Saturday, October 27, 2012

Looking a Leader, Becoming a Leader: Assertiveness versus Deference

The third presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney had a one-on-one format that was in part a dialogue of the two, in part each of them addressing the camera and the moderator. In a dialogue format they get a chance to show how they address each other. Now, if you saw the debate, can you recall whether they were assertive in their style or whether you heard clauses that appeared to hedge their position or make disclaimers? Probably you remember an assertive style throughout, which is the style a politician who wants to be elected wants to cultivate. It is also the style that many leaders choose. Assertiveness is associated with self-confidence, which can make others confident in that person (or so it is thought). It also maintains an air of status and high position in a hierarchy. This is how we expect leaders in government and business to behave.

If so, is that how you should behave in order to become a leader? That is a trickier question. For one thing, people who are trying to advance up a career ladder may find it unwise to behave assertively toward their managers. It is widely thought to be bad idea, though the evidence of what would happen if you did so is not so rich. That's because people avoid assertiveness when interacting upwards in the hierarchy - they prefer to be a little deferential - and maybe we can't blame them for not running that experiment on themselves.. But what about the choice of assertiveness or deference in peer interactions? There one might see more of a battle for superiority through showing assertiveness, at least if we think of human workplaces as roughly akin to chimpanzee tribes with their dominance contests. But what a drag on productivity and strain on work relations that would be.

I can imagine workplaces that descend into dominance contests given the right (wrong?) kind of circumstances. But research by Alison Fragale and colleagues shows that the normal pattern is actually the opposite of this expectation: when interacting with peers in the workplace, people are especially careful to show deference in their statements. That is because peers have a greater need to signal friendly, non-threatening intentions to each other than individuals who interact up or down the hierarchy. Fragale and colleagues were able to show this through analysis of email logs in two studies, which was a clever design because people do tend to think a little longer before hitting “send” than they do before engaging vocal cords, so email communications are well-calibrated for tone as well as content.

I thought there was an interesting message in this research because it does suggest that an ability to get along and smooth social interactions is important in a career-oriented workplace where individuals want to get ahead. It is not just about sounding assertive and looking “leaderly.” And there is one detail about this research that I found particularly delightful: One of the studies used email records from the West Power Trading division of Enron; not an organization known for its warm and fuzzy organizational culture!

Monday, October 15, 2012

Matching: A Nobel Prize, and Some Evidence from Networks






Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Zynga’s Falling Shares, and the Fall of Entrepreneurship as Internet Firms Grow (Old)

We have just been treated to news on how many publicly listed Internet firms that gave stock or stock options to their employees have seen major declines in the value of their stock. Famous firms like Zynga and Facebook have been hit, as well as some less well-known ones. The immediate concern for these firms is that they are losing some of their employees, who have seen the big stock payoffs they anticipated (and briefly had) disappear. In fact, this has not happened yet, at least on a large scale, but executives worry that employees might leave once the job market gives them better outside options.

The successful Internet firms were built on entrepreneurship and have thrived on quick adaptation and exploitation of business opportunities, and these may be necessities rather than just virtues in such a fast-moving industry. The longer term worry is that it is not clear that this entrepreneurial spirit can be maintained as these firms grow and age. First, the most entrepreneurial employees may find that they prefer to start their own business, or even join another startup, rather than to work in a growing and increasingly bureaucratic firm. As star employees they have probably been given larger managerial responsibilities, but not every entrepreneur wants to become a manager. Second, even if they stay, they may find that it is harder to drive through new initiatives in a larger organization with more complex procedures and more boxes to tick before anything new can happen. They may stay, and may try to find and exploit new opportunities, but they are wrapped inside a structure that makes it harder to be timely to the market.

All this sounds very reasonable, but actually the fall of entrepreneurship is not as inevitable in larger and older firms as it seems. Aleksandra Kacperczyk recently published an article in Administrative Science Quarterly on development of new business opportunities inside firms, or intrapreneurship, finding that while employees of large and old firms were less likely to leave in order to start a new business, they were more likely to create business opportunities inside their own firm. This may sound surprising from the description of large and old firms as more bureaucratic, and to some extent it is. But larger firms also have more resources to put behind new business generation (would you rather have your business be backed by Google or someone else?). Many older firms have become pretty experienced at what they are doing, and good at it. So the conventional wisdom that not much entrepreneurship happens inside the larger and older firms needs a second look. There is evidence that seems to disagree.

Ovide, Shira and Scott Thurm. 2012. Silicon Valley’s Stock Funk. Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2012.