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Study: Left-handed CEOs are more innovative

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 02:32:28 +0000

Study: Left-handed CEOs are more innovative Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 04/29/2025 - 22:32

In This Story

Long Chen

June Woo Park

Q: What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in common (besides the obvious)?
A: All three belong to a community comprising about 10% of the population—the community of the left-handed.

And they’re far from the only business luminaries who are members. Steve Forbes, Oprah Winfrey and Lou Gerstner (of IBM fame) are left-handed, as were John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Ratan Tata.

Of course, this could be a mere coincidence—but perhaps not. The popular belief that left-handers think more creatively—and hence may enjoy an innovative edge in business—has been supported by cognitive neuroscience research, which shows that the left hand is controlled by the brain’s right hemisphere, a region closely associated with creative thinking. However, conflicting findings and limited research evidence prevent broad conclusions about the correlation between creativity and handedness, let alone its potential implications for business leadership.

A forthcoming research publication by Long Chen and June Woo Park, two accounting professors at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, constitutes the first rigorous scholarly investigation into whether—and how—handedness plays a role in business innovation.

June Woo Park and Long Chen

The paper was co-authored by Albert Tsang of Southern University of Science and Technology and Xiaofang Xu of Beijing Technology and Business University.

The researchers searched Google for photos and videos of S&P 500 CEOs engaged in activities like writing, throwing, drawing, and eating to determine their dominant hand, if wasn’t already disclosed in published sources. “We looked at pictures of them on the golf course to see how they held their clubs,” Park explains. “We also noted which wrist they wore their watch on; left-handed people often wear it on the right.” When in doubt, they followed up with calls or emails to the respective companies. All in all, they were able to identify the handedness of 1,008 CEOs across 472 companies: 91.4 percent were right-handed, 7.9 percent left-handed, and 0.7 percent mixed.

The researchers then looked at the numbers of patents and citations received by the firms from 1992 to 2015. They controlled for firm and industry characteristics, as well as other personal traits known to affect CEO innovativeness (such as age, education, risk preference shaped by experience, birth order, and founder status).

In addition, they performed several follow-up tests, including one focused on a narrow subset of firms that unexpectedly switched from a right-handed CEO to a left-handed one due to unforeseeable circumstances such as death or illness.

Every variation of the study produced essentially the same result: Firms led by left-handed CEOs demonstrate significantly higher innovative output. The differences were qualitative as well as quantitative. Patents under left-handed leadership were more likely to represent something new under the sun, rather than a spin-off from established technology.

The researchers hypothesized that the left-handers’ creative orientation would impact the way they ran their firms, including hiring decisions. Indeed, they found that companies applied for more H-1B and STEM visas when left-handers were at the helm. This emphasis on talent acquisition was not only a key indicator of innovation commitment, but may have also contributed to the firms’ creative advantage.

“We find that left-handed CEOs are more likely to hire immigrant inventors in STEM fields, and are also more likely to be inventors themselves,” Chen says. “These findings strengthen our argument by highlighting specific ways in which left-handed CEOs may directly enhance firm innovation.”

Still, piling up patents doesn’t automatically produce outcomes that will make customers and shareholders happy. Ultimately, firm performance is what matters in evaluating business success. As additional analyses in the study suggest, firms led by left-handers had higher return on assets and stronger buy-and-hold returns than peers with a right-handed leader.

“They outperformed their counterparts,” Park summarizes. “Investors are drawn to innovative firms, and left-handedness is one of the factors investors could use in their stock-picking.”

Yet innovative success is complex and multifaceted. Left-handedness is only one potentially meaningful trait among many—a lot more are yet to be explored.

“Our results are based on a large sample. But investors should not assume a CEO that is not left-handed lacks innovative potential,” Chen says.

For their ongoing and future research projects, Chen and Park are looking beyond left-handedness to explore other deeply personal CEO traits that may have business implications.

“We find it fascinating to draw on insights from disciplines outside accounting and finance,” Chen says. “CEO decisions may be shaped by factors like family experiences, genetics, academic background, career paths, and more—really, the full range of experiences that makes them who they are. Understanding that can help market participants better interpret and predict CEOs’ decision-making.”

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The work-from-home blues have a secret source: nostalgia

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:25:23 +0000

The work-from-home blues have a secret source: nostalgia Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 09/19/2024 - 10:25

For at least two years, CEOs have been trying to bring employees back to the office, citing remote work’s supposed negative effects on productivity, morale, and creative collaboration. Managers, we’re told, are having a hard time monitoring and motivating dispersed teams. But what if bringing employees back to the office won’t put the genie back in the bottle?

Kevin Rockmann, professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, argues that the furor over remote work masks deeper cultural issues at play in many organizations. This cultural malaise has employees pining for an imagined past where they felt grounded and connected with their colleagues. In short, remote workers aren’t unmanageable—they’re suffering from pangs of nostalgia.

Kevin Rockmann

Rockmann’s recently published research paper in Journal of Management (co-authored by Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson University) documents the results of surveys conducted during the height of Covid (September 2020). The thrice-daily surveys were delivered over a two-week period to 110 full-time professionals. Respondents were asked to report on their feelings of nostalgia, as well as emotional coping strategies, task performance, and counterproductive work behaviors (e.g. withholding support from colleagues and stealing time from their employer).

The overwhelming majority of participants (98 out of 110) admitted to experiencing nostalgia for life before Covid. And these feelings could have either positive or negative outcomes, depending on how the respondents dealt with them. Rockmann points to two pathways that showed up across the surveys as a whole, which he labels “approach” and “avoid.”

One way respondents reacted to nostalgia was to use so-called “cognitive change” strategies, which help regulate emotions through shifts in perspective. For example, someone feeling sad about being trapped at home during the pandemic could think to themselves, “It could be so much worse. At least I don’t have Covid like so many others.” These strategies seemed to evoke empathetic responses, leading the survey participants to reach out to colleagues to check in or offer assistance.

Equally prevalent in Rockmann’s results, however, was a much darker pathway. Instead of reaching out to others in response to nostalgia, respondents tended to turn inward in an attempt to minimize the emotional discomfort. Psychological researchers call this sort of reaction “attentional deployment.” “It’s a defense mechanism whereby you don’t feel you have the means to really connect with others, so you leverage your attention away from the source of pain,” Rockmann explains. This pathway led to incidents of “acting out”—the above-mentioned counterproductive work behaviors.

Rockmann says these Covid-era findings remain relevant for at least two reasons. First, survey respondents’ written comments sound like they could have been written yesterday, rather than four years ago. Common nostalgic themes revolved around co-workers, the structure of co-located work, etc.—all oft-heard plaints of remote workers in 2024. Second, the normalization of remote work well predated Covid—as Rockmann’s past research on the topic has documented. Covid accelerated an inevitable transition that was already well underway. Therefore, workers of a certain age would likely be feeling some nostalgia, even if there had never been a Covid pandemic.

“While return-to-office may make sense for some companies, I would emphasize that nostalgia cannot be fixed that way. Nostalgia is about longing for the past—or, more accurately, longing for a return to how we remember the past, usually through rose-colored lenses.”

How can organizations help employees conquer nostalgia, or at least encourage healthier ways of coping with nostalgia? The obvious answer might be what CEOs are trying to do—end remote work altogether. “While return-to-office may make sense for some companies, I would emphasize that nostalgia cannot be fixed that way. Nostalgia is about longing for the past—or, more accurately, longing for a return to how we remember the past, usually through rose-colored lenses,” Rockmann says.

Any political demagogue will tell you that people are most susceptible to nostalgia when they feel isolated and afraid. The fact that nostalgia is so widespread in today’s workplace would seem to confirm Rockmann’s past research showing how organizational cultures fail to promote positive relationships among employees.

Combating the nostalgia epidemic will require a cultural reset for many organizations. “Managers will need to engage much more closely with employees, asking sensitive questions (e.g. “What do you miss about working here before Covid?”) and co-creating individualized solutions to help employees fully adjust to the major changes in their working environment,” Rockmann says.

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Kevin Rockmann

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When expressing gratitude, it’s all in the timing

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 14:42:32 +0000

When expressing gratitude, it’s all in the timing Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 09/04/2024 - 10:42

Thanks so much for reading this article all the way to the end! No, that wasn’t an editorial error. It’s a savvy managerial motivation strategy lurking somewhere in almost every employee’s inbox or Slack channel.

Mandy O’Neill, an associate professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, has discovered a potential new addition to the annals of managerial motivation techniques: anticipatory gratitude.

Mandy O'Neill

We all know that thanking people for a job well-done, or a much-needed favor, is an effective form of positive reinforcement. Psychology researchers classify gratitude as a “socially engaging emotion” that promotes prosocial behavior and strong interpersonal relationships. In the course of exploring how employees cope with high-stress or frustrating work situations, O’Neill and her co-author Hooria Jazaieri of Santa Clara University discovered an interesting wrinkle in what we thought we knew about this popular emotion: Gratitude can be used as a form of emotion regulation and, when expressed ahead of time instead of after the fact, can produce that extra “oomph” when it comes to employee resilience and persistence.

Their paper is in press at Academy of Management Discoveries.

The researchers stumbled upon the power of anticipatory gratitude while researching organizational culture and change within the intensive care units of a leading U.S. hospital. It’s difficult to imagine a more gut-wrenching, high-stakes work environment: The ICU units in question receive what one employee called “the sickest of the sickest” from throughout the region. To decompress and process their emotions after especially difficult shifts, employees routinely emailed the group using an internal listserv. O’Neill and Jazaieri were forwarded four years’ worth of messages, which they analyzed with the help of direct experience gained from extensive site visits to the hospital.

In addition to writing heartfelt outpourings of post facto gratitude, ICU colleagues thanked one another for rising to occasions that had not yet occurred. Some of these emails were pre-emptively apologetic (“I may have to take a day or two off from time to time…Thank you for your patience and understanding”). Others seemed to function as pep talks, inspiring teams to keep up the good work (“Thank you…for bringing your a-game to work every day”).

As O’Neill describes it, “The ‘thanks in advance’ phenomenon involves an awareness that you’re going to be annoyed or upset by what I’m asking you to do, so I infuse you with the positivity of that feeling you get when someone expresses gratitude to you. Think about it as an emotional buffer. It helps with the inevitable distress of the task that’s going to happen later. It makes those negative emotions less salient, less powerful, and less insidious.”

The researchers launched several follow-up studies to learn more about the effects of anticipatory gratitude. They chose a context—Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) gig-work platform—that was in many ways the polar opposite of the ICU. “You go from the ultimate interdependent work environment to the ultimate transactional work environment,” O’Neill explains.

“The ‘thanks in advance’ phenomenon involves an awareness that you’re going to be annoyed or upset by what I’m asking you to do, so I infuse you with the positivity of that feeling you get when someone expresses gratitude to you. Think about it as an emotional buffer."

The MTurk workers were assigned to solve extremely difficult puzzles. After completing the paid task, they received negative feedback about their performance and were offered the opportunity to do additional puzzles without being paid. MTurkers who had seen a message of gratitude before the main task voluntarily took on significantly more unpaid work than those who received a similar message after the paid exercise.

“What’s so compelling and surprising for us is that anyone who does work with experienced online gig worker populations knows it’s nearly impossible to induce workers to go beyond their assignment, even by 30 extra seconds, which is about what we were asking for,” O’Neill says.

Questionnaires administered during the study revealed that anticipatory gratitude enhanced feelings of communal self-worth, which contributed to the participant’s resilience, that is, their ability to “bounce back” after the initial failure. In a third study, the researchers found anticipatory gratitude was better than a related positive affect—anticipatory hope—at motivating MTurkers to persevere at (i.e., spend more time on) a different set of challenging puzzles.

At this point, the potential for managerial manipulation should be crystal clear. Indeed, it was evident even to some of the gig workers, who wrote private messages such as, “It may be partial trickery for academic purposes but it was still nice to hear.”

"Gratitude can’t be a substitute for fair pay and decent work conditions...But our findings are clear: anticipatory gratitude works; it is effective.”

For O’Neill, these findings show that gratitude is more complicated than we previously thought. “This paper is one of the very few to show that gratitude isn’t always authentic and prosocial. It can be used strategically, especially for managers,” she says.

Sincerity and strategy are not mutually exclusive. Empathic managers whose feelings of gratitude are so strong that they have to be expressed beforehand could still be taking advantage of the “thanks in advance” phenomenon.

“In all organizations, you need people to stick with difficult or thankless or boring tasks. The challenge, of course, is how to do so ethically. Gratitude can’t be a substitute for fair pay and decent work conditions, for example. But our findings are clear: anticipatory gratitude works; it is effective,” O’Neill says.

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In This Story

Olivia (Mandy) O'Neill

Women’s empowerment in the workplace starts with smarter networking

Colleen Rich — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:13:51 +0000

Women’s empowerment in the workplace starts with smarter networking Colleen Rich Mon, 03/11/2024 - 13:13

Women’s History Month offers a chance to examine the gender leadership gap. According to a 2022 World Economic Forum report, just 31% of global leadership roles are held by women.

Sarah Wittman. Photo provided

Networking is one effective way to bridge the gap, but research shows that women are at an unfair disadvantage in this area. Sarah Wittman, an assistant professor of management at Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, unpacks this complex problem and proposes some potential research-based solutions.

Why is it important for women to network as much—and as strategically—as men?

To rise to the top, you have to be known and known of. You have to have social capital—and a social network that makes a difference. Of course, nobody likes to be thought of as “that person”: the person who uses other people for their own advancement. Yet research suggests that in professional networks women are less likely than men to network instrumentally, accumulate instrumental ties and, thus, less likely to have within their networks the powerful people who can help them advance and get things done. Over time, women’s network deficits accumulate: especially in an age of online social media including LinkedIn, if you didn’t connect with colleagues in your last job, you likely aren’t connecting this job. And those people are the ones who know you and could help you land your next job.

What, then, can women do to build useful career networks?

One piece of advice is, of course, to change your mentality—so that networking becomes relationship-building not just contact-accumulation. That fits better with what is expected of women and is less likely to receive backlash. Where networking is “just” relationship-building, it becomes less intimidating and, quite frankly, less grossly utilitarian. Especially when you’re not needing anything now, you can creatively focus on what you might give. Rather than thinking about the resources you might need, think about what resources you might represent for others. The universe repays, and having established contacts when you do need to leverage them is invaluable.

Second, make network-building easy on yourself. Just do it. LinkedIn particularly and other similar online social media are amazing tools because they are both personal and surprisingly impersonal. These days, people link with people they don’t even actually know—but perceive as working in the same industry, or in a relevant function. Linking with those possibly relevant others will not only be low risk (the “no,” if there is one, doesn’t come face-to-face), but where you engage with the platform, the professional content that you produce will allow you and your resources to become known, and known of, across your contacts’ feeds.

It’s easier to start with networks that you legitimately belong to alumni of – your high school, university, or sorority, and people who share some element of your professional past or present (ex- or present colleagues). You never know who is doing what, and how that might be related to your own career.

Unbeknownst to you, you may already have valuable social capital at your fingertips, in so-called “multiplex” ties—ones that can serve multiple ends. Do you know what your neighbors do for work? What about your children’s friends’ parents? Or your spouse’s co-workers’ spouses (or children)? But, again, the more of a decent human being you are in these relationships, the more likely they might be willing to provide professional value as well.

So the networking gap boils down to women being “too nice,” not aggressive enough to put themselves out there?

No! Scholars have written extensively on the so-called “double-bind” for women, especially those in leadership positions. Research shows that—regardless of what they do—they will be judged negatively based on warmth versus competence. Too nice? Not smart, and disrespected. Too strategic? Cold and conniving, and disliked. This goes for networking, too. Women who “reach for the top” in their networking are not seen as team players (violating feminine norms of communalism) and may suffer a status penalty versus women who have less instrumental networks. But women who don’t have those instrumental ties aren’t able to advance.

“Fixing women” is not the answer. In the C-suite, empowering words for women must be matched by action. Senior leaders must be ready to appoint capable and deserving women to positions of organizational relevance.

Closer to home, men who love women and have seen women’s challenges firsthand tend to be some of our biggest allies. CEOs with daughters, for example, are more likely to have women join their boards. Men: Understand that the women whose advancement you empower today will—en masse—be the role models that pave the way for the advancement of your own daughters, nieces, and granddaughters.

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Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:49:21 +0000

Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position Marianne Klinker Wed, 09/27/2023 - 10:49

Online technology has made real-time performance feedback a workplace reality. But a pair of �鶹��Ƶ professors have found out about a major bias in the system.

Online technology is fundamentally reshaping employee evaluations. In the last decade or so, companies such as IBM, Amazon, and General Electric have adopted performance feedback apps that allow employees to "review" one another in real time. These apps take the 360-degree paradigm to its logical extreme by removing temporal, hierarchical, and geographical barriers to feedback.

According to Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, “People are trying to tap into new sources of employee engagement across all management and employment tiers. For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way. So when we merge these trends of social connectedness, instant communication, and use of technology, we come up with this wonderful application.”

As with any breakthrough technology, though, appropriate use of real-time performance feedback depends upon understanding its inherent limitations. After all, increasing the scale and speed of feedback is not guaranteed to erase deep-seated biases based upon gender, race, hierarchical position, etc. In a recent paper for Information Systems Research, Petryk and her ISOM colleague Siddharth Bhattacharya, concentrate on a relatively neglected—but, as it turns out, subtly powerful—category of bias related to how individuals are embedded within the informal (i.e. social) network of the organization.

Mariia Petryk (left) and Siddharth Bhattacharya

Their co-authors were Michael Rivera and Subodha Kumar of Temple University, and Liangfei Qiu of University of Florida.

Working from a unique data-set from technology provider DevelapMe, comprising nearly 4,000 instances of real-time performance feedback spanning five organizations, the researchers mapped the informal networks of each organization. They then compared reviews submitted by employees who were positionally embedded—i.e. those who moved in influential circles, though they may not themselves have been high-ranking—to ones by those who were structurally embedded, meaning they had larger clusters of weak ties.

For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way.

For example, both a C-level executive and their assistant could be considered positionally embedded. A middle manager whose work touches multiple teams would be structurally embedded.

The professors found that positionally embedded employees tended to give higher scores to colleagues, while structurally embedded employees skewed negative in their ratings.

Bhattacharya says, “Informal network bias could be explained as a matter of perspective. From atop the hierarchy, it’s difficult to see how projects came together and who made what happen. Positionally embedded people have a coarse rather than a granular view. Therefore, they may give highly visible individuals more credit than they deserve for collaborative work—for example, they may wrongly assume that a team member chosen to present a project to them was primarily responsible for said project.

By contrast, structurally embedded employees have wider and more diverse networks and thus a much broader base of comparison. This makes them prone to detect and emphasize the flaws of co-workers.”

Organizations using feedback apps such as DevelapMe can usually set limits on the number of anonymous reviews they allow, although the identities of anonymous raters are always visible to HR and senior leadership. The researchers found that anonymity magnified informal network bias for both structurally embedded and positionally embedded employees.

Further, since reviews included both numerical score and explanatory text, the researchers analyzed how informal network bias influenced the wording of reviews. They saw that positionally embedded raters, though more generous with their numerical rating, were relatively neutral and formal in their written feedback. Structurally embedded reviews exhibited the opposite pattern: Comparatively strict in their scoring, but positive and encouraging in their written content. The researchers speculate this points to contrasting motives—constructive vs. motivational—the two groups had for delivering feedback.

Easy ways to counter informal network bias, then, would be for organizations to carefully consider the amount of anonymity to permit, and for them to recommend or even require that each instance of feedback be accompanied by text.

Beyond that, Bhattacharya and Petryk suggest that companies employ a combination of training and technological refinements to help address informal network bias. For example, positionally embedded managers should be reminded to temper their reviews with a bit more objectivity—perhaps peering outside their bubble to get a more complete picture of an employee’s work. Tech providers and consultants could use tools such as social network mapping to help organizations better account for informal network bias in their employee performance data.

Petryk says, “Our data and findings show the mechanisms of how people—not necessarily high-ranking people—can have power over rewards, because at the end of the day the ratings will be factored into a formal evaluation. And bonuses will be distributed on the basis of the evaluation. How that decision is being made can be greatly impacted by the data that we analyze, and that we obtain from this network.”

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What’s worse than a ‘toxic’ workplace? One that gaslights employees

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 19:15:18 +0000

What’s worse than a ‘toxic’ workplace? One that gaslights employees Marianne Klinker Mon, 09/11/2023 - 15:15

When it comes to relationships between co-workers, organizations’ stated priorities must match what’s happening under the hood.

These days, we hear a lot about “toxic bosses,” “toxic companies,” and the like. It’s easy to forget that non-toxicity is not all we want from an employer. If we’re really honest, most of us want to be part of an organization where working relationships are consistently healthy and supportive. Our dream company would also be a place where advancement opportunities were available to all, not only those who regularly have lunch or go golfing with the right people.

It might not shock you to learn that few companies have fully achieved this sort of actively anti-toxic as opposed to superficially non-toxic working culture. Those that have, though, tend to be more resilient when crisis hits, according to Kevin Rockmann, professor of management at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business.

Kevin Rockmann

“If even one person is an isolate, that’s a problem,” Rockmann says. “That’s information you’re not benefiting from…It’s not about everybody being best friends, it’s just about having productive working relationships that are characterized by respect, so that when the [expletive] hits the fan, people are going to step up.”

In a recently published paper for Strategic Organization, Rockmann and co-author Caroline A. Bartel (of University of Texas-Austin) theorize that such working cultures require concerted and sustained attention at all organizational levels—especially the top. Unstinting focus from above spurs the creation of structures and practices for supporting positive interpersonal relationships, which the paper terms “systems for relational advocacy.”

Rockmann’s theory adopts the attention-based view of the firm as an interpretive framework for organizational activity, as opposed to its chief competitor, the resource-based view. While the latter, according to Rockmann, centers on “the resources that an organization has or can access,” the former recognizes that “Resources are important, but it’s really about how we leverage those resources. What are organizational leaders paying attention to?” His paper forms part of a special issue of Strategic Organization devoted to the attention-based view.

Outside of relational advocacy—which relatively few firms actually practice—the paper identifies two main types of relational systems, reflecting different ways senior leaders can manage their attention.

Relational antipathy describes organizations that have made a strategic decision to deprioritize relationship-building among employees. This may be because senior leaders believe that a culture of competition rather than cooperation would be better for their firm, or because the business model is thought to lend itself to more transactional relationships (e.g. gig economy start-ups). In any case, Rockmann emphasizes that relational antipathy can be a workable system, especially when characterized by fairness as opposed to exploitation.

Rockmann reserves his strongest criticism for systems of relational indifference, where lip service may be paid to the importance of positive relationships (“we care about everyone!”), but senior leaders do not allocate the attention needed to create and maintain those relationships long-term.

“I was talking to an HR person at this company, who said, ‘We started this awards program to recognize employees who helped each other out.’ I asked them, ‘That’s great, so how many people are getting awards?’ They said ‘Well, no one’s been getting the awards recently. We keep forgetting to send the announcement out and the rewards behind it are pretty minimal.'”

To Rockmann, this is a quintessential example of the dangers of relational indifference because it shows how espoused good intentions become mere gaslighting without organizational follow-through. “Nobody was told that part of their job evaluation that year was to make sure they do that awards program,” he explains. “What could have been a way to bring people closer together and incentivize stronger relational connections falls by the wayside. And that weakens the organization, because relationships are how we’re going to solve crises.”

Instead of a tightly woven, resilient network of relationships, relationally indifferent organizations are susceptible to cliquishness and a social order split into in-groups and out-groups. As with any laissez-faire system, the concentration of capital—in this case, social capital—is much less democratic. This can torpedo morale throughout the organization, as mutual resentment and incomprehension sets in among outsiders and insiders.

Due to these dynamics, leaders of relationally indifferent organizations cannot necessarily trust what their own employees are telling them. “Typically, what happens is you do a survey and the people that feel like they aren’t going to be listened to don’t fill it out. And so you get results that are positive or very positive, and you think, well, our workplace is great.”

Rockmann therefore advises that leaders should “realize that they are products of the clique-ish system, so they need objective data. Be willing to listen to ombuds or consulting companies who come in to assess your workforce.”

If they find there’s a need to move from relational indifference to relational advocacy, what should leaders pay attention to first? “To me, the lowest-hanging fruit are the job descriptions. Put in the manager’s job description that part of their incentive is how well-connected their people are. Put in the employee's job description that ‘part of your job is helping other people do theirs’.

“A lot of people are not intrinsically motivated to form supportive working relationships,” Rockmann summarizes. “So if they’re not relationally motivated, you have to be explicit.”

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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 �鶹��Ƶ 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 �鶹��Ƶ'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.

Topics

Costello Research Innovation Strategy

ISOM Faculty Research

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In This Story

Pallab Sanyal

Shun Ye

Defuse anger in the workplace with humor, �鶹��Ƶ expert says

Colleen Rich — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:10:05 +0000

Defuse anger in the workplace with humor, �鶹��Ƶ expert says Colleen Rich Fri, 04/28/2023 - 11:10

Whether it is pressing deadlines, overwork, or employees feeling they are not being supported, anger in a work environment can be unavoidable. Over time, the anger and frustration can compound, causing anger to spread through the entire team or organization, creating what �鶹��Ƶ expert Mandy O’Neill calls a “culture of anger.”

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In her research, O’Neill, an associate professor of management at �鶹��Ƶ’s School of Business, found that a culture of anger not only leads to problems for individuals, such as increased alcohol consumption, work-family conflict, and high-risk behaviors, but it also presents problems for teams as a whole.

In a study of a large retail organization, O’Neill found that employee anger stemmed from a culture in which employees did not feel supported by their managers, leading to more employee absences and higher turnover. Additionally, individual high-risk behaviors can lead to a decrease in workplace safety as a whole, including safety violations, accidents, and injuries.

Mandy O'Neill. Photo by Creative Services

Recognizing a culture of anger

O’Neill explains that when dealing with anger in a team environment, whether it’s a workplace, group project, or sports team, it’s important to draw a line between a team experiencing occasional anger and a team defined by a culture of anger.

“All emotions have a social functional purpose,” said O’Neill. “Anger can serve important purposes around, for example, moral outrage against social injustice, or action tendencies that cause a person to rise up against obstacles thrown in their way.”

However, in a culture of anger, “it's not just one incident, one time that made everybody angry. Rather, it's when anger is kind of everybody’s default emotion,” O’Neill said.

Dos and don’ts

O’Neill highlights two common methods of fighting anger that can actually make matters worse. “Emotion suppression, which is essentially to put the lid on an emotion and not let it be expressed, is very destructive,” said O’Neill. “Even if you think you're not expressing [anger], it leaks out in ways that you may not necessarily be aware of or able to control.”

Additionally, O’Neill found that allowing members of a team to vent their anger without restraint can serve to intensify the anger. Paradoxically, venting can reactivate and spread anger rather than resolving or calming the feeling.

So, what can be done to help improve an angry team culture?

Through interviewing emergency responders at fire stations in the southeastern United States, O’Neill found that the most effective teams were those who supplemented feelings of anger with joviality.

“Expression of joviality and humor is a way of channeling anger in ways that actually can promote group bonding,” said O’Neill.

She also found that companionate love, "the connection felt between people whose lives are closely intertwined,” also helps fight anger. Affection and caring, for example, creates a sense of familiarity between members of a team that helps to resolve issues, and can make a jovial culture easier to foster as members of the team know how and when to use humor without going too far.

O’Neill believes that introducing joviality and companionate love to a team can help team members work with anger to turn it into a positive, productive emotion. “Anger paired with positive emotions lends itself to a very different scenario than if you have anger without these emotions,” she said.

O'Neill is actively engaged in organizational research, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods to the study of employees and organizational units. She has worked with organizations across a wide range of industries including health care, technology, emergency services, and retail.

To reach Mandy O’Neill directly, contact her at ooneill@gmu.edu.

For more information, contact Benjamin Kessler at bkessler@gmu.edu.

�鶹��Ƶ �鶹��Ƶ

�鶹��Ƶ is Virginia’s largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., �鶹��Ƶ enrolls nearly 40,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. �鶹��Ƶ has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity, and commitment to accessibility. In 2023, the university launched �鶹��Ƶ Now: Power the Possible, a $1 billion comprehensive campaign to support student success, research, innovation, community, and sustainability. Learn more at www.gmu.edu.

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Olivia (Mandy) O'Neill

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Costello Research Health & Well-being at Work

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