In this issue:
Mixing Your Teams Up is Key to Creativity!
If you keep team membership constant, people in the team are going to grow familiar, they'll feel more comfortable, they won't be afraid to propose ideas, and morale will rise – surely all this is a guaranteed recipe for creativity? Not according to Charlan Nemeth and Margaret Ormiston, who've shown that, while stable teams are judged more friendly and comfortable than newly-formed teams, the cost for failing to mix up team membership is a loss of creativity.
One hundred and sixty-four undergrads were arranged into 41 teams of 4. One member in each team just kept notes, so these were really three-person teams. First, the teams were given 15 minutes to come up with ways to boost tourism in the San Francisco Bay area or ways to decrease traffic congestion.
Next, half the teams kept the same members, while the other half of the teams were entirely mixed up, so no two people who'd worked together in the first session were placed together in the second session. The stable teams and the mixed-up teams then worked together for 15 minutes on whichever of the two problems they hadn't tackled in the first session.
Afterwards, members of the stable teams reported feeling their groups were more creative, friendlier and more comfortable than did the members of the newly-formed teams. But crucially, it was the newly-formed teams who generated more ideas (an average of 28 ideas versus 23), and according to two independent judges their ideas were also better quality and more diverse.
“The current study underscores the theory that 'change' and the introduction of new perspectives are more important than comfort, belonging and friendliness for idea generation and creativity”, the researchers said. Managers should avoid the temptation to retain individuals in groups that have previously worked well together, they added. “Rather, teaming individuals who have not previously worked together may better benefit the creative process”.
Nemeth, C.J. & Ormiston, M. (2007). Creative idea generation: Harmony versus stimulation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 524-535.
Status Anxiety at Work
People who compare themselves against their junior colleagues tend to be more content at work than those who compare themselves against their seniors, researchers have found.
Measuring ourselves up against those around us is a fundamental aspect of human nature, providing another source of information to fuel our boundless self curiosity. But according to Douglas Brown and colleagues, little or no research has previously been conducted on the role of these social comparisons in the workplace.
Nine-hundred and ninety-one university graduates, from teachers to salespeople, completed an online survey about their tendency to compare their fortunes with those above or below them at work. Several factors were associated with a person’s tendency to compare themselves against their superiors. Participants who lacked autonomy at work, who were unclear about their responsibilities, and/or who were uncertain about their own status and abilities, were more likely to compare themselves to those above them at work. This in turn was associated with job dissatisfaction, and a tendency to look elsewhere for work.
Of course, the link between lack of job autonomy, job ambiguity and job dissatisfaction are well established by previous research, but Douglas Brown’s team said they are the first to highlight the important mediating role social comparison plays in all this.
Only one factor – uncertainty about one’s own status and abilities – was associated with making more frequent comparisons against one’s junior colleagues, a somewhat surprising finding considering the same factor was also associated making more upward comparisons. In turn, comparing oneself with more junior colleagues was associated with more job satisfaction.
While acknowledging their cross-sectional design meant the causal role of social comparisons at work has not been established, the researchers concluded “these findings have important implications for understanding how social comparisons work in an organisational context, and how job attitudes form and job search behaviour is initiated”.
Brown, D.J., Ferris, D.L., Heller, D. & Keeping, L.M. (2006). Antecedents and consequences of the frequency of upward and downward social comparisons at work. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 102, 59-75.
Understanding Why People Go On the Sick
You’re a company boss and you want to reduce illegitimate sickness leave among your employees. What do you do? Introduce schemes to increase job satisfaction among your staff? It sounds sensible – the problem is, time and again research has only found a weak link between measures of job satisfaction and employee sick leave. The same is true for measures of job involvement and organisational commitment. But now Jurgen Wegge and colleagues think they’ve found the reason for this. The key, they say, is looking at how these factors interact. Lack of involvement in one’s job only matters when it’s combined with low job satisfaction.
Wegge’s team administered questionnaires to 436 employees of a large German civil service organisation. On their own, neither job satisfaction (measured by agreement with statements like “In general I am satisfied with my job”), nor job involvement (measured by agreement with statements like “Most of my life goals have to do with my work”) was related to the amount of sick leave an employee had taken over the last year. However, low job satisfaction and low job involvement combined were strongly related to the amount of sick leave taken.
The researchers said their finding has practical implications. “…it can be argued that establishing high job satisfaction (e.g. by job-redesign strategies, promotions, increases of salary) among employees will pay off as this prevents the transformation of low job involvement into high absenteeism”.
Wegge, J., Schmidt, K-H., Parkes, C. & van Dick, R. (2006). ‘Taking a sickie’: Job satisfaction and job involvement as interactive predictors of absenteeism in a public organisation. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology, In Press. DOI: 10.1348/096317906X99371.
Free Succession Planning Slide Show - Mini Me
Thanks to all of you that came to the CIPD Exhibition in September and visited the stand with our partner Novations.
For those of you that requested it you should have been sent our succession planning slide show as presented by Paul Terry. If you would like a copy please do email us its FREE!!
Thanks to Penny Mathews for her wonderful photographs.
Copyright Penny Mathews 2007
See you next time!
