Work Matters

Tag: performance

  • Caffeine: It Undermines Performance on Collaborative Tasks for Men, Enhances It For Women

    I can't believe that I missed this study reported by BPS research last January.  Way cool.  It compared the performance of men working in pairs to women working pairs.  The researchers placed them under performance pressure, and varied whether they drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.   The "caffeinated" men performed worse, while the women performed better.  Here is the opening paragraph from BPS, which suggested that the stimulant has these varying effects because, when cranked-up physiologically, people tend towered their most natural and well-rehearsed behavior — which means that men get more aggressive and women become more collaborative:

    If a meeting becomes stressful, does it help, or make things worse, if team members drink lots of coffee? A study by Lindsay St. Claire and colleagues that set out to answer this question has uncovered an unexpected sex difference. For two men collaborating or negotiating under stressful circumstances, caffeine consumption was bad news, undermining their performance and confidence. By contrast, for pairs of women, drinking caffeine often had a beneficial effect on these same factors. The researchers can't be sure, but they think the differential effect of caffeine on men and women may have to do with the fact that women tend to respond to stress in a collaborative, mutually protective style (known as 'tend and befriend') whereas men usually exhibit a fight or flight response.

    Clearly, this is a "more research is needed" situation.  But, if it generalizes to real life, the implication is that, if you are running a meeting and it is attended by all women, give them caffeinated drinks, but if it is all men, or perhaps a blend of men and women, given them the decaf if you want cooperation and better performance.  

    Here is the reference:

    St. Claire, L., Hayward, R., and Rogers, P. (2010). Interactive Effects of Caffeine Consumption and Stressful Circumstances on Components of Stress: Caffeine Makes Men Less, But Women More Effective as Partners Under Stress. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40 (12), 3106-3129 DOI:

  • New Study: When NBA Players Touch Teammates More, They and Their Teams Play Better

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    I've written here before about research on the power of "non-sexual touching," notably evidence that when waitresses touch both male and female customers on the arm or wrist, they tend to be rewarded with bigger tips. Plus I wrote about another study that shows when either women or men are touched lightly on the back by women, they tend to take bigger financial risks.  That second study showed that touching by men had no effect.  Well, there is a new study that shows the power of nonsexual touch among male professional basketball players.  You can read the pre-publication version here.

    It is called : "Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA" and was published by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner in a well-respected peer reviewed journal called Emotion earlier this year (Volume 10, pages 745-749).

    In brief, here is how they set-up the paper; these are opening two paragraphs:

    Some nonhuman primates spend upward of 20% of their waking hours grooming, a behavior primates rely upon to reconcile following conflict, to reward cooperative acts of food sharing, to maintain close proximity with caretakers, and to soothe (de Waal, 1989; Harlow, 1958). In humans, touch may be even more vital to trust, cooperation, and group functioning. Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall, 1996). With brief, 1-second touches to the forearm, strangers can communicate prosocial emotions essential to cooperation within groups—gratitude, sympathy, and love—at rates of accuracy seven times as high as chance (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). Touch also promotes trust, a central component of
    long-term cooperative bonds (Craig, Chen, Bandy, & Reiman, 2000; Sung et al., 2007; Williams & Bargh, 2008).

    Guided by recent analyses of the social functions of touch (Hertenstein, 2002), we tested two hypotheses. First, we expected touch early in the season to predict both individual and team performance later on in the season. Second, we expected that touch would predict improved team performance through enhancing cooperative behaviors between teammates.

    I love that. As I always tell doctoral students, and I emphasized during the years that I edited academic journals.  A research paper is not a murder mystery.  The reader should know what you are studying and why by the end of the second paragraph — this is a nice example.

    Kraus and his colleagues go onto explain their research method a bit later:

    Coding of the tactile communication of 294 players from all 30 National Basketball Association (NBA) teams yielded the data to test our hypotheses. Each team’s tactile behavior was coded during one game played within the first 2 months of the start of the 2008–2009 NBA regular season. Games were coded for physical touch and cooperation by two separate teams of coders.

    They explain:

    We focused our analysis on 12 distinct types of touch that occurred when two or more players were in the midst of celebrating a positive play that helped their team (e.g., making a shot). These celebratory touches included fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.On average, a player touched other teammates (M = 1.80, SD = 2.05) for a little less than 2 seconds during the game, or about one tenth of a second for every minute played.

    They also had coders rate the amount of cooperation by each player studied during that same early season game:

    [t]he following behaviors were considered expressions of cooperation and trust: talking to teammates
    during games, pointing or gesturing to one’s teammates, passing the basketball to a teammate who is less closely defended by the opposing team, helping other teammates on defense, helping other teammates escape defensive pressure (e.g., setting screens), and any other behaviors displaying a reliance on one’s teammates at the expense of one’s individual performance. In contrast, the following behaviors were considered expressions of a lack of cooperation and trust: taking shots when one is closely defended by the opposing team, holding the basketball without passing to teammates, shooting the basketball excessively, and any other behavior displaying reliance primarily on one’s self rather than on one’s teammates.

    Karaus and his coauthors then used these imperfect but intriguing measures of touching and cooperation to predict the subsequent performance of players and their teams later in the season; I won't go into all the analysis they did, but the authors did at least a decent job of ruling out alternative explanations for the link between touching and performance such as players salaries, early season performance, and expert's expectations about the prospects for team performance in 2008-2009.  And they still got some rather amazing findings:

    1. Players who touched their teammates more had higher "Win scores," defined as "a performance measure that accounts for the positive impact a player has on his team’s success (rebounds, points, assists, blocks, steals) while also accounting for the amount of the team’s possessions that player uses (turnovers, shot attempts). "

    2. Teams where players touched teammates more also enjoyed significantly superior team performance than those where players touch teammates less (the authors used a more complicated measure of team performance than win-loss record, it took into account multiple factors like scoring efficiency and assists, and other measures, which correlated .84 with the number of wins that season.

    3. The authors present further analyses suggesting that the increased cooperation among teams where players engage in more "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles" explain why touching is linked to individual and team performance.

    Now, to be clear, as the authors point out, this an imperfect study. They only looked at touching in one game for each team.  So there is plenty to complain about if you want to picky.  But I would add two reminders before we all get too critical.  The first is that there is no reason I can see to expect that the weaknesses in this study would inflate the effects of touching; rather, quite the opposite.  The second is that the touching and cooperation were coded by multiple independent coders who did not know the researchers' hypotheses or the patterns they were looking for, and there was very high agreement (over 80%) among them.

    As the researchers emphasize. more research is needed, but this study at least suggests that it is worth doing.  It is at least strong enough to increase rather decrease my confidence in the the touching-cooperation-team performance link.   And the way it plays out in different settings might require some careful adjustments in research methods and employee behavior.  For example,  basketball is setting where touch is clearly more socially acceptable than in the offices that many of us work in.  So if you and your sales or project team all of a sudden decide to start doing high-fives, group hugs, and chest bumps, it might backfire given local norms.  Perhaps a more reasonable inference is that, given what is socially acceptable where you work, touching on the high side of the observed natural range just might help.

    I would love to hear reader's comments ont his research, as it is quite intriguing to me.

    P.S.  No, this is not an invitation for you creepy guys out there to start grabbing your colleagues and followers in inappropriate ways that make them squirm and make you even more disgusting to be around!

     

  • Why Does Having Multiple Siblings Make You A More Effective Boss?

    I just did a post about a new study that shows, among other things, that the best bosses are more self-aware than the worst.  The press release had one tantalizing finding that intrigued me.

    Here it is:

    People with multiple siblings tend to be better
    leaders.         Executives with more siblings were rated highly
    in their ability to manage people and drive result    s.     "No one says it
    better than the Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who's quoted in USA Today
    saying, 'Having seven siblings [gave me]… a unique background in
    understanding what competition is.'    "

    This finding is interesting but the example from the Bank of America guy bugs me because it places so much emphasis on competition — having multiple siblings also had other advantages as it forces you to learn to cooperate and learn that the world does not swirl around you — plus to return to the strongest finding form this study, siblings usually give each other unvarnished feedback, making it tough for any of us to live in a fool's paradise.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts about siblings, as I found this to be a cool finding, but I bet I missed a lot of reasons why having them may help bosses be more effective.

  • Jeff Pfeffer on the Misguided Lust for Outside CEOs as Saviors

    Jeff Pfeffer has an inspired post over at BNET in which he reviews the evidence — and tells some evidence-based stories — about how companies that become enamored with the magic of an outside CEO who can ride in on his or her white horse and save the day are deluding themselves.  Jeff relies in part on Harvard Business School Professor's Rakesh Khurana's well-crafted Searching for the Corporate Savior.  As Pfeffer notes, and as we discuss in our book Hard Facts, that — although there are very vivid stories of outside saviors, notably Gerstner at IBM, the track record for outsiders is generally weak.  As one example, Boris Groysberg's research on GE executives who became CEOs of other companies found that, on average, their new companies performed well-below the industry average. This effect was especially pronounced when their past experience did not fit those skills required for the new company (This finding was reversed when there was a good fit. Boris reports that a good fit was associated with performing about 15% above the expected industry average, something called "annualized abnormal returns;" while those companies that had a GE CEO who didn't fit performed about 40% below average). 

    The upshot, as Jeff and I suggested in The Knowing-Doing Gap, is that the best CEOs and other bosses have the experience and skill required to run their businesses — and insiders have an upper-hand in the typical case.  Compare Xerox's former CEO and now Chair Anne Mulchay to HP's fired Carly Fiorina. Anne had numerous different jobs at Xerox and had been there more that 20 years. And she is widely praised by insiders as a good listener.  Note that Carly not only had a tendency to become bored with the details of running HP's business, Fortune reported that she had never had any P&L responsibility in prior jobs before becoming HP CEO. Moreover, Carly, although brilliant, was known to be a lousy listener when it came to talking to insiders, and instead preferred  to rely on consultants. When Mark Hurd came in, one of the first things he did was to fire hundreds of them.  During Carly's reign, I once was at Silicon Valley party where I was talking with a disgusted high-ranking HP insider who was complaining that Carly — who is charismatic and inspiring — was perfectly suited to politics because there are no real deliverables, which fit her skills perfectly!  I guess Carly figured that out too, as she is now running for the U.S. Senate in California.