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Work Disputes Less Troubling When They Involve the Job Itself
We all have colleagues that we simply don’t like. Those personal frictions color our attitudes throughout the day and even after work. But if a run-in with a co-worker involves a specific work-related dispute, the tensions tend to abate rather quickly, a new study shows. A research team led by Laurenz Meier, an industrial/organizational psychologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, examined how people’s reported feelings of anger varied from day to day. Meier and her colleagues asked 131 participants to keep diaries about their moods before and after work over a two-week period.
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Collaboration Can Breed Overconfidence
Teamwork isn’t always a reliable approach to strategic planning, problem solving, or simple execution of tasks.
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Under Stress, We Ignore the Negative Possibilities
When people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides, studies show..
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Tapping Leaders for a Crisis: Are Women Better At Fixing the Problems?
By the time Marissa Mayer took over a struggling Yahoo! and Meg Whitman rushed into aid a fading Hewlett-Packard, the term glass cliff was well-ensconced in the businesswoman’s lexicon. A steady stream of psychological research was showing that women are indeed more likely to be tapped for corporate leadership positions during times of crisis, when the risk of failure is at its highest. The widespread assumption is that feminine leadership traits, such as being understanding and tactful, work better under such circumstances.
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Social Status Woes: Facial Structure Predicts Strategy for Getting to the Top
Whether you’re low on the totem pole at a new firm or a raking in a piddling salary in a dead-end job, the thought of climbing the social status ladder is intimidating. It often seems like clawing -- rather than climbing -- might be the most effective way to get the social status boost that comes with a promotion offer or salary hike. Oddly enough, for a particular subset of men with greater facial width-to-height ratios (FWHR) -- a physical sign of high testosterone levels -- aggressive behavior might actually be a go-to strategy for getting what they want.
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A Friendly Face Might Mask Ill Intent
Oxytocin, sometimes called the “trust hormone” might actually inhibit our skill in detecting hidden intentions in others’ faces, a study suggests.
