Lower Pitched Voices Viewed as More Competent

Posted on 2012/12/122012/12/13 by Jason Hensel

Finally, something women and men can agree on together–both genders prefer leaders with masculine voices. The research comes from Rindy Anderson (Duke University) and Casey Klofstad (University of Miami), and was published in PLOS ONE.

…the researchers asked people to listen to the phrase “I urge you to vote for me this November” spoken by two voices that differed only in their pitch. They found that both men and women preferred female candidates with masculine voices. Men also preferred men with masculine voices but women did not discriminate between the male voices they heard. According to the authors, their results suggest that the influence of voice pitch on perceptions of leadership capacity is consistent across different domains of leadership and independent of social context.

“We often do not consider how our biology can influence our decision making,” Klofstad said. “The results of this study show that voice pitch–a physiological characteristic–can affect how we select our leaders.”

Why, then, do both genders prefer leaders with masculine voices?

“In the case of women’s voices, this bias could be a consequence of lower-pitched female voices being perceived as more competent, stronger, and more trustworthy,” the authors wrote in the study. “That is, these traits are perceived as positive in the context of leadership and could be the mechanism that leads us to prefer female leaders with lower voices. Additionally, the pitch of the female voice declines over the lifespan. Consequently, selection of female leaders with lower-pitched voices can result in the selection of women who are older, and perhaps more experienced at leading others. Stated differently, men and women may be biased to select older women as leaders, regardless of the type of position in question. In the case of men’s voices, men with lower-pitched voices are larger, stronger, and more aggressive. Again these traits are perceived as positive in the context of leadership, leading us to prefer male leaders with lower voices.”

Knowing this, would you change your vocal pitch to sound more like a leader?

(Story quotes from the Public Library of Science. Image via Flickr: cav… / Creative Commons.)

Send to Kindle

Lucky Number…Four?

Posted on 2012/12/012012/12/02 by Jason Hensel

We’ve been lead to believe for decades that the number of items a mind can cope with before it gets confused is seven. This number comes from a 1956 paper by psychologist George Miller titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” In fact, the Psychological Review named it the most influential paper of all time.

However, Gordon Parker, a University of New South Wales professor of psychiatry, says that Miller is incorrect. Parker says the mind works with four “chunks” of information, rather than seven.

“So to remember a seven numeral phone number, say 6458937, we need to break it into four chunks: 64. 58. 93. 7,” Parker said. “Basically four is the limit to our perception. That’s a big difference for a paper that is one of the most highly referenced psychology articles ever–nearly a 100 percent discrepancy.”

Parker suggests that the original paper’s success stems from “more in its multilayered title and Miller’s evocative use of the word ‘magic’,” than in the science.

Still, the mind’s storage capacity limits are unclear, Parker says.

“There may be no limit in storage capacity per se but only a limit to the duration in which items can remain active in short-term memory,” he said. “Regardless, the consensus now is that humans can best store only four chunks in short-term memory tasks.”

This will come in handy when you’re trying to memorize something. Or maybe it doesn’t matter that much anymore, since we can rely on computers and smart phones to access information quickly.

(Story materials via the University of New South Wales. Image via Open Clip Art Library / artefact.)

Send to Kindle

Why Employee Empowerment is Important in the Workplace

Posted on 2012/11/26 by Jason Hensel

I’ve always said I’m at my most productive and innovative at work when I’m given autonomy. That feeling of empowerment and trust from management motivates me to help the company succeed because it’s all on my shoulders.

Now there is some research from the University of Illinois that shows autonomy plays a major role in increasing “employee commitment to continuous improvement initiatives.”

“Continuous improvement initiatives are typically bundled with employee empowerment techniques,” said Gopesh Anand, a business professor at Illinois. “We always hear, ‘If you empower employees, they will take care of the improvements.’ But what happens repeatedly is that this employee empowerment is management-driven, and it does not work.”

“It’s a paradox–employee empowerment being forced upon employees by management,” said Dilip Chhajed, a business professor at Illinois and director of the technology management program in the College of Business. “What usually ends up happening is that employees feel they are being forced into doing something that they may not even see as being very useful.”

The research offers three points on how to enhance employee commitment to improvement at work.

The day-to-day work environment needs to be perceived by employees as autonomous.
As continuous improvement involves making changes to the very practices that frontline employees use in their day-to-day work, trust in leadership is critical.
A higher degree of trust in leadership further leads to proactive behaviors by frontline employees, encouraging them to use the autonomy in their day-to-day jobs to seek out and make systematic improvements to work practices.

“Many times, employees end up working on continuous improvement projects simply because the CEO is telling them to participate in the initiative,” Anand said. “But they aren’t really sold on this idea of making an effort to improve their workplace and work practices.”

“Workers need to have a sense of control over their work environment,” said Luis Delfin, a graduate student who co-wrote the research. “They need to be able to decide how and what to do in their day-to-day work. And that’s actually what motivates them to improve. Their buy-in becomes even stronger when leadership provides them the support to do this.”

However, employees shouldn’t think of improvements as extra work.

“Employees can’t think of it as, ‘This is something being brought down upon us by upper management,’ ” Anand said. “If they do, it becomes extra work that they’re not compensated for.”

“The big one for employees is, ‘What’s in it for me?’ ” Chhajed said. “Management is trying to make things more efficient, so what does that mean for my job, my work hours? That’s why employees need to trust that management is looking out for their best interests. If they don’t have that trust, then even autonomy is not going to help as much. Trust is huge, because you don’t want the perception that management is coercing employees to do this.”

Also, management shouldn’t be the main instigator of change.

“There should be some top-down direction in terms of where the initiative should go and what are we in business for,” Anand said. “But there needs to be balance between the top-down goals and the bottom-up improvements.

“It’s like building a bridge from both sides,” Delfin said. “Upper management usually has the vision, but at the same time they’re not the experts on how things get done on the ground. So you need to have frontline employees who have some freedom because you are trying to get all of this to meet in the middle. That means that the leaders in management need to act more like coaches, and less like dictators. You need a cooperative environment where leaders are guiding and coaching, and employees are participating.”

Are you given a lot of autonomy at your job? Or does management dictate your every move and decision?

(Story materials from the University of Illinois. Image via Flickr: Ryan / Creative Commons.)

Send to Kindle

Page Views and Comments Motivate Bloggers

Posted on 2012/11/212012/11/21 by Jason Hensel

This blog currently receives 30 page views a month on average. The number of comments is minuscule. It’s safe to say, then, that I write entries for my pure enjoyment and not as a sense of obligation to a huge reader base. That’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy more page views and comments. I really would. When I see my view average go up, I get excited because I believe I’m making connections with people who enjoy reading about things that interest me. This encourages a continuation to write more.

And wouldn’t you know it, there have been studies conducted about blog writing and motivation. According to researchers from Penn State, traffic-measuring and comments are just the things that may give bloggers more motivation to write. Carmen Stavrositu, one of the researchers, says female bloggers enjoy blogging because it makes them feel empowered and part of a community.

“Women who received a high number of site visitors felt a deeper sense of agency about blogging compared to those who received fewer visitors, ultimately leading to a greater sense of influence,” Stavrositu said. “Also, women who received many comments felt more empowered than those who received very few comments, due to a strong perceived sense of community.”

S. Shyam Sundar, who worked with Stavrositu, says that comments indicate connections and page view stats indicate influence.

To test their theory, the researchers surveyed 340 female blog writers about their blog activities and feelings of empowerment.

The survey of bloggers, who were drawn at random from a Web directory of blogs written predominantly by women, showed that those who blogged for personal reasons felt a greater sense of community in the blogosphere, whereas bloggers who wrote about external subjects believed said they felt that blogging made them competent, assertive and confident.

In a follow-up experiment, researchers asked 106 female college students to create a blog and write over two days about a personal topic — for instance, personal relationships or their health. Another group of 108 participants were asked to write about external issues that were important to them, such as racism, science, social issues and politics.

The researchers then manipulated site metrics indicating the number of visitors to the blog to test how they affected the bloggers’ sense of agency. The site metrics were tweaked to indicate that some blogs received 50 visitors each day, while others received just 20.

To test how a sense of community affected the attitudes of bloggers, the researchers added more comments to some blogs, while leaving only a few comments on others. Even though the content of the comments did not differ, bloggers who received a greater number of comments felt a higher sense of community.

“Those women who write mostly about their personal lives and daily experiences become more empowered by developing a strong sense of community,” Stavrositu said. “That is, they connect with others who share similar experiences and feel like they are a part of the community.”

Stavrositu and Sundar chose female blog writers because they create more more blogs than men and continued them longer.

“In general, it seems that, unlike in a lot of technology areas, women have widely adopted blogging and social networks,” Sundar said. “However, there’s no reason to think that these results would be restricted just to women.”

If you write blog entries, and money isn’t a reason, what keeps you writing?

(Story materials from Penn State. Image via Flickr: Adam Tinworth / Creative Commons.)

Send to Kindle

Micro-Management is My Kryptonite

Posted on 2012/11/202012/11/19 by Jason Hensel

Inc.com recently ran a story titled “10 Leadership Practices to Stop Today,” by Paul Spiegelman. It’s a great piece, and I agree with all 10 recommendations, especially No. 1: “Out: Micro-management, or the need to control every aspect of your company. In: Empowerment, the ability to give your people some rope–even rope to make mistakes without blame.”

Perhaps it’s because I’m a writer, someone who makes his scratch in the creative arts, but micro-management is the Kryptonite to my creativity and productivity. Whenever I’m being micro-managed, I feel less empowered, less trusted, and more like a slave.

In fact, researchers from Harvard Business School and Rice University did a study last year and found that “workers perform just fine when managers don’t keep close tabs on them, and that workers are more likely to be fearful of experimenting when their managers micromanage; as a result, the employees learn less and performance suffers,” as reported by Kimberly Weisul for CBS News.

The struggle for me is knowing how to handle micro-management. Sure, I play along and let managers know everything I’m doing down to the last detail. But I can only allow myself to do that for so long before I become either depressed or angry. Neither of those are good for my health or career.

What does one do? How have you handled micro-managing in your career? How can a lower-level employee convince leadership that a lack of autonomy is stifling creativity, productivity, and a healthy mental state?

(Image via Flickr: ZaCky / Creative Commons)

Send to Kindle

Women Identified As More Depressed Than Men

Posted on 2012/11/19 by Jason Hensel

A couple of weeks ago, Christa and I were chatting about how a majority of anti-depression medicine providers market themselves to women. We thought it was interesting that every commercial you see on TV features a depressed woman. It’s one of those things you probably don’t think about until it’s pointed out to you. Then you see it all the time.

And now I’ve seen a new study that fits with this observance. According to research from Viren Swami at the University of Westminster in the U.K., correctly identifying signs of depression depends on the gender of the identifier and the depressed person.

Swami presented study participants with one of two fictitious subjects, Kate and Jack. Both were described in non-clinical terms as having identical symptoms of major depression, the only difference being their suggested gender. For example, a sample of the test reads, “For the past two weeks, Kate/Jack has been feeling really down. S/he wakes up in the morning with a flat, heavy feeling that stick with her/him all day. S/he isn’t enjoying things the way s/he normally would. S/he finds it hard to concentrate on anything.” Respondents were asked to identify whether the individual described suffered a mental health disorder, and how likely they would be to recommend seeking professional help to the subject in the test.

Men and women were equally likely to classify Kate as having a mental health disorder, but men were less likely than women to indicate that Jack suffered from depression. Men were also more likely to recommend that Kate seek professional help than women were, but both men and women were equally likely to make this suggestion for Jack. Respondents, particularly men, rated Kate’s case as significantly more distressing, difficult to treat, and deserving of sympathy than they did Jack’s case.

The researcher also found that individual attitudes towards depression were associated with skepticism about psychiatry and anti-scientific attitudes. According to Swami, their results are significant for initiatives aimed at enhancing mental health literacy, which should consider the impact of gender stereotypes and attitudes towards help-seeking behaviors.

Have you noticed a bias toward women and depression in ads? Do you think women suffer more than men from depression?

(Quotes from the Public Library of Science. Image via Flickr: Luis Sarabia / Creative Commons.)

Send to Kindle

Intelligent People Drink More?

Posted on 2012/11/092012/11/09 by Christa Schelter

Do you think people who drink more alcohol would be more or less intelligent — generally speaking? Recent research cited in a Discovery News article caught my eye with the title “Why Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol.” Any correlation of brain chemistry or intelligence and alcohol has been a concern ever since I was told: “Alcohol kills brain cells.” Data from the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States found that more intelligent individuals (IQ measured in childhood) ended up drinking alcohol more frequently and in greater quantities than “duller” children. From the study:

“Very dull” Add Health respondents (with childhood IQ < 75) engage in binge drinking less than once a year. In sharp contrast, “very bright” Add Health respondents (with childhood IQ > 125) engage in binge drinking roughly once every other month.

The association between childhood intelligence and adult frequency of getting drunk is equally clear and monotonic. . . . “Very dull” Add Health respondents almost never get drunk, whereas “very bright” Add Health respondents get drunk once every other month or so.

Both studies followed children and found that the more intelligent individuals drank more as adults. Theories abound as to what these findings mean. Is it..Evolution? Economics? Social forces? An intersection of one or a few factors?

What conclusions can you draw?

(Story materials [study citation] found in Psychology Today. Image via Flickr: Wayan Vota / Creative Commons.)

Send to Kindle

Why Ask Why?

Posted on 2012/11/052012/11/06 by Jason Hensel

I once had a boss that said we should always ask why three times. I never took up the recommendation to her face, but the advice has stuck with me for many years.

When you ask why questions, as opposed to how questions, you open people up to a more abstract way of thinking.

“‘Why’ questions make people think more in terms of the big picture, more in terms of intentions and goals, whereas more concrete ‘how’ questions are focused on something very specific, something right in front of you, basically,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Jesse Preston.

Preston, along with two other researchers, recently conducted a study to test abstract thinking’s influence on political beliefs. They used the Islamic community center and mosque in New York because it’s a strong polarizing issue.

The first study showed that after viewing a plane fly into the World Trade Center, conservatives and liberals held opposing views of the mosque at ground zero.

The second study, however, had participants answer three why questions or three how questions in a row on an unrelated subject before offering their views about the mosque.

Preston says the why questions (not the how questions) brought liberals and conservatives closer together.

“We observed that liberals and conservatives became more moderate in their attitudes,” Preston said. “After this very brief task that just put them in this abstract mindset, they were more willing to consider the point of view of the opposition.

“We tend to think that liberals and conservatives are on opposite sides of the spectrum from each other and there’s no way we can get them to compromise, but this suggests that we can find ways of compromising,” Preston continued. “It doesn’t mean people are going to completely change their attitudes, because these are based on pervasive beliefs and world views. But it does mean that you can get people to come together on issues where it’s really important or perhaps where compromise is necessary.”

Asking why questions isn’t limited to politics. It can be used in the workplace, too, granted that you have a supervisor who is open to other viewpoints. The best ones are open and will have good answers for all three of your why questions.

And if they don’t, continue asking why.

BONUS: Here’s a clip from Lucky Louie showing that by asking why one can really get to the true reason behind something.

(Story quotes from the University of Illinois. Image via Flickr: Brendio / Creative Commons.)

Send to Kindle

Hearing With Your Hands

Posted on 2012/10/292012/10/31 by Jason Hensel

There are people who can’t talk unless they’re gesturing. But maybe their hand movements are doing more than helping them speak. Perhaps they’re helping them hear.

According to researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, what you hear may depend on what your hands are doing.

“Language is processed mainly in the left hemisphere, and some have suggested that this is because the left hemisphere specializes in analyzing very rapidly changing sounds,” said the study’s senior investigator, Peter E. Turkeltaub, M.D., PhD, a neurologist in the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery.

The researchers used a simple noise and indication test on 24 volunteers for the study. They had to press a button when they heard background sounds, which were quick or slow.

“We asked the subjects to respond to sounds hidden in background noise,” Turkeltaub said. “Each subject was told to use his or her right hand to respond during the first 20 sounds, then the left hand for the next 20 second, then right, then left, and so on.”

People who used their right hand heard the rapidly changing sounds more often than when using their left hand. It was vice versa for the slowly changing sounds.

“Since the left hemisphere controls the right hand and vice versa, these results demonstrate that the two hemispheres specialize in different kinds of sounds—the left hemisphere likes rapidly changing sounds, such as consonants, and the right hemisphere likes slowly changing sounds, such as syllables or intonation,” Turkeltaub said. “These results also demonstrate the interaction between motor systems and perception. It’s really pretty amazing. Imagine you’re waving an American flag while listening to one of the presidential candidates. The speech will actually sound slightly different to you depending on whether the flag is in your left hand or your right hand.”

I think this research is especially interesting for meeting designers and professional speakers. Imagine the ways you could control what your audience hears by simply having attendees hold something. It would be a fun experiment to present two exact sessions (word for word) to different audiences, one that holds something in the left hand and one in the right hand. Then let’s see if session comprehension and scores are different. Anyone willing to try it out?

(Story quotes from Georgetown University. Image via Flickr: Malthe Sigurdsson / Creative Commons)

Send to Kindle

How Men and Women Evaluate Glass Cliff Positions

Posted on 2012/10/282012/10/30 by Jason Hensel

Yahoo! hired Marissa Mayer as president and CEO this past summer. Before accepting the position, she was an executive at Google, a very successful company. Yahoo!, though, is experiencing some business pains. Did Mayer take the job because it would be challenging, or did Yahoo! seek her out because feminine leadership traits–such as tact and understanding–are preferred when a company is facing a crisis?

Psychological Science published a new study that answers that question and shows that it’s not the crisis positions that attract women leaders, it’s the social resources attached to the job positions.

The Association for Psychological Science has the rest of the story:

Psychological scientists Floor Rink and Janka Stoker (University of Groningen) and Michelle Ryan (University of Groningen and the University of Exeter) investigated how men and women evaluate these “glass-cliff” positions. The researchers speculated that, all else being equal, women wouldn’t be more attracted to a precarious position, but they would be more sensitive to certain aspects of the position.

Rink and her colleagues hypothesized that, following gender norms, women would be more attentive to communal aspects of precarious leadership roles, focusing on social resources, while men would attend to aspects related to authority and hierarchy, focusing on financial resources.

In the first study, Rink and colleagues asked Dutch business students to imagine working for a large company in financial crisis. They were offered a top leadership position at the hypothetical company, where they would be in charge of resolving the crisis. All of the students read a passage containing information about the social and financial resources that came with the position. One group read that they had employee support (social resources) and financial investment from management (financial resources), a second group read that they had financial investment but no employee support, and a third group read that they had employee support but no financial investment.

Comparing across genders, women generally seemed less likely than men to evaluate any of the positions positively. Yet comparing across the three scenarios, women were particularly less likely to accept the position that lacked social resources, while men were less inclined to accept the position that lacked financial resources, confirming the researchers’ hypotheses.

A second study suggests these findings may have been driven by internalized gender stereotypes about leadership. The researchers found that women viewed employee acceptance as a factor that would lead to influence, while men viewed influence as an attribute that would lead to employee acceptance.

“Since the discovery of the glass cliff, researchers and practitioners have questioned whether women are simply more likely than men to accept precarious leadership positions, thereby–albeit unintentionally–putting themselves at a disadvantage in their careers,” the researchers note. “Our findings make it clear that the glass cliff cannot be attributed to women’s failure to recognize the precariousness of glass-cliff positions.”

Taken together, the findings from the two studies suggest that societal expectations about gender and leadership play a key role in driving women’s and men’s evaluations of glass cliff positions.

The researchers argue that these findings may be useful for organizations searching for new leaders to guide them through crises.

“In order to get the right person for the right job, it is probably important for organizations to recognize which aspects of a crisis they want their future leader to solve and to give him or her the appropriate means with which to do so,” says Rink.

Send to Kindle

How to Ensure Your Baby is CEO Material

Posted on 2012/10/272012/10/29 by Jason Hensel

If I was to have a baby, I’d want the child to grow up to be a musician or a writer or anything in the arts. Sports would be cool, too. But some of you may want your child to grow up to be a CEO. If so, then make sure the baby is born in the spring.

In a study from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, babies born in the summer are less likely to be CEOs.

“Our findings indicate that summer babies underperform in the ranks of CEOs as a result of the ‘birth-date effect,’ a phenomenon resulting from the way children are grouped by age in school,” said Sauder Finance Professor Maurice Levi, co-author of the study to appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters.

Using hockey as an example, Malcolm Gladwell addressed this same phenomenon in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, summarizing that the reason players are successful is due to the month in which they were born.

For the U.S., school admissions are open between September and January. The study’s researchers discovered that of the 375 CEOs sampled from S&P 500 companies, the ones born between June and July were the youngest in their class. Those born in March and April were the oldest.

“Older children within the same grade tend to do better than the youngest, who are less intellectually developed,” Levi said. “Early success is often rewarded with leadership roles and enriched learning opportunities, leading to future advantages that are magnified throughout life.

“Our study adds to the growing evidence that the way our education system groups students by age impacts their lifelong success,” Levi continued. “We could be excluding some of the business world’s best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early.”

(Story quotes from the University of British Columbia. Image via Flickr: opensourceway / Creative Commons)

Send to Kindle

How Negative News Affects Women

Posted on 2012/10/24 by Jason Hensel

Women and men react differently when it comes to bad news. According to a study from the University of Montreal at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital, women’s sensitivity to stressful situations increases after being subjected to negative news. The same negative news doesn’t affect men. The women, though, were better able to recollect what they had learn more so than the men.

“It’s difficult to avoid the news, considering the multitude of news sources out there,” said lead author Marie-France Marin. “And what if all that news was bad for us? It certainly looks like that could be the case.”

I’ll let the University of Montreal news center tell you the rest of the story:

The researchers asked 60 people divided into four groups to read actual news stories. In order to determine their stress levels, the researchers took samples of the participants’ saliva and analyzed them for a hormone called cortisol. Higher levels of this bodily chemical indicate higher levels of stress. A group of men and a group of women read “neutral” news stories, about subjects such as the opening of a new park or the premiere of a new film, while the another two gender segregated groups read negative stories, about events such as murders or accidents. Saliva samples were taken again in order to determine the effect of these news stories. “When our brain perceives a threatening situation, our bodies begin to produce stress hormones that enter the brain and may modulate memories of stressful or negative events,” explained Sonia Lupien, Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress and a professor at the university’s Department of Psychiatry. “This led us to believe that reading a negative news story should provoke the reader’s stress reaction.”

The participants were then confronted with a series of standardized tasks involving memory and intellect that enable researchers to evaluate and compare how people react to stressful situations. A final round of samples was then taken to determine the effects of this experience. Finally, the next day, the participants were called back to talk about what they had read. The researchers were surprised by what they found. “Although the news stories alone did not increase stress levels, they did make the women more reactive, affecting their physiological responses to later stressful situations,” Marin explained. The researchers discovered this when they saw that the level of cortisol in the women who have read the negative news was higher after the “stress” part of the experiment compared to the women who have read the neutral news. “Moreover, the women were able to remember more of the details of the negative stories. It is interesting to note that we did not observe this phenomenon amongst the male participants.”

The researchers believe that evolutionary factors may be at play, noting that other scientists have considered whether an emphasis on the survival of offspring may have influenced the evolution of the female stress system, leading women to be more empathetic. This theory would explain why women could be more susceptible to indirect threats. “More studies should be undertaken to better understand how gender, generational differences and other socio-cultural factors affect our experience, as individuals, of the negative information that perpetually surrounds us,” Marin said.

(Image via Flickr: Phoney Nickle / Creative Commons)

Send to Kindle