Many Execs Talk a Good Social Responsibility Game but Fail to Walk the Walk

Why You Should Be Kind to Medical Staff

By Daniel Butcher

While many people worldwide experience frustration with their healthcare system, taking it out on individual healthcare workers can backfire. Rudeness toward medical staff can lead to more delays and even errors.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that being rude to doctors, nurses, and other medical staff can hurt their job performance because it consumes valuable cognitive resources. In short, rudeness creates a huge mental distraction.

“Our theory was that when you experience rudeness, you’re distracted because of it, and you’re not even aware that you’re distracted. But you are distracted, and as a result, you can’t pick up on a lot of the social signals that are being communicated by other people, and interactions with bosses, team members, and clients or patients are harmed by that,” Bamberger said. “We actually demonstrated that in a field experiment using medical simulations; we brought in doctors to a medical simulation center where they were working on mannequins.

“Simulation centers are increasingly used to train doctors; they have all the equipment there: They can intubate, they can see X-rays, they kind diagnose and treat maladies,” he said. “So we look at the way they interact with each other; how do they try and transmit information to each other? How do they share tasks?”

Bamberger and colleagues recorded the medical team processes while working at the medical simulation center.

“We look at their diagnostic performance, their treatment performance, and their general patient management in an intensive-care context,” Bamberger said. “First of all, what we find is that individuals who are experiencing rudeness have significantly poorer performance than those who don’t.

“It’s interesting that this rudeness experience at the start of the day has lingering effects throughout the day; it doesn’t just go away after an hour or two,” he said. “The poor diagnostic and treatment performance stays on throughout each of the scenarios that they have to deal with over the course of the day, even after lunch, so they just come in at eight in the morning, they finish at four in the afternoon, and this stuff—being distracted by bosses’ or patients’ rude behavior while they are unconsciously trying to assess any possible threat—goes on all through the afternoon.

“The differences in staff performance pre- and post-rudeness are clear.”

Mentors Influence How Much College Grads Drink

By Daniel Butcher

The quality of mentorship can be a key factor in early-career professionals surviving and thriving at an organization. And more specifically, senior executives’ alcohol use, especially while entertaining clients, has a big influence on junior employees’ drinking habits.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that for at least the three years after graduation, alcohol consumption levels typically don’t change much. But there’s a caveat.

“We do find a couple of factors that are instrumental in getting alcohol consumption to move, which gives managers some clues as to what might be done to speed up that maturing out process for junior employees and hopefully reduce the risk of managers having to deal with people with problem drinking,” Bamberger said. “This is a soft side of the socialization process when these young adults come into the organization, so some of the most instrumental factors have to do with mentoring programs, veteran employees who are there to support the newcomers.

“You have to be a little bit careful there, because we did another study in China, where we found that, for employees in sales and sales-support occupations who are social connectors, post-college alcohol consumption moves in the wrong direction,” he said. “Many young people coming into these positions within three months after graduation show patterns of hazardous drinking.

“We demonstrate that, in such cases, their ‘mentors’ are their clients who end up ‘teaching’ them how critical it is to drink in order to build trust and close the deal—now, this may be more of a sales-department client-related phenomenon, and it may be more intense in China than other parts of the world.”

In China, it’s well-known that salespeople can’t close a deal unless they show their clients a good time the night before a meeting. Such occasions often include heavy drinking. However, Bamberger notes that many companies based in many countries worldwide, including across Europe and the United States, have salespeople and clients who also have behavioral patterns like that.

“The socialization [process] is [influenced by] mentoring by certain individuals, which can be problematic,” Bamberger said. “But our study with a college students in the U.S. finds that where you have that kind of support, particularly with newcomers mentored by veterans with low or moderate levels of drinking, you can expedite the pace at which young adults mature out of this pattern of a high level of alcohol consumption.

“There are other factors and things that managers can do [to help expedite that maturation process] as well, some of them having less of an effect, including a review of alcohol-drinking policies as part of the orientation program—our findings are that that doesn’t do very much,” he said.

“Managers do need to look at what else worked to reduce problem drinking among their younger team members.”

Sharing Info, Workloads, Positive Feeback Boosts Productivity

By Daniel Butcher

Leaders who can install processes for effective, timely information-sharing, fair workload distribution, and civil communication—including positive feedback—foster the best collaboration and productivity among team members.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that lackluster productivity is often a result of poor information-sharing and workload-sharing behaviors.

“Team processes are hard; people can’t always pick up the signals that they need to,” Bamberger said. “For example, if they have a piece of information that someone else needs, when should they pass it on to this other person? A nurse has a test result; when should she pass it on to the to the team leader or attending physician?

“If she passes it on too early, she’s going to disrupt what they’re doing, which clearly affects their performance, but if she passes it on too late, it could be deadly, so timing and synchrony of such tasks are crucial,” he said.

Incivility and rudeness also undermine productivity, while civility and kindness tend to boost it.

“In research on medical teams, we demonstrated that when people experience gratitude at work it can often, but not always, have beneficial implications,” Bamberger said. “A lot depends on the source of the gratitude and the nature of the task at hand.

“In one experiment, we had the three teams: a control condition, one that viewed a video before they started the day from a senior neonatologist talking about how grateful he is to everybody in the field for doing the wonderful work they do to save these babies, which had nothing in terms of a productivity boost, but then we had a third group where we had a mother of a preemie talk about how grateful she was to the medical team that saved her child, and that had massive positive effects,” he said.

“We demonstrate what that does to the team interaction through the implications based on a theory in cognitive science called [Fredrickson’s]broaden-and-build, which explains how positive emotions have beneficial effects on people’s ability to be flexible in their thinking, to absorb more information, and things like that.”

Bamberger and colleagues also demonstrate that the effects were much stronger when a mother expressed gratitude than when a senior colleague did.

Sharing positive customer feedback

Business leaders and managers can leverage these insights to improve their effectiveness.

“They can demonstrate gratitude themselves; it does make intuitive sense that if managers and leaders behave with civility and politeness, then that may set an example for the rank-and-file employees to do the same, but they can encourage customers and clients or patients to say ‘thank you’ directly,” Bamberger said. “If you like the way a flight attendant treated you on a flight, you’re supposed to write the company, but what if you were actually put in direct contact with the flight attendant and were able to express the gratitude directly?

“Our evidence suggests that that’s going to have a much stronger effect than a manager saying, ‘You got three positive letters this week,’” he said. “Setting up systems for customers to directly express positive feedback has the potential to significantly boost employee morale and performance.”

Rudeness Doesn’t Motivate Workers—Quite the Opposite

By Daniel Butcher

Some business leaders and managers resort to barbs or even shouting to motivate staff members, but research shows that a coercive leadership style is counterproductive. In fact, civility leads to improved team cohesion and performance, while rudeness hurts workers’ performance.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that several research papers on the subject explore the implications that emotion-laden events in organizations have on interpersonal relations and team dynamics. In a nutshell, rudeness creates a huge distraction that undermines productivity.

“For example, why can’t you text and drive at the same time? When you’re driving, the reason you don’t text is because—aside from it being against the law—you’re distracted,” Bamberger said. “It’s a complex process to text—it takes your attention, so you have limited cognitive resources, and driving is also complex.

“Whatever goes to the texting is not available for driving, and the result could be death,” he said.

What’s the connection between texting while driving and leadership style, as well as interactions between coworkers? Rudeness and even mild incivility are actually highly emotional events that occur frequently in the workplace.

“Many, many employees experience rudeness at work, and it’s rather ambiguous,” Bamberger said. “It’s not like being bullied or attacked physically, but in response to rudeness, you’ve got to try to figure out what is threatening to some degree, but you don’t know how threatening it is.

“And precisely because of that, and largely unconsciously, your brain is engaging and trying to determine the degree of threat,” he said. “That’s not a mindset that’s conducive to analysis, attention to detail, or any type of thought-demanding work.”

Why One-Size-Fits-All Diversity Training Fails to Deliver

By Daniel Butcher

The more customized and personalized in-office training sessions are, the more effective they tend to be, and that’s especially true for diversity training, according to Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University.

“We’ve all had different experiences; we all have different backgrounds,” she said. “Taking that into consideration, our starting point might be different in terms of the things we need to learn in training—somebody might need it to be more knowledge-based, whereas maybe another person is more emotion-oriented and needs to learn how not to be so reactive.

“Organizational leaders might say, ‘This sounds like a hell of a lot to customize—we have a 10,000-person organization, so how can we customize diversity training for each individual employee?’ but it’s mainly about designing for a wide range of people with different frames of reference and learning styles to improve the return on your training investment,” Roberson said. “A lot of companies buy training off the shelf, and they say, ‘This person, this competitor, or this company in our industry uses this consultant or this diversity-training program.’

“I guess it works for some of them, because they’ve been using it for years, but that doesn’t mean that it’s tailored to address your people and your culture.”

The big-picture takeaway that Roberson stressed is the important of developing flexible, customizable diversity-training models—or working directly with people who do develop diversity training and learning in a way that suits the organization’s purposes.
“Diversity training should not be a plug-and-play one-size-fits-all approach and just hoping that it’ll address all of the organization’s issues,” Roberson said.

“If leaders are spending this money, and if the organization’s people are spending time in this training, then they want to ensure that they’re getting bang for their buck—some return on their investment—and that is going to be something that’s useful and tailored to their people and their culture,” she said.

Connect the Dots from Training to Learning

By Daniel Butcher

Employee training is most effective when leaders and trainers integrate and reinforce learning objectives and key concepts throughout sessions and encourage participants to apply the new knowledge in their roles.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that pre- and post-training elements are just as important as the training session itself.

“We talk about letting people set their own goals like, ‘This is what I want to get out of the training’ or ‘This is how I want to progress through it,’ because that’s part of that act of learning and being personally responsible in the training,” Roberson said.“In the post-training environment, what happens a lot is that people who were in diversity training are excited—‘I learned this, and I met some cool people,’ etc.

“But the manager says, ‘I need you to do XYZ; get back to work—I missed you for this time you were gone,’ and so work piles up and they’re expected to jump right back into work and so don’t have an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned,” she said.
“So having managers or leaders who actually work with their employees to set goals for how they’re going to use their training in their job or building some of those into their performance evaluation help employees to feel that it’s not just something they went through that was a waste of time.”

Giving participants the opportunity to share and actually have responsibility for sharing, such as a train-the-trainer feedback forum and asking people to share what they’ve learned with colleagues and be subject-matter experts on something that was covered during the training session is a best practice, Roberson said.

“Those kinds of things at least make sure that what they learned in the training is not forgotten and tossed to the side but rather it’s actually pulled into their work,” she said. “And it helps the employees make the connection between what they learned in the training and what they actually have to do in the work environment.”

Why Many Big Brands Reneged on Diversity Commitments

By Daniel Butcher

In November 2024, Walmart joined other major corporations such as automakers Toyota and Ford Motor Co. in scratching its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the face of threatened boycotts. Walmart announced that it had pulled out of The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, which gave priority treatment to suppliers based on racial or gender diversity, and ended support for a racial equity center established after a police officer killed George Floyd in 2020.

Those decisions come in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, which has emboldened conservative groups to pressure companies to turn their backs on their DEI commitments. For example, Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal group has sued companies with DEI initiatives and programs focused on helping Americans of diverse racial and ethnic groups.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University recalled that she was confused and saddened when John Deere & Co., Tractor Supply Company, and other companies announced that they were scaling back their DEI initiatives in response to criticism and boycott threats from a conservative influencer.

“For those who recognize the value of DEI, it’s perplexing that a non-shareholder could wield such influence over corporate decision-making,” Roberson said. “However, this response reveals a deeper issue: The vulnerability of these firms’ DEI efforts suggests they were never a meaningful part of their mission or strategy.

“Instead, these initiatives were likely performative and transactional, lacking true integration into the companies’ business strategy and operations,” she said. “Unsurprisingly, such superficial approaches to attracting, engaging, and retaining key talent leaves companies exposed to both vulnerability and scrutiny.”

Why the Meanings of DEI, CRT, and Woke Have Been Warped

By Daniel Butcher

As the political pendulum swings, ideas and policies that were once uncontested and niche become controversial and mainstream. Often, terms used to define academic discourse are redefined by politicians and pundits.

For example, Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that terms such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), critical race theory (CRT), and woke have been removed from their original context and weaponized to support people’s political ideologies.

“When people use terminology like woke [in a disparaging sense], you’ve already told me everything I need to know, because it is not a scholarly construct—it is not its intended meaning; they’re using it in a different way,” Roberson said. “They’ve removed its context and significance and politicized it.

“Also, people are equating woke strategies with DEI, and if you unpack that, their conceptualization of DEI becomes primarily about race and maybe a little bit about LGBTQ, but it’s race and ethnicity primarily,” she said. “You don’t hear about it when people are talking about gender, veteran status, or all of the things that are protected categories like disability.

“It becomes this dog whistle for why the speaker doesn’t like certain things about how race is discussed.”

Opinions differ on why that is the case. But repurposing language has long history among political movements. Sometimes, it’s simply a way to deflect uncomfortable topics of conversation or debate.

“There are some people who consider words like equity to mean that some people get a bigger slice of a fixed pie—some people are going to get ahead and some people are not,” Roberson said. “If they think about diversity training, in their mind, that means that some people are going to be made to feel bad about how others have been treated unfairly.

“It’s this conflict-management strategy, where they say, ‘Let’s not talk about it at all—some people had it bad years ago, but we are a post-racial society,’” she said.

“If people use certain terminology, I already know where they sit, and am less likely to engage in a debate with them, because I know that they’re going on opinion or rhetoric rather than on evidence.”

Diversity Trainees Need a Mindset Shift to Learn and Change

By Daniel Butcher

A key to effective diversity training is to inspire a shift in trainees’ mindset so that they’re willing to engage with the material and discuss it with fellow participants, then—crucially—apply what they’ve learned by putting into practice in the workplace.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that she and colleagues have thought a lot about what they can do to create a new model for diversity training.

“We asked ourselves, ‘How can we do this in a way that people can actually use it?’ and so we thought about some individual or trainee personas so that participants experience what has happened in organizations and how to address those situations,” Roberson said. “You have somebody who is apprehensive and is thinking, ‘I don’t want to go through this; I don’t want to engage because I don’t want anybody yelling at me’—maybe they’re conflict-averse, and they just don’t want to be part of that sensitive conversation.

“At same time, you have trainees who are very zealous, somebody who thinks, ‘I know everything, and I could basically teach this training myself,’ and their motivation and learning is also stifled because they’re already thinking, ‘I got this’—they don’t necessarily feel like there’s anything for them to learn,” she said. “So we wanted to create this diversity-training model that’s applicable to everybody.

“Regardless of whether somebody is resistant or 100% gung-ho, how do you get that person engaged? How do you get them to into the proper mindset for the training and wanting to learn and engage and, most importantly, use it once they get back into the work environment?”

Diversity Words vs. Action

By Daniel Butcher

Plenty of leaders talk the talk about their belief in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but fewer actually walk the walk by setting specific objectives and investing sufficient resources to make significant improvements.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that for organizations to truly earn the boost to their reputation that investing in a DEI program is likely to deliver, they must demonstrate a commitment, beyond just issuing press releases or making public statements.

“You often find that there are organizations that will express a commitment to DEI; you’re rarely going to find an organization that says, ‘We hate DEI; we’re not going to anything related to DEI; it doesn’t make sense for our organization,’ although you will have organizations do so on occasion,” Roberson said.

For example, in June 2024, Tractor Supply Company issued a statement that the organization will “no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign…stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns, eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals while still ensuring a respectful environment, and withdraw our carbon emission goals and focus on our land and water conservation efforts.”

Why?

Tractor Supply Company pointed to customer feedback.

“In a way, they’re saying that those issues are not important to them anymore, so they’ve decided what they think is important to their customer base and their other stakeholders,” Roberson said. “But a lot of times you find organizations [whose leaders] hear about DEI and say, ‘We should probably do it,’ but they have limited knowledge of what that means for their part of the business and they don’t really give it deep thought about how to do it.

“They also don’t think about the demonstration of commitment to DEI; they just say things like, ‘We believe in an equitable workplace, and we believe in an inclusive workplace,’ but then when it comes time to do it, they go and look to see what everybody else is doing,” she said. “And there’s this normative effect, where they say, ‘We probably should have diversity training, employee resource groups, and some kind of outreach,’ but they pick and choose from the menu of diversity practices without thinking about what the end state is and what they want their DEI program to look like.

“And it’s perfectly fine for an organization to say, ‘We’re not really trying to change things; we just want to look good,’ because having a good reputation is an outcome that can be a driver of organizational action, but they also have to realize that if that’s all they’re doing and if people are unhappy or disengaged and they leave, or they’re having trouble recruiting, they shouldn’t be surprised, because they’re literally just expressing a commitment to DEI; they’re not demonstrating a commitment to it or trying to change their environment in any way.”