Among evolutionary biologists and psychologists, there are two theories on the origins of leadership. The dominant idea views leadership as the outcome of status battles between group members. The winner (leader) exercises power over lower-ranked individuals.

The alternative idea sees leadership as a coordination device that helps group members plan, execute group tasks, and divvy up resources. In this view, leaders serve the interests of followers.

To test these two ideas, Gillet and colleagues conducted two social decision-making experiments. They examined the behaviors of individuals in four-player coordination games in which the individuals had the option to go first (lead) or wait (follow); their decisions were associated with certain monetary pay-offs. The researchers then linked the players’ decisions to data from personality questionnaires and their earnings in the game.

“The core question in these games is who leads and how do they fare compared to followers in terms of their earnings in the game?” the researchers report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Gillet et al found that leaders were more likely to be rated as pro-social rather than selfish. And they discovered that these “servant leaders” seemingly sacrificed some of their own gains for the benefit of the group.

“Leaders, on average, earned less money than followers and dispositionally social participants (on the basis of their social value orientation) chose to lead more often than selfish participants,” the researchers report. “Additionally there is no relationship between leadership and the kind of personality traits that are usually associated with selfish leadership, most notably personal dominance.”

As the researchers admit, the experiments were run in an anonymous setting that did not enable group members to form status and dominance hierarchies commonly seen in the brutish real world. So this line of thinking is a work in progress, albeit one that gives servant leaders a measure of redemption.

Gillet, J., Cartwright, E., & Vugt, M. (2010). Selfish or servant leadership? Evolutionary predictions on leadership personalities in coordination games Personality and Individual Differences DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.06.003

photo credit: Clinton Steeds

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Selfish versus Servant Leadership

Change can be stressful, no doubt. But not all employees experience change in a similar way, say researchers Loretto (U Edinburgh), Platt (U Edinburgh), and Popham (U St. Andrews). Downsizing, for example, could have a positive effect on mental health, they write in the British Journal of Management, if they lead to clearer roles and responsibilities for employees and increasing worker participation.

FACTOID: Employers in the UK are under legal obligation to prevent and control factors leading to stress in their workforce.

To fill in the research gap, Loretto et al set out to devise a comprehensive measure of organizational change (based on self-report questionnaires) and then to use that tool to explore the effects of change on employee mental health (using the well-validated General Health Questionnaire). Their study focused on nearly 5,400 employees in the National Health Service in the UK.

The study did show that the prospect of changing employers and terms and conditions of employment are likely to have detrimental effects on staff health and well-being.

But the researchers’ findings also challenge the assumption that change necessarily has an adverse effect on health. “Our findings indicate areas, such as promotion and development, where a positive impact can be anticipated.” They speculate that training and promotion may reduce employees’ uncertainty by increasing their control over their future.

Loretto, W., Platt, S., & Popham, F. (2009). Workplace Change and Employee Mental Health: Results from a Longitudinal Study British Journal of Management DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00658.x

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Managing Change, Managing Your Sanity

Adam (INSEAD), Shirako (U of California, Berkeley), and Maddux (INSEAD) conducted the “first investigation of how the interpersonal effects of discrete emotions in negotiations vary across cultures,” according to their paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

They hypothesized that anger would elicit larger concessions from Western negotiators but smaller concessions from East Asian negotiators. They figured that anger is at odds with the East Asian emphasis on interdependence and social harmony and would therefore be perceived by East Asian negotiators as an inappropriate display.

The research backed them up. Adam et al conducted three studies using scenarios and computer simulations (none involving face-to-face interactions) and found consistent evidence that “anger not only may be less effective in East Asian cultural contexts, but may actually backfire and lead to worse outcomes.”

Culture, they say, has a significant impact not only on how people from different cultural backgrounds perceive certain behaviour but also how they actually react to that behaviour.

Hajo Adam, Aiwa Shirako, & William W. Maddux (2010). Cultural Variance in the Interpersonal Effects of Anger in Negotiations Psychological Science, 21 (6), 882-889 : 10.1177/0956797610370755

photo credit: Frederic Poirot

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Bargaining — and Anger — Across Cultures

Professor Robert Hooijberg (IMD, Switzerland) studied 175 state government managers in the U.S. to assess whether or not leadership effectiveness is linked to integrity, as judged by the managers themselves, their bosses, their peers, and their direct reports.

Hooijberg found that goal-oriented behaviour — getting the job done — is far and away the strongest predictor of perceived leadership effectiveness. Integrity, by contrast, holds much less importance for a leader’s boss or direct reports. “Our study lends little support to the assertion that integrity is essential for effective leadership, a sobering thought indeed,” he writes.

Of course, there is more to this research. Hooijberg found, for example, that flexibility is a crucial value for leaders. And in his article, he lays out some important distinctions between the concept of “integrity” and what it actually means in practice. Sometimes acting with undiluted honesty can damage workplace relationships that need to be sustained. Do you really need to point that your colleague’s green-and-brown argyle socks clash with his black pin-striped suit?

Read the entire article here

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Is Integrity an Overblown Leadership Trait?

In the UK, for example, there’s a proposal to tie top public sector pay to a 20-times multiple of low pay, and to publish the salaries of the highest earners.

Amid all the huffing and puffing, the huge UK-based HR association, CIPD, is providing a gutsy contrarian view. In a recent report, CIPD argues in favour of variable pay and bonuses, a tough argument to make in these days of retrenchment.

“Politicians and, perhaps more importantly, more strident parts of the media need to stop seeing pay in the public sector as only a cost to be driven down,” the report says. “Instead, used well, it can be a tool to drive up standards and increase value to the taxpayer.”

So how should compensation be designed to deliver what public sector bosses and their political masters intend? CIPD suggests that, for the most part, what works for the private sector should work for the public. To wit:

Ensure reward practices match the purpose.
The key question is: “Are the ways that the benefit package is structured likely to make any day-to-day difference to the ability of the organisation to deliver its objectives, or the effort delivered by individuals to help it do so?”

Make compensation transparent.
Employees need to know what is expected of them and what they need to do to earn a pay raise or bonus, and what is expected of others. Transparency also builds credibility with taxpayers. In fact, CIPD likes the idea of publishing the names of high earners, not merely their job titles. U.S. states such as Utah, Washington, Nebraska, and California already have publicly accessible online databases containing the salaries of state employees.

Reward performance.
This won’t please the “slash the pay packet” crowd but CIPD suggests public sector managers make greater use of variable pay to reward individual or team behaviour. This is a good way to recognize high performance without continually ratcheting up comp levels and pension commitments. “Bonuses can help focus minds by communicating what’s important to the organisation and can be more cost-effective than consolidated pay awards.”

Adopt flexible compensation schemes.
CIPD recommends moving from national pay agreements, “pay spines/increments”, and service-related pay progression to flexible pay structures. More flexible pay grades and progression mechanisms should be adopted to allow individuals to progress through their grades faster.

Download Transforming Public Sector Pay and Pensions

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Public Sector Pay: Slash or Learn

Of late, Nick has been exploring the idea of “narrative leadership,” basically the use of stories — personal and otherwise — to effectively lead others. He delivers an entertaining overview of the idea, and throws in a few stories for good measure, in a TedX presentation from Calgary.

If you’re in a story and you don’t like it, change the story.

Here’s the clip. At the 6:00 minute mark, Nick tells us what researchers are learning about “narrative competence.” Researchers with the Center for Creative Leadership, for example, looked at how leaders develop; how do they learn what they need to know? The answer: 50% comes from experience; 20% from hardship or failure; 20% from mentors; and 10% from formal learning. That means that 70 percent of what leaders learn comes from their experiences, both positive and negative. “And we make sense of these experiences through stories,” Nick says.

At the 8:40 minute mark, Nick explains how effective leaders know their own story and lead with it. He follows it up at at 9:00 minute mark with the story of the M.S. Hershey Foundation and its role in lifting Nick out of life-limiting storyline and giving him a new script.

At the 13:30 minute mark, Nick says “we become the stories we tell ourselves,” with the implication being that we can change the world by changing our stories.

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Narrative Leadership: What’s Your Story?

Management development experts have long known that organizations get the most out of their training dollars when employees are supported before, during, and after training. Few organizations, however, actually follow this advice.

Models of training effectiveness focus on program design, trainee characteristics, and workplace environment as the key factors that determine transfer of learning. By contrast, Harry J. Martin (Cleveland State University) wanted to study the context in which employees apply and transfer the knowledge and skills learned, specifically the role of workplace climate and peer support.

(Workplace climate includes factors such as adequate resources, cues that remind trainees of what they have learned, opportunities to apply skills, barriers and constraints to transfer, and consequences for using training on the job.)

FACTOID: It is estimated that only 10 to 40 percent of learning transfers to the job.

Martin focused on 237 managers of a manufacturing company in the midwest U.S. who completed a comprehensive training program. He devised a global measure of workplace climate for each of the 12 divisions in which the employees worked and used performance ratings of the participants to measure the level of training transfer.

Martin found that trainees in a division with a more favorable climate and those enjoying greater peer support showed greater improvement. Even better, in terms of transferring learnings, peer support overcame or lessened the effects of a negative office environment.

“The results of this study suggest that follow-up programs should be designed to address both the immediate and general organizational environments,” Martin reports in Human Resource Development Quarterly. “Care must be taken to help ensure that peers and immediate supervisors help trainees put the skills to work. Co-workers could provide general encouragement or be involved in more structured activities such as the peer meetings employed in this study.”

“Workplace Climate and Peer Support as Determinants of Training Transfer,” by Harry J. Martin; Human Resource Development Quarterly (Vol. 21 No. 1 Spring 2010; pp. 87-104)

photo credit: gritphilm

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Spreading the Learning: Role of Workplace Climate and Co-workers

“It is clear that organizational development and design will become increasingly important as organizations seek to change, innovate and to link learning to organizational goals,” according to CIPD’s 2010 Learning and Talent Development survey report. But the report also noted that “practitioners are less involved in discussing the design, delivery and impact of learning with other managers. This alignment issue is a key one as L&TD seeks to build its reputation and impact.”

The survey found that for 46 percent of respondents, the major organizational change affecting learning and talent development in the next five years will be a greater integration between coaching, organizational development, and performance management to drive change. For 37 percent, it will be greater responsibility devolved to line managers.

Other findings from the CIPD survey:

• As a result of the economic downturn, learning and talent development is becoming more focused on value and impact; in other words, doing more with less. “It will be particularly important for professionals to ensure that their L&TD activities are even more closely aligned with business strategy and to be able to assess the return on investment generated.”
• Almost 60 percent of organizations undertake talent management activities. Among these, half rate such activities as “effective” and only 3 percent consider them “very effective.” The three most effective activities to manage talent are coaching (39 percent), in-house development programmes (32 percent), and high-potential development schemes (31 percent).
• The three most common ways to evaluate talent management activities: feedback from line managers (42 percent); rretention of those identified as high-potential (35 percent); and  anecdotal observation of change (35 percent).
• In terms of leadership skills, the main gaps identified by employers were performance management (setting standards for performance and dealing with under-performance) and leading and managing change.
• Internships are growing in popularity, partly because employers want to provide a lifeline for talented young people. The results are encouraging. “The fact that a third of firms report higher productivity as a result of their internships is particularly encouraging, given that many interns are new to the workplace and are still in the process of learning new skills.”

About 86 percent of responding organizations (623) had headquarters in the UK and the remainder (101) were based outside the UK.

photo credit: Limmud

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Has Talent Management Weathered the Economic Storm?

• Cooperative!
• Patient!

It’s not just me making such bold claims. Check out these pages from a booklet (circa 1940) that was intended to assist male bosses in supervising their new female employees at RCA plants. The images come from the collection of the U.S. National Archives Southeast Region.

One piece of advice: Avoid horseplay or “kidding”; she may resent it.

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Women Are Teachable!

Phase at which communication function became involved in the change process:

• Identifying the problem > 8%
• Identifying possible approaches to resolve the issue > 23%
• Implementing the change > 27%
• Selecting the approach to resolve the issue > 11%
• Planning the implementation > 31%

Frankly, I’m surprised that almost one-third of the organizations surveyed involve their comm people only when they are planning how their change project will be implemented. I would have figured that communications is more embedded in change management than that. Could that be why so many change projects rot on the vine?

The Towers Watson survey involved 328 companies and 5 million employees.

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When Do You Call in the Comm People?