Drive – the secret of motivation?

I saw the video, then read the book. Drive by Daniel Pink is fascinating.
He reports numerous studies showing that altruistic behaviour can be tainted by financial incentives and suggests that financial incentives only work for certain kinds of work and that even then over the long run they don’t – remember Herzberg’s 2-factor theory?
He suggests that you can be a Type I or a Type X Continue reading »

Hitting the right note

Charlie Taylor, the government’s behaviour czar, suggested not long ago that teachers needed to be  more authoritative in the classroom. One of the things he suggested for women teachers is that they should have training programmes to help them vary the tone and  pitch of their voices, to make it lower for example, to sound … Continue reading »

Disfluency helps you to remember

Researchers at Princeton University found that people remember things better when it’s printed in smaller and less legible type. This counter-intuitive finding has implications for anyone presenting the written word.
Daniel Oppenheimer and his colleagues who carried out the research believe that easy to read typefaces enable you to skim the text without necessarily taking it in whereas harder-to-read text slows you down and makes you read more carefully. Continue reading »

Leadership starts at school

If you are a parent or a primary school teacher you probably knew that.

Now researchers at the University of Glasgow have assessed late primary and young secondary school children carrying out various tasks including building a tower.

They found that extraversion, one of the Big 5 personality factors, had the best correlation with leadership but they believed effective attachment was also important as well as aspects of narcissism. Continue reading »

Golden Skirts don’t necessarily add Midas touch

David Cameron has been taking advice about Norway’s 40% quota of women on boards as the plan is to get the UK up to 25% by 2015. Cameron says there is overwhelming evidence that having women on boards is good for business. Unfortunately researchers at the Ross School at the University of Michigan found that having the 40% quota negatively affected companies. Continue reading »

Feedback & Women’s Team Performance

Receiving feedback on how individuals in a group are performing on can reduce your cognitive ability.
Researchers ranked performances on tasks and then shared that information with the group. After the feedback some people’s problem-solving ability declined significantly and that was particularly true for women. Continue reading »

Female Managers more critical of Organisations

according to Roffey Park’s Annual Management Agenda report. Female managers are more critical of their bosses, less impressed by their boards, and see more conflict in the workplace than men. It seems that female managers have higher standards and expect promises to be kept and people to be honest at work. Of course it could be … Continue reading »

My most read posts on Leadership & Management in 2011

As last year the competition is really hot out there with some great writers and experts but here are the figures from WordPress showing which of my posts you read the most. My readers come mainly from the UK, USA, and Canada, followed by India, Oceania and Brazil. In 5th spot was: Most people prefer male bosses. Despite all … Continue reading »