He takes us back to the work of Harlow (more famous for his surrogate monkey mother experiments), McGregor‘s “Theory X, theory Y”, and Type A/B theory.

He reports numerous studies showing that altruistic behaviour cane 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 asks why people contribute to Wikipedia and devote hours to work for which they receive no financial recompense. It’s not always about the money.

In fact he believes that it’s more about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

He suggests that you can be a Type I or a Type X which he describes as:

Type I behavior: A way of thinking and an approach to life built around intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivators. It is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Type X behavior: Behavior that is fuelled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones and that concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which that activity leads.

If you want to know which you are, go to his web-site and complete a free self-assessment questionnaire.

And if you haven’t seen the RSAnimate on Youtube it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=u6XAPnuFjJc

The survey found that the three most commonly used learning models are all more than 30 years old.

49% of respondents used the Belbin Team roles questionnaire (1981); 46% used Honey & Mumford’s Learning Style questionnaire (1970) – and let’s not forget David Kolb’s original work on this; and 43% used the MBTI (1962).

The CIPD report suggests these are “too familiar” for today’s business challenges (not sure if they just mean “old hat” and if they still work why not use them?)

John McGurk, the CIPD’s L&TD advisor, said that we should be using newer behavioural science insights such as “nudges” and heuristics along with new ideas from neuroscience. Certainly neuroscience is this year’s hot topic. I’ve already heard seminars on this at the recent Association for Business Psychology conference and the upcoming Assocation for Coaching conference in Edinburgh also features neuroscience as a theme.

There is at least one consultancy offering neuro-leadership training. It seems to be the next step after emotional intelligence and some would argue that neuroscience explains or underpins some of the EI ideas.

Apart from the change in the report title there also seems to be lots of management-speak in it eg “resource light, challenge rich” presumably means doing more with less, and L&D professionals as “chief curiosity officers”?

When I wrote about training in February, I asked if it had evolved. This research suggests it hasn’t but should.

As  a business psychologist I can’t disagree with the suggestion that we should always be looking for better ways to do things including learning. But it’s not always necessary to throw out the baby with the bath water.

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 more authoritative.

Currently most teachers are only taught to project their voices and speak clearly.

They could also adopt more confident postures as they can give way their nervousness by fidgeting and other non-verbal signals. When teachers are tense it can result in them speaking in a higher-pitched voice which the children pick up on and  exploit with bad behaviour.

Research in other walks of life shows that women’s voices have lowered in pitch since the 1940s and this is due to social conditioning. Women with lower pitched voices are considered more authoritative. Margaret Thatcher is a good example of someone who was coached and developed her “intensive care voice” which was a far cry from the high-pitched “Thatcher the milk snatcher” voice before she became Prime Minister.

It seems women are criticised more because of their voices including accents. According to linguistics professor Deborah Cameron, women with accents are judged on their relative femininity and sexual availability – particularly if they have strong cockney and scouse accents. Men are not judged in the same way. Which is possibly why there are so many women with Scottish accents in the media. They sound neutral and authoritative.

Back in the mid-90s researchers at Kent State University, Ohio, found that you could tell who was the dominant person in a conversation by measuring the pitch of the voice. People adapt their speech depending on who they are talking to; changing their accent, raising and lowering the pitch, and changing the speed.

Measuring these fluctuations, particularly in the low-frequency bands below middle C, shows which person is modifying their speech patters to match the other and being unconsciously deferential.

Knowing this is one thing but training people is less easy as competence and confidence are reflected in your voice unconsciously. However learning to hold a good posture, how to breathe properly and using visualisation techniques can help you inject enthusiasm and confidence into your speech.

I have a colleague, Tim Lambert, who was trained as an actor and he is great at helping people develop a more confident speaking and self-presentation style. Look him up at http://www.kay-lambertassociates.co.uk/

This counter-intuitive finding has implications for anyone presenting the written word.

Students were given material to read printed in either a grey 12 point Comic Sans or Bodoni font and a 16 pony Arial font (Arial is considered one of the easiest to read).

They recalled 14% more facts from the document written in the harder to read font. In a semester long experiment students presented with slides and handouts with less legible typefaces performed better on tests than students presented with more legible typefaces.

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. But you will also feel less confident as you read the difficult typeface so you will concentrate harder and process the information more deeply. These factors help to improve your recall.

However the implications are very interesting. To help people to retain information from text books you might have to print each chapter in a different font so readers don’t become acclimatised to one style. Using unfamiliar fonts like Monotype Corsiva, which is considered very hard-to-read might be a step too far but you could use different colours or contrasts or sizes which people can’t adjust to.

For all PowerPoint users who’ve been told to keep it simple and clear the message is that hard-to-read cluttered slides probably work better at assisting recall. Of course using a blackboard or flip chart (especially with my writing) should also improve recall.

There are a couple of provisos here. First you don’t want to make the material so hard to read that you frustrate people and they give up. Secondly the subjects in these experiments were all intelligent and motivated to learn. Thirdly if the reading were optional people wouldn’t necessarily have the motivation to finish reading.

Source:  HBR March 2012

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

Now researchers Moustaka and  Bushnell 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 important as well.

There were also aspects of narcissistic  performance in the team tasks eg “I am very good at making other people believe what I want them to believe”. This supports the view that people born since 1982 are more narcissistic than previous generations.

Typically research into effective leaders identifies personality traits such as extraversion, conscientiousness, and non-neuroticism as being important. There is also evidence that a percentage of leaders display “dark side “ behaviours including narcissism.

Source: The Psychologist Vol 25 No 3 March 2012 & others

Someone has even started a 30% club to improve on that figure.

So the general impression is that this is a good thing. Cameron says there is overwhelming evidence that having women on boards is good for business.

The government has also said that if companies won’t do it voluntarily the government might have to impose a quota.

That’s what happened in Norway after the 2003 legislation failed to achieve its target – moving from 9% to 40% – by 2005. So on January 1st 2006 publicly listed companies were given two years to comply or be dissolved.

So is there “overwhelming evidence” that it’s a good thing? Unfortunately researchers at the Ross School at the University of Michigan found that having the 40% quota negatively affected companies. They also believe the same thing would happen in the USA and the UK as they have similar systems of governance. Amy Dittmar, associate professor of finance, says “boards are chosen in order to increase shareholder wealth. Placing restrictions on the composition of boards will reduce value”.

First the stock price dropped by almost 3% following the introduction of the new law and 5% for those companies with no women on the board at the time. A measure of the firm’s corporate governance used to determine a company’s value, Tobin’s Q ratio, dropped 18% where companies had to increase the number of women by 10% or more.

One of the researchers, assistant professor of finance Kenneth Ahern, said that their findings support the view that board structure affects value. “Firms that were required to make the most drastic changes to their boards also suffered the largest negative returns. …constraining the selection of board members has a large negative impact on value”

Ahern and colleague Amy Dittmar point out that this is not because of the gender of the new board members but because of their lack of experience and young age. The constraint imposed by the 40% quota led firms to recruit women board members that were younger and with different career experiences. Dittmar says “when firms were free to choose directors before the rule they tended to choose women who were similar to men directors”. Recent research suggests women perform less well than men in competitive situations so could that have a bearing on it as well?

With a large demand and a small supply firms were forced to select directors they wouldn’t otherwise have chosen. And one newspaper report said that one women had ended up on 14 different boards.

Perhaps this research should give everyone a pause for thought. What’s good for diversity is not necessarily good for the company’s performance.  I’m sure women want to be in top jobs on merit and with more women than men graduating you might think it’s only a matter of time before we see more of them up there and the number of women on boards has increased lately in the UK.

However the number of women in senior management positions seems to have dropped – to around 20% globally, according to the Grant Thornton International Business Report. And in privately held businesses the number with no women at all in senior management has increased to 38%. Recent UK research shows that women managers are more critical of  organisations so does that influence women in deciding whether or not to go for promotion?

Whatever the reason with fewer women in senior management how will they provide succession at board level?

And should we really be worrying about gender imbalance. Don’t shareholders want the best person for the job irrespective of gender?

FYI the country with the most women in senior management positions is Thailand (which also has most female CEOs with 30%), followed by Georgia, Russia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Not what you might have expected? But probably no surprise to find India, Japan and the UAE have less than 10% of women in senior management.

The topics for these articles were:

• How to write training materials (March 1998) by Eddie Davis
• A process for selecting training methods (December 1998) by Clive Shepherd
• On-the-job Training (September 1997) by Mike Cannell
• Emotional Intelligence: the new way forward (July 1999) an interview with Daniel Goleman
• Running a successful learning centre (Jan/Feb 1999) by Karen Velasco
• Herzberg – still a key to understanding motivation (July/August 1996) by Donald Cameron
• Training and maintaining the virtual team (March 1999) by Shirley Pickering
• Being appraised (May 1995) by Trevor Bentley
• Influencing Skills (Jan/Feb 1996)  by Nick Heap

So has anything really changed over the last decade?

The article on writing training packages would stand up today in it’s general advice except that it doesn’t mention all the things we now take for granted. And the big difference is the internet. Creating e-books and PDF files or creating training packages for webinars or other interactive tools wasn’t a consideration in this article.

However in the second article. published the same year,we have a specialist in the use of IT and he produces cost comparisons between web-based, PC based, workbooks with video and audio support. and on-the-job and classroom instruction. So it seems that the use of technology was still considered a specialist area at the time.

The third article on on-the-job  (OTJ) training was written against a background of businesses cutting costs and reducing off the job training. The IPD (as the CIPD was then called) had published a report encouraging more OTJ training and this article was written by the author of that report.

The article on Emotional Intelligence (EI) is an interview with Daniel Goleman shortly after he published his second book “Working with Emotional Intelligence”. It’s basically a critique of traditional training methods but Goleman also concedes that EI is within the domain of personal or interpersonal skills. He argues that EI learning needs lots of repetition and practising models over several months otherwise it’s like “learning to play the piano in one lesson”. This is an interesting piece historically as Goleman talks about his collaboration with Richard Boyatzis and their work for the HAY group. Did we realise just how big the EI industry would get?

The fifth article on running learning centres is a good overview and a reminder of how they could and did contribute to employee development. I’ve seen learning centres in large companies but also seen them run down on cost grounds,  so that they become just drop-in centres where you can go on-line but without any personal. How many companies still provide learning centres?

The fifth article is about Herzberg’s two factor theory of motivation. The author is particularly keen to help managers understand the theory as he believes it helps them understand the links between loyalty and motivation. Do managers still learn about Herzberg (or Maslow)? What do managers and trainers understand about motivation?

The sixth article about training virtual teams is probably more relevant today with more globalisation. The author emphasises the need for soft skills as well as technical skills and recommends that training should begin in a traditional way and using psychometrics to help team members understand each other better. That’s certainly the approach I have used with virtual teams using MBTI Step 2 as pre-work. One thing the article doesn’t cover is cultural differences and that can be an interesting challenge!

Being appraised is what it says, a guide for people being appraised. and is a welcome change from the usual guides for managers and emphasises that appraisal should be for your benefit as well as the organisation. Still relevant today.

The last article is about influencing skills using a diagnostic model based on open systems theory. It covers interventions and transitions as well as contracting and I found it interesting and well worth a re-read.Whether organisations would invest in a 4-day skills course is a different matter in the current economic climate.

Overall an interesting dip into my archives and I could definitely still use some of the information and ideas. Technology has obviously moved on and the current economic situation has some influence although times were hard in the 90s too.

Receiving feedback on how individuals in a group are performing on can reduce your cognitive ability.

That’s according to researchers at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute who used MRI technology to study how the brain was processing information about the group processes and how it effected cognitive capacity.

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.

The researchers think that subtle social signals in group settings affect cognitive functioning or, as the Daily Mail put it: “being in a group lowers your intelligence especially if you’re a women”.

This is interesting because not long ago I posted on how adding women to your group raised its collective IQ. This was attributed to women having better social skills, or more social sensitivity (similar to emotional intelligence). Teams displaying social sensitivity would be more open to feedback and constructive criticism.

I wonder if in this experiment the sharing of feedback introduced an element of competition rather than cooperation and raised stress levels which impact on problem-solving ability. Other research has found that men are more competitive than women on the whole and this gender competition gap could explain why in this experiment giving feedback was not  an advantage for women and of course for the team as a whole.

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 that as most top managers are men they are happy with the way things are – although that will change as more women fill senior and board level posts.

Previous research has found that most employees prefer male managers, even women, but also that many companies turn to women when the company is in crisis.

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 the posts I’ve written about getting women on board!

In 4th spot, but with the most comments, was: It doesn’t pay to be too nice This was number 1 by a big margin in 2010 so it’s obviously still struck a chord with you all.

In 3rd spot was: Is social media the key to small business marketing? Seen by many as the answer to their marketing problems but it won’t completely replace traditional methods.

In 2nd spot was: No-one ones to be rated as average This was prompted by the poor reactions people have to performance appraisal systems and my experience in implementing them.

And in top spot was: Erotic capital, boobs and Botox. Making the best of yourself Carol Hakim’s work has obviously struck a chord – or perhaps readers wanted a bit of spice to brighten up their day? A page 3 of the management blog!

So thanks for reading my posts and I hope you have a prosperous 2012

You’ll find posts on work psychology and other business-related psychology topics at EI4U