Research Briefs
Workplace 'bad apples' spoil barrels of good employees
Look around any organization and chances are you'll be able to find at least
one person whose negative behavior affects the rest of the
group to varying degrees. So much so, say two UW Business
School researchers, that these "bad apples" are like a virus to their teams, and can upset or spoil the whole apple cart.
A paper authored by William Felps, a doctoral student, and Terence Mitchell, the Edward E. Carlson Distinguished Professor
in Business Administration, examines how, when and why the
behaviors of one negative member can have powerful and often
detrimental influence on teams and groups.
Felps was inspired to investigate the “bad apple" phenomenon
after hearing his wife describe her workplace as cold and
unfriendly. But when a caustic co-worker came down with an
illness that caused him to be absent for several days, the
atmosphere of the office changed dramatically. "People started helping each other, playing classical music on their radios, and
going out for drinks after work," Felps says. “But when he
returned to the office, things returned to the unpleasant
way they were.
"My wife hadn't noticed this employee as being
a very important person in the office before he came down
with this illness but, upon observing the social atmosphere
when he was gone, she came to believe that he had a profound
and negative impact."
To investigate the phenomenon, Felps and Mitchell analyzed
two dozen published studies that focused on how teams and
groups of employees interact, and specifically how having
bad teammates can destroy a good team.
The authors define negative people as those who don't do
their fair share of the work, who are chronically unhappy
and emotionally unstable, or who bully or attack others.
They found that a single "toxic" or negative team member can be the catalyst for downward spirals in organizations.
In a follow-up study, the researchers found the vast majority
of the people they surveyed could identify at least one "bad apple" that had produced organizational dysfunction.
They reviewed a variety of working environments in which
tasks and assignments were performed by small groups of employees
whose jobs were interdependent or required a great deal of
interaction with one another. They specifically studied smaller
groups because those typically require more interaction among
members and generally are less tolerant of negative behaviors.
Members of smaller groups also are more likely to respond
to or speak out about a group member's negative behavior.
In one study of about 50 manufacturing teams, for instance,
they found that teams that had a member who was disagreeable
or irresponsible were much more likely to have conflict,
have poor communication within the team and refuse to cooperate
with one another. Consequently, the teams performed poorly.
"Most organizations do not have very effective ways to handle
the problem," says Mitchell. "This is especially true when the problem employee has longevity, experience or
power. Companies need to move quickly to deal with such problems
because the negativity of just one individual is pervasive
and destructive and can spread quickly."
The study, written about widely in the mainstream press,
was published in the journal Research in Organizational Behavior.
Virtual
experiences can cause embellished, false memories
The next time you're in the market for a new camera or
other high-tech gadget, it might be best to read about
the product's
capabilities in a brochure rather than taking it for a
test-run in an interactive, computer-generated virtual
world.
According
to new research by Ann Schlosser, an associate professor
of marketing, Web sites offering object interactivity may
improve vivid mental images compared to those with simple
static pictures and text, but those virtual experiences
can lead to the creation of fabricated recollections that
pose
as memories – commonly referred to by psychologists as
false positives.
The study showed that virtual experiences may help improve
true memories but actually lead most people to think a
product could do more than it was capable of.
Companies that offer interactive demonstrations to consumers
could ultimately suffer from this kind of marketing, Schlosser
said, because consumers who discover that the product does
not have attributes generated through false memories are
likely to feel misled by the company and be less inclined
to buy it.
The study appears in the Journal of Consumer Research.
What makes employees voluntarily leave – or keep – their
jobs?
Employers would be better at keeping workers if they focused
on why their employees want to stay rather than what kinds
of things make them quit, according to a study out of the
UW Business School.
The research team was led by recent UW doctoral student
Wendy Harman, now an assistant professor at Truman State
University,
and UW researchers Terence Mitchell, the Edward E. Carlson
Distinguished Professor in Business Administration, and Thomas
Lee, the Hughes M. Blake Professor of Management. The team
reviewed 15 years of research on employee job satisfaction
and voluntary turnover, attempting to demonstrate not only
why employees leave jobs, but also why they stay.
They developed two new theories. The "unfolding model" explains why employees quit. The "job embeddedness" theory tells why workers stay. Understanding both of these theories, they say,
could help employers keep their best employees.
The unfolding model describes different psychological paths
people follow when they decide to leave an organization.
Faced with circumstances or "shocks," such as a fight with one's boss or an unanticipated job offer, an employee is
forced to decide to stay or leave. Turnover decisions,
say Mitchell and Lee, are influenced by comparisons between
the
investments made in their job or organization, the rewards
they receive, the quality of alternatives and the costs
associated with working for a particular organization –
and all of these
comparisons change over time.
Job embeddeddness describes a web of forces that cause
one to feel he or she would not leave a job. The critical
components
to job embeddeddness include the extent to which people
are linked with other people or to activities, the extent
to
which their jobs and communities fit with other aspects
of their lives, and the ease with which their respective
links
can be broken, or what they would sacrifice if they left.
"The reasons we keep a job are not necessarily the opposite
of why we leave," says Lee. "We may stay at a job we dislike because we are linked with others – we feel a
sense of belonging to a group that depends on us and we'd
have to sacrifice things that are important to us should
we move, such as an office with windows or living in a
nice neighborhood. Or we feel as though we fit there or
in our
community."
Organizational leaders should understand that why employees
quit often has nothing to do with being unhappy about the
job and that helping build a sense of community among its
employees can prevent them from quitting, the researchers
say.
The paper appears the journal Current Directions in Psychological
Science. UW doctoral students William Felps and Bradley Owens
also are co-authors. |
