Good Science - Good Practice
Jamie Madigan
National Archives
Tom Giberson
Oakland University
Welcome to another edition of Good Science–Good Practice, where we examine the intersection of solid scientific research and practical business issues. This time we highlight some interesting studies on leadership and diversity, plus a couple of research methodologies that might be used to good effect in real organizations. Also, baseball!
For our first piece, Carmeli, Ben-Hador, Waldman, and Rupp (2009) recently published an interesting and useful article connecting several variables important to any leader: leadership behavior, employee motivation, and employee performance. Their work builds on the basic leadership styles outlined through the Ohio State and University of Michigan studies, which suggest that leader behaviors, can be categorized as focusing on tasks and/or relationships. Specifically, the authors examined whether leader relational behaviors impacted employee performance via employee vigor.
How might this work? The authors argue that leader relational behaviors (LRB) encourage a positive work environment, in which open communication, trust, and collaboration build bonding social capital (Adler & Kwon, 2002) among employees. Bonding social capital is thought to provide positive cognitive and affective outcomes in the workplace, including increasing employees’ ability to make sense of workplace situations, as well as enhancing employee vigor. Vigor is described as an affective equivalent of self-efficacy, involving both arousal and a sense of vitality. Shirom (2007) suggests that vigor predicts the level of effort employees dedicate to a task.
To test these hypotheses, 209 employees and their managers from the Israeli Association of Community Centers completed several measures, including a measure of manager LRBs, bonding social capital, employee vigor, and job performance. Carmeli et al. (2009) used structural equation modeling to evaluate their sequential mediation model and found that bonding social capital mediates the relationship between LRBs and employee vigor, and vigor mediates the connection between bonding social capital and employee job performance.
The authors suggest that LRBs facilitate quality work relationships and that these relationships may be a key to enhancing employee motivation and job performance. In a time of cutbacks, downsizing, and asking more and more of fewer and fewer people at work, this study is interesting in its use of a foundational view on leadership—bringing back aspects of the human relations movement and the “leadership style” approach to leadership. During tough times, managers might be inclined to drive performance through task-oriented behaviors; this study suggests that LRBs can encourage performance, though likely through a potentially more constructive route than a high-task focus.
We see applications of this research in leadership development programs, such as training and coaching interventions, as well as helping to define specific leadership competencies. We also see it encouraging managers to find ways to not only lead through a task focus but also ensuring they build constructive, positive relationships among their team members. For example, managers might drive task performance and build relationships through seeking input from individuals or teams on how to better perform tasks, how to constructively deal with increasing workloads due to layoffs, and so on. We would like to see a study on the specific types of behaviors leaders might engage in to build bonding social capital. The LRB measure in this study essentially focused on broad generalizations of behavior, vis à vis the impact of leader behavior on employees. Specifically, employees indicated the extent to which their manager encouraged collaboration, cultivated a trustful work environment, and encouraged open communication. A useful study—or series of studies—might look at the specific types of behavior that lead to these particular impacts. It may very well be that these behaviors are organization specific; nonetheless, research on more detailed levels of LRB behaviors would further enable practitioners to develop training and other interventions to encourage this leadership style in the workplace.
Continuing with the leader–follower relationship theme, Moss, Sanchez, Brumbaugh, and Borkowski (2009) recently investigated the leader–member exchange (LMX)–performance relationship. A fair amount of research suggests that a positive relationship exists between the perceived quality of leader–follower relationship and follower performance. Moss, et al. were interested in understanding more about the process that might account for the LMX–performance relationship. As we will see, the authors suggest that feedback avoidance behavior (FAB) might account for the relationship between LMX quality and member performance.
As a brief reminder, LMX focuses on the two-way exchange relationship between leaders and followers. LMX suggests that leaders form “in-group” relationships with some employees, who in exchange for loyalty and hard work gain greater access to resources and prime opportunities. Leaders also develop “out-group” relationships, and these employees have less access to resources and opportunities.
Previous work on feedback behavior suggests that employees who perform well are inclined to draw the boss’s attention to it (feedback-seeking behavior [FSB]; Ashford, Blatt, & VandeWalle, 2003). Feedback-seeking behavior includes monitoring the environment for feedback on performance and actively inquiring input from others with regard to performance (Ashford & Cummings, 1983). Similarly, others have found that employees who perform poorly will not only avoid seeking feedback but will actively avoid interactions that might encourage the leader to provide negative feedback (e.g., Northcraft & Ashford, 1990; Moss, Valenzi, & Taggart, 2003). In fact, FAB is a “proactive, purposeful, and intentional feedback management strategy, which involves...evading feedback” (Moss, et al. 2009). Although avoiding feedback now might feel like “dodging a bullet” in the short term, such feedback could help the employee avoid similar failures in the future.
Bringing LMX and previous FSB and FAB research, the authors hypothesize that FAB might mediate the relationship between LMX and employee performance. The authors reason that higher quality leader–follower relationships might encourage more FSBs and fewer FABs. One hundred twenty-seven of 200 leader–follower dyads from a hospital system finished the study in full by completing measures of LMX quality, employee performance, and FABs. Results suggest that member perceptions of LMX and performance were fully mediated by FABs. In other words, low LMX employees were much more likely to engage in FABs following poor performance, depriving themselves of potentially valuable feedback for future improvement, as well as opportunities to further develop LMX. Over time, this likely further reinforces the already poor LMX, creating a negative performance cycle.
Let’s change gears a little bit and examine another area where science and practice are intersecting. Diversity continues to be a popular topic in the human resources world, with many companies putting forth significant efforts at not only increasing the diversity of their workforce but even competing for awards and recognition for a great place for minorities and women to work. For sure there are reasons to engender diversity completely unrelated to the company’s bottom line (e.g., community service, adherence to basic corporate values, etc.), but many academic researchers are still interested in the very applied question of whether or not diversity has an effect on organizational performance.
One such recent study was conducted by McKay, Avery, and Morris (2009) and published in Personnel Psychology. What was interesting about this study is that it not only looked at actual employees at a large retail company—over 56,000 of them, in fact—but they looked at each store’s sales performance. This strikes us as a metric pretty likely to get the attention of just about any decision maker in a retail sales organization. Specifically, the researchers hypothesized that it was the congruence in diversity climate perceptions between managers and their subordinates that mattered. Sticking with the established operationalization of diversity climate as the shared perceptions that a company’s policies and practices are fair and welcoming to underrepresented groups (women and racial minorities), they helpfully traced back over the current literature showing how climate in general and diversity climate in particular affected firm-level outcomes.
Theory established, the researchers then surveyed their massive sample, including both managers and their direct reports, and collected information about sales performance at the store level. They found that perceptions of a pro-diversity climate from both managers and subordinates had a significant main effect on changes in sales. This would be enough in its own right, but interestingly the researchers also found that a two-way interaction existed between perceptions of diversity climate between managers and subordinates. Essentially, the relationship between climate and store performance was strongest when the two sets of opinions were aligned. If both managers and subordinates agreed that there was a climate supportive of diversity, the store did better. Conversely, when there was disagreement, store performance tended to be lower. In the end, the researchers found that “a one-unit increment in diversity climate (e.g., from 3 to 4), from the subordinate and managerial perspectives, was associated with a 21% and 8% sales growth, respectively” (McKay et al., 2009; p. 784).
As with so many articles highlighted in this column, what we liked about this study was how it combined solid research design and robust analysis with very practical and applied concerns. Speaking of which, what concern could possibly be more applied than baseball? Answer: not much. This is why we were so intrigued by another study, which looked at executive personality traits and their affects on America’s favorite past time (and for the record, we think it should be interesting to non-Americans, too; no knowledge of baseball minutia is required).
What Resick, Whitman, Weingarden, and Hiller (2009) did was use a “historiometric” research design to examine almost 100 years of history and gather information about the CEOs (or equivalent) of baseball clubs. Research assistants combed biographies, interviews, news articles, and other publications to assemble biographies of team CEOs with information relevant to their hypotheses. Specifically, they were interested in looking at the relationship between CEO personality (in terms of core self-evaluations and narcissism) and highly important outcomes like field manager turnover, fan attendance, and how often the team actually won its games. If there are more down to earth dependent variables of interest to the common sports fan, we’d like to hear them.
Although all their hypotheses didn’t quite pan out, what Resick et al. (2009) found was that, indeed, the “bright” side of CEO personality in the form of positive core evaluations of self—that is, self-esteem, internal locus of control, confidence in one’s ability to succeed in most situations, and neuroticism—did correlate with baseball CEOs’ use of transformational leadership. Conversely, the behaviors of those club executives who researchers rated as high in the “dark” side of CEO personality—essentially narcissism—were negatively correlated with contingent reward leadership and transformational leadership. Being a narcissist may have helped one become an executive, but it wasn’t good news for things like fan attendance and winning streaks.
We find this interesting not only as a piece of research on CEO personality and firm-level performance but also for how applied it is and how simply pulling a profile from a client’s or student’s favorite (or, alternatively, most despised) baseball team could serve as a great hook for introducing the topic. And while we’re on the topic of individual differences and propensity towards beneficial behaviors at work, let’s talk about some recent research on psychological flow. How was that for a transition?
Fullagar and Kelloway (2009) published an article in the latest edition of Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology entitled “Flow at Work: An Experience Sampling Approach.” The authors start the piece by reviewing the concept of flow, which generally is taken to mean working in the narrow space between maximal performance and fumbling into failure. As anyone familiar with the research knows, flow relies, among other things, on a perfect match between skill and challenge, immediate and unambiguous feedback, a loss of ego, and clear goals for the activity.
But some researchers, like Fullagar and Kelloway, think that flow may be as much a trait as a state. In other words, it may be a state of mind and an experience, but there are also some people who are, by dint of their very special makeup, more susceptible to falling into that delicious state of flow. You’d expect to find that such people enter flow more frequently and more easily and that measures of those traits would correlate with associated traits.
To test this hypothesis they tracked a group of 40 architectural students over 15 weeks while they engaged in studio work. Students were periodically and semirandomly queried about their flow state during times when they were most likely to be working on their architecture projects. The researchers were also interested in other questions about the relationship between flow and mood and subjective well-being. Their results were not a slam dunk—74% of the variance in flow could be accounted for by situational factors rather than dispositional ones—but they did find that there are some dispositional components to flow.
But in addition to the subject matter, we also found this article interesting and a good example of bridging the academic–practitioner divide because of the experience sampling methodology used by the researchers. This strikes us as a much better way of collecting data in organizations than simply mailing out surveys to be answered at one or two points in time. With the ubiquity of cell phones and handheld computers, it should be feasible to implement this kind of methodology in many populations.
References
Adler, P., & Kwon, S. (2002). Social capital: Prospectus for a new concept. Academy of Management Review, 27, 17–40.
Ashford, S. J., Blatt, R., & VandeWalle, D. (2003). Reflections on the looking glass: A review of research on feedback seeking behavior in organizations. Journal of Management, 29, 773–799.
Ashford, S. J., & Cummings, L. L. (1983). Feedback as an individual resource: Personal strategies of creating information. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 32, 370–398.
Carmeli, A., Ben-Hador, B., Waldman, D. A., & Rupp, D. E. (2009). How leaders cultivate social capital and nurture employee vigor: Implications for job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 1553–1561.
Fullagar, C. J., &  Kelloway, K. (2009). “Flow” at work: An experience sampling approach. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 82, 595–615.
McKay, P. F., Avery, D. R., & Morris, M. A. (2009). A tale of two climates: Diversity climate from subordinates’ and managers’ perspectives and their role in store unit sales performance. Personnel Psychology, 62, 767–791.
Moss, S. E., & Sanchez, J. I. (2004). Are your employees avoiding you? Managerial strategies for closing the feedback gap. Academy of Management Executive, 18, 32–46.
Moss S. E., Sanchez J. I., Brumbaugh A. M., & Borkowski N. (2009). The mediating role of feedback avoidance behavior in the LMX-performance relationship. Group & Organization Management, 34(6), 645–684.
Moss, S. E., Valenzi, E. R., & Taggart, W. (2003). Are you hiding from your boss? The development of a taxonomy and instrument to assess the feedback management behaviors of good and bad performers. Journal of Management, 29, 487–510.
Northcraft, G. B., & Ashford, S. J. (1990). The preservation of self in everyday life: The effects of performance expectations and feedback context on feedback inquiry. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 47, 42–64.
Resick, C. J., Whitman, D. S., Weingarden, S. M., & Hiller, N. J. (2009). The bright-side and the dark-side of CEO Personality: Examining core self-evaluations, narcissism, transformational leadership, and strategic influence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 1365–1381.
Shirom, A. (2007). Explaining vigor: On the antecedents and consequences of vigor as a positive affect at work. In C. L. Cooper & D. Nelson (Eds.), Organizational behavior: Accentuating the positive at work (pp. 86–100). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.