive approach that in his dataset of 308 mixed roles proved as valid in predicting job performance as the standard approach (extracting the 'first unrotated principle component') while avoiding some fiddly statistical issues. 

However, the GFP was not comprehensive, as after partialling out its variance he found significant influences of personality subcomponents remained, notably assertiveness and achievement. This suggests the add-up method doesn't quite account for their influence. He concluded that this was a promising recipe but the approach will take refining.

His colleague Rob McIver chose to put aside notions of 'the ideal GFP' to explore total personality scores that predict success on a particular capability-set - in most cases, a job. Rather than relying just on factor extraction or the add-it-all-up approach, this starts by developing and shaping tests to pre-fit the criterion you care about.

McIver's data drew on external raters who had judged various facets of workplace effectiveness for the same individuals described by Kurz in his earlier presentation. The individuals had also completed seven different personality tests, and McIver explained how he generated a total personality score for each one using a criterion approach: personality dimensions were mapped onto effectiveness based on logic and previously reported relationships, meaning some dimensions were weighted heavily and others not at all if judged irrelevant to effectiveness. McIver showed how their own questionnaire, developed from the ground up around these effectiveness factors, produced the most powerfully predictive total scores, with an r up to .32.

McIver went further, producing a personality super-score for each participant by totalling all seven tests together. Would it work, given that many of these questionnaires were not developed with this effectiveness framework in mind? It turns out that united they stand, pretty well, with a validity of .27, thanks in some part to the criterion-based pruning and weighing. McIver concluded that this approach may be more profitable than searching for one true GFP.

Between these two talks Rob Bailey of OPP took the floor to question whether, in any case, true GFPs could truly be useful for practitioners. He points out that the literature tends to describe the general factor as reflecting people who are relaxed, sociable, emotionally intelligent, satisfied with life, and altruistic - and that a low score means the opposite of these things. He challenged the symposium to imagine cases where such information could be provided to an individual in any constructive fashion, compared to the conventional profiling approach.

Bailey then went to the data, in this case taken from over 1,200 individuals paid to complete a 16-factor personality questionnaire, the absence of career implications giving them little incentive to 'fake nice' and apply spin to their results. 

His component analysis suggested the personality data could reduce to two factors, not fewer, and he showed how opting to use the dual factors rather than the 16 original ones weakened the ability to predict variables such as job satisfaction, dropping coverage from 9.3% of the variance to 7.5%.

He concluded that granularity, not fat factors, may be a better bet for predictive power, and also cautioned that the differences he finds (no single factor, more value in the parts than a whole) may result from using a personality measure that isn't built to the specifications of the Big Five, and that in fact dependence on that model may be under-valuing the diversity, and thus relevance, of personality itself.

When the dust settled, the questions remained, but the issue of the GFP will undoubtedly be one we will revisit.

Further reading

van der Linden, D., te Nijenhuis, J., & Bakker, A. (2010). The General Factor of Personality: A meta-analysis of Big Five intercorrelations and a criterion-related validity study Journal of Research in Personality, 44 (3), 315-327 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.03.003

Are organisations led by the limbic system?

Jon Sutton

According to keynote speaker Gerard Hodgkinson (Professor of Strategic Management and Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School), 'Descartes's error is alive and well in the workplace'. In a bold and wide-ranging address, Hodgkinson made the case for why and how occupational psychology needs to connect with the social neurosciences.

Hodgkinson is bringing psychology into the field of strategic management, trying to help decision makers become more rational. Take how organisations tend to respond to a major threat or opportunity (HMV and Blockbuster come to mind as I write this). 

Usually there are small, incremental changes, and when it becomes apparent this isn't sufficient, what does the organisation do? Nothing. There is a period of 'strategic drift'. Then there is a period of 'flux', which on Hodgkinson's graphic representation looks rather like a tailspin. This is followed by 'phase 4', 'transformational change' or 'complete demise'.

But to what extent can psychology shed light on this process? Hodgkinson's 2002 book 'The Competent Organization' argued the case for the centrality of the psychological contribution to organisational learning and strategic adaptation, yet 11 years on, he said, there was still only a passing consideration of affective and non-conscious cognitive processes. Why do we continue to sidestep it?

Using examples from his practice, Hodgkinson demonstrated how strategising is both an inherently cognitive and affective process. Eliciting a cognitive taxonomy from senior figures in a UK grocery firm, he found that although the market conditions had changed dramatically, mental models – individually and collectively – had not. Decision makers were slaves to their basic psychological processes, for example still focusing on the 'magic number' of '7 plus or minus 2' competitors.

Hodgkinson showed how he confronts strategic inertia in top management teams, stimulating individual cognitive processes by scenario analysis. Some organisations excel at this: Hodgkinson claims that Shell closed all their facilities within 45 minutes of 9/11. While others were still struggling to comprehend what was happening, their scenario planning had allowed them to take quick and decisive action.

Hodgkinson's latest research draws on social cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics to develop a series of counterintuitive insights. His hope is that these can teach people to be more skilled in their control of their emotional, limbic system. True rationality, he concluded, is the product of the analytical and experiential mind.

Further reading

Hodgkinson, G., & Healey, M. (2008). Cognition in Organizations Annual Review of Psychology, 59 (1), 387-417 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093612.

Finding the balance between work and home

Jon Sutton

Who is responsible for work-life balance? The individual, the organisation, or even the legislative system? That was the question posed at the start of this symposium, and it became clear that 'one size fits all' policies and practices don't exist: we must understand needs and wants in order to tailor solutions.

First up was Dr Ellen Ernst Kossek (Purdue University, US), who identified the importance of feeling in psychological control of boundaries. Based on three validated measures of 'cross role interruption behaviours', 'boundary control' and 'work-family identity centralities', Kossek outlined different profiles. You're either an 'integrator', or a 'separator', or you cycle between the two: a 'volleyer'. 

Add in consideration of whether your well-being level is high or low and you end up with six styles, including the 'fusion lovers' who are happy to integrate work and family life, the 'job warriors' who volley away to their heart's discontent, and 'captives' who are the separators with low well-being.

The image of Winston Churchill in his pyjamas, as an early remote worker, cast a large shadow over the talk by Dr Christine Grant and colleagues from Coventry and Warwick Universities. Grant described her work to outline competencies related to the effective e-worker, and to develop an assessment tool. Organisations can provide training for existing and new e-workers, Dr Grant said, before leaving us with the thought that 'a good manager is always a good manager; a bad manager is worse as an e-worker'.

It's one thing taking your work home with you when you're an academic or editor, but another entirely when you've just been pulling a family out of some motorway wreckage. Dr Almuth McDowall (University of Surrey) looked at work-life balance self-management strategies in the police force, eliciting 134 behaviours from semi-structured interviews. 

Some were context-specific, for example in the police it's actually very important not to take work home with your, as it is confidential and often intrusive material. McDowall highlighted the importance of communication and negotiation over work-life balance, and suggested that there is a separate competence for line managing work-life balance in others.

Finally, Professor Gail Kinman (University of Bedfordshire) tackled a subject close to home for many: work-life conflict in UK academics. She noted that academics vary in the extent to which they wish their roles to be integrated, with many highly absorbed in the job role and most working considerably over the 48 hour working time directive. 

In Kinman's survey of 760 academics in at least 99 universities, most academics weren't getting the separation they wanted. Working at home and ICT use predicted work-life conflict. Kinman called for enhanced sensitivity to variation in boundary management styles and preferences amongst colleagues and supervisors, citing the example of sending e-mails at the weekend as potentially role modelling that behaviour for the recipient.

Another interesting point to emerge from the symposium is that most measures of work-life balance are focused on the impact on families, despite the fact that it's an issue for the single and childless as well.

Further reading

Ernst Kossek, E., Lewis, S., & Hammer, L. (2009). Work--life initiatives and organizational change: Overcoming mixed messages to move from the margin to the mainstream Human Relations, 63 (1), 3-19 DOI: 10.1177/0018726709352385

Saving the world with Psychology

Can Occupational Psychology play a part in saving the world? Absolutely, insisted Prof Stuart Carr in his keynote presentation at the DOP conference. After all, work is deeply woven into the world, so transforming one can influence the other. 

Carr brought this home through examples of the United Nation's 2015 Millennial Development Goals, which include reduction of poverty, which manifests in the wages that workers derive; education, which depends on the capability of teachers and other staff; and gender equality, which can be combated in the workplaces in which we spend much of our waking hours. 

This exemplifies a humanitarian approach to work psychology, ensuring decent work for all workers and ensuring that the work they do meets responsibilities towards multiple stakeholders, rather than the bottom line. 

Carr provided some examples of how he and collaborators are making inroads into this, for instance by organising a Global Special Issue on Psychology and Poverty reduction that spanned multiple journals, raising awareness of how psychology can point at these issues.

Carr also raised another way to use psychology to improve the world: by applying it directly to the conditions of those involved in Humanitarian Work. These roles can involve risk and be demanding, so it would be useful to investigate this and take steps to foster well-being. 

And any way to improve the impact of the humanitarian work itself would obviously be beneficial. Carr reported on the creation of online networks such as Humanitarian Work Psychology that connect researchers,  students and those on the ground, who are commonly isolated, to allow them to share knowledge and put it to work on actual problems.

So we can change the world through 'Humanitarian' Work Psychology to make conditions of work decent everywhere, coupled with 'Humanitarian Work' Psychology that focuses attention on those aspiring to be levers of change in the world. 

Further examples abounded in the presentation, including a global task force to address pay disparities in humanitarian work: the dual pay levels for foreign and national staff causing distancing of the two groups due to negative appraisals - the former rationalising the latter's low pay as reflecting their capability, the latter becoming demotivated and distrustful of the attitude of the foreigners, causing a vicious cycle.

There is much more to do, and the keynote was a call to arms to the profession as a whole. As Carr reminded us, much occupational psychology work developed in the Peace Corps in the 1960s and following, and only later became concentrated in focus on the for-profit sector. 

A shift is possible and long overdue. Carr likened this to a Koru, the fern frond native to many countries including his home in New Zealand, whose spiral shape suggests a return to beginnings, and whose swift unfurling denotes the possibility of change.

Carr, S., McWha, I., MacLachlan, M., & Furnham, A. (2010). International–local remuneration differences across six countries: Do they undermine poverty reduction work? International Journal of Psychology, 45 (5), 321-340 DOI: 10.1080/00207594.2010.491990