Barking Up The Wrong Tree

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Prior research has shown that positive information presented by a third party shields people from the negative consequences of being perceived as self-promoting. But in many contexts, those third parties are intermediaries with a financial interest in the person being promoted rather than neutral parties. In three experimental studies, the authors demonstrate that even when intermediaries are not neutral, they can be helpful for overcoming the self-promotion dilemma—the need to assert one’s competence but not be harmed by the fact that people who self-promote are viewed negatively. The authors find that hiring an agent to sing one’s praises results in more favorable perceptions of the client, which contributes, in turn, to a greater willingness to offer that person assistance. It is also shown that even when the intermediary is physically present and seen to be complicit with the client, the positive effects of having someone else speak on one’s behalf persist.

Source: “Overcoming the Self-Promotion Dilemma: Interpersonal Attraction and Extra Help as a Consequence of Who Sings One’s Praises” from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. 10, 1362-1374 (2006)

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Objective: To investigate the association between managerial leadership and ischaemic heart disease (IHD) among employees.

Methods: Data on 3122 Swedish male employees were drawn from a prospective cohort study (WOLF). Baseline screening was carried out in 1992–1995. Managerial leadership behaviours (consideration for individual employees, provision of clarity in goals and role expectations, supplying information and feedback, ability to carry out changes at work successfully, and promotion of employee participation and control) were rated by subordinates. Records of employee hospital admissions with a diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction or unstable angina and deaths from IHD or cardiac arrest to the end of 2003 were used to ascertain IHD. Cox proportional-hazards analyses were used to calculate hazard ratios for incident IHD per 1 standard deviation increase in standardised leadership score.

Results: 74 incident IHD events occurred during the mean follow-up period of 9.7 years. Higher leadership score was associated with lower IHD risk. The inverse association was stronger the longer the participant had worked in the same workplace (age-adjusted hazard ratio 0.76 (95% CI 0.61 to 0.96) for employment for 1 year, 0.77 (0.61 to 0.97) for 2 years, 0.69 (0.54 to 0.88) for 3 years, and 0.61 (0.47 to 0.80) for 4 years); this association was robust to adjustments for education, social class, income, supervisory status, perceived physical load at work, smoking, physical exercise, BMI, blood pressure, lipids, fibrinogen and diabetes. The dose–response association between perceived leadership behaviours and IHD was also evident in subsidiary analyses with only acute myocardial infarction and cardiac death as the outcome.

Conclusion: If the observed associations were causal then workplace interventions should focus on concrete managerial behaviours in order to prevent IHD in employees.

Source: “Managerial leadership and ischaemic heart disease among employees: the Swedish WOLF study” from Occupational and Environmental Medicine

I found this study in Bob Sutton’s great book Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst.

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Via Developing Intelligence:

…there are some cases where additional working memory has no benefit – or can even be a disadvantage. A great example of this can be found in Decaro et al’s recent article in Cognition, who show that subjects with higher working memory capacity are actually worse at learning complex rules in a categorization task…

And:

Why should this occur? Some theorists have proposed that sustained control or effort can actually impair the acquisition of habits. Decaro et al. propose that the complex categorization task requires exactly this form of habitual learning – which is clearly impaired in subjects who appear to have more controlled resources at their disposal.

There are a few other cases where those with “better” cognitive capacity actually perform worse on specific cognitive tasks. One is the famous matchstick arithmetic problem, where subjects with brain damage frequently outperform healthy subjects. Similarly, some children who suffer from febrile convulsions can actually show superior performance relative to healthy children. Likewise, kids can outperform adults, and chimps may outperform humans at some tests of short-term memory. And rats genetically altered so that they can’t produce new neurons will actually show improved memory in some tasks.

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