Work Matters

Tag: Sleep deprivation

  • More Evidence That Sleep Deprivation Turns Employees Into Assholes (Due to Loss of Self-Control)

    Those of you who have followed this blog, and especially, Good Boss, Bad Boss will know that a pile of evidence already shows that sleep deprivation turns people grumpy, insensitive, and dulls their cognitive abilities — in other words it turns them into dumb assholes.   An interesting newish paper adds to the pile of evidence.

    A pair of interesting studies on sleep deprivation were published in the October issue of the Academy of Management Journal by Michael Christian and Aleksander Ellis.  In both a field study with 171 nurses and a more controlled laboratory study with students, they found that when people suffered sleep deprivation, they suffered both a loss self control (measured with items like "my will power is gone" and reverse-scored "I feel calm and rational") and to feel more hostile (measured with items like "scornful" and "disgusted").  In turn, these foul emotional states led the nurses to engage in more workplace deviance, things falsifying receipts for reimbursement, dragging out work to get overtime, used drugs or booze on the job, said something hurtful to someone at work, and intentionally working slower.  The ugliness observed in the workplace was replicated in a more controlled experiment with 75 students" half the students were kept awake by the experimenters for a night in the lab and the other half arrived from a good night's sleep in the morning.  The results were replicated in the lab study, and the added twist was that the experimenters created a situation where there was an incentive for students to steal an answer sheet for a test they took, and there was more stealing by the sleep deprived students.

    This study is a nice contribution because it uses two methods and shows that lack of self-control and hostility appear to be important reasons that sleep deprivation is so vile.  I always find this kind of research quite disturbing because so many important decisions are made by people who are sleep deprived.  This include thousands of doctors who are serving their residencies in emergency and operating rooms right now as well as the corporate and government officials who made all those major decisions during the financial meltdown in late 2008.

  • Naps Are Wonderful, Especially If You Can Lie Down

    Asleep-on-job-homer2
    I have always been intrigued by research on sleep, sleep deprivation, and naps.  In brief, a pretty big body of research shows that sleep deprivation, make people unhappy, nasty to others, and undermines their creativity and performance.  And a related body of research suggests that even a short nap can help combat the damage caused by sleep deprivation.

    Along these lines,  a new study of naps summarized at BPS compared the performance of students (measured by their ability to identify out-of-pitch tones) who had no nap after lunch, who had a 20 minute nap leaning forward and resting their head on a desk, or had a 20 minute nap lying down.  The researchers found that people who had either kind of nap performed better then those who did not nap, but those who napped lying down had the best performance of all.

    Napping is dangerous in some situations — as Homer demonstrates above. But there are lots of jobs where sleeping in the job is simply viewed as evidence of laziness or lack of motivation.  This new  research suggests that we might change the norms in some workplaces — a nap room sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?

    P.S. The citation is Zhao,
    D., Zhang, Q., Fu, M., Tang, Y., & Zhao, Y. (2010). Effects of
    physical positions on sleep architectures and post-nap functions among
    habitual nappers. Biological
    Psychology, 83     (3), 207-213