Taming Toxic Workplaces

Famous Mentors Can Be a Blessing and a Curse

By Daniel Butcher

Students and young professionals who get well-respected, or even famous, mentors gain can gain skills that help put their careers on promising trajectories. But mentees’ identities and reputations becoming connected with prominent mentors can provide both benefits and challenges.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that, on the positive side, relationships and connections with prominent mentors can improve mentees’ opportunities. On the negative side, the entanglement of an individual’s career with a prominent mentor can also lead to being taken for granted, having their contributions underappreciated, and feeling overshadowed. She and her coauthors of an Academy of Management Review article refer to this as the “paradox of promise” that complicates mentees’ building meaningful career narratives.

“We were looking at mentorship in a creative context, and all of us were able to draw from our experiences as well, but our research findings apply to any place where there is a strong mentor figure where you learn by doing and being around somebody who is experienced and renowned in their field,” Rouse said. “This paradox of promise can happen—we know that working with very prominent people in the field is useful; it can help you get connections, and you learn a lot.

“This person is well-known, because they are very skilled at what they do, and so you can see that happening, where you’re learning very easily from this person, because they have a lot of knowledge to give you, but at the same time, you have the shadow over you when you go out and try to make a name for yourself,” she said. “You’ll often be referred to in context with your mentor, and so it’s very hard to break out and establish your own identity, because people assume—maybe rightly, maybe wrongly—that basically you are just the output of this other person and haven’t really established a voice on your own.

“And so that can be very challenging for people, especially if you are driven, as some of our informants were, to really make a name for themselves and separate themselves from their mentor.”

It can be difficult to craft your own career narrative in the way that you’d like if most people know you based on the work that you’ve done in the shadow of a successful, celebrated mentor. That said, some mentees embrace their association with such a figure.

“There are other people in our study that were much more comfortable to build on the legacy of that mentor and feel that they were the next stage of that—helping that legacy to live on, contributing to that legacy was really important to them, and they were able to find meaning from that,” Rouse said. “This is really about what you are trying to get out of your own creative career as a protege and thinking about the different ways to find career success.

“An interesting thing about our study is we found that all people found a way to craft a career narrative and find meaningfulness,” she said. “They just took different paths for doing that.”

Two Creators Working Together Are Better Than One

By Daniel Butcher

There are many examples of creative and productive partners, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the Coen brothers, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, William Procter and James Gamble, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; the list goes on and on.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that people who create together engage in intimate creative interactions that lead to a shared interpersonal boundary—“I created it” becomes “We created it.” This shared interpersonal boundary influences creativity by forming a closed, safe space in which duos can explore divergent ideas and navigate creative blocks.

“We know a lot about team creativity, and we know a lot about individual creativity, and one of the things I was really interested in exploring is this idea of two people working together and the balance that happens in that space,” Rouse said. “You look at a lot of successful, creative people in the world, and they’re often working in pairs, and it’s either a very explicit pair or a well-known person who works with a shadow person.

“It might be a husband and wife, or it might be a more dominant person and a secondary person who are working together,” she said. “That creative space is really special, because you can challenge that person and they’re trusted, and it’s in this bounded space where you develop the sense of a shared interpersonal boundary, where you feel very connected to this other person, and so they’re able to challenge each other and get some of the benefits of having an outsider voice.

“Yet the trust and the support are built into the relationship as well, and that seems to be a really powerful dynamic for developing really high-quality creativity and sustaining it over time.”

An example that Rouse cited in an Academy of Management Review article is from Michael Lewis’s book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, on social psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

“They were social psychologists very well known for doing their work together, and Lewis does a really good job of fleshing out the sorts of tensions in that kind of relationship, but they’re also a very powerful example of two people collaborating and working together successfully and bringing out the best in each other over time,” Rouse said.

The “Lone Genius” Myth Overshadows One of the Partners

By Daniel Butcher

Professional creative partners—such as Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Coen brothers, and Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David provide evidence that the pair is the primary creative unit. But countless examples show when one of a pair gets more credit than the other—think Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Dave Chappelle and Neil Brennan, Simon and Garfunkel, as well as whoever was the wind beneath Bette Midler’s wings.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that many organizational stories feature duos who create together:

• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak propelled the personal computer revolution.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page provided new ways to find information through Google.
• Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield shifted our expectations about ice cream with flavors such as Cherry Garcia and Phish Food.

Such creative pairs often start their own companies, but when they work within organizations, they change them.

“We have this very this myth of the lone genius—this is woven through the creativity literature where we really want to assign credit to one person,” Rouse said. “This idea can be very rupturing to a creative dyad, if somebody’s trying to assign more credit to one than the other or saying, ‘This is really that one person’s idea—that other person didn’t do very much.’

“Our societal and organizational incentives—both financial rewards and recognition—are generally not aligned well with this idea that we actually do creativity as a very social process,” she said. “It isn’t just in entertainment and business; also in medical fields, an important question is, ‘Who came up with what discovery?’ and we’ve gotten a little looser on attribution of credit, being able to say, ‘This team of people came up with this discovery,’ but often you will hear people still continue to pick apart who did what and say, ‘That was really this one person’s idea, and this other person was just helpful.’

“I don’t think we’ve figured out a very good way of rewarding or acknowledging the power that happens in a group or particularly in a dyad around creativity—we still really want to assign ownership or credit to one person.”

In some cases, different personality types determine which half of a duo is more celebrated by the media.

“You definitely see these examples where there’s one person in a duo who becomes a media darling, and sometimes this is by choice, when one person likes being in the spotlight more than another person, and they’re willing to fly under the radar, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,” Rouse said.

“You can think about social dynamics there, and in some situations, one person loves being in front of the camera and getting those kinds of accolades, and another person would prefer to be in the background,” she said.

“But sometimes it isn’t an individual choice—that is, there are other factors that come into play that shape who we pay attention to.”

How Teams Achieve the Coveted State of “Group Flow”

By Daniel Butcher

Too often, teams in sports, music, and business fail to gel for many reasons. Sometimes, though, teams achieve “group flow,” when interactions seem effortless, and team members contribute ideas and complete tasks in synchrony to reach peak levels of collaborative performance.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that team members contributing swiftly and additively—extending a prior contribution, is crucial for creating a sense of momentum. Increasing momentum, in turn, influences changes in emotions, thought processes, and behavior that result in group flow.

“The delicacy of group flow makes it very hard to maintain,” Rouse said. “When we’re theorizing about it, we’re really careful about this idea of coming in and out of group flow, and that it is very hard to sustain over time.

“When you’re thinking about it in the context of a group at work, in particular, it’s helpful to think about things like, ‘How do we focus our attention on each other and keep that momentum going?’—so you could imagine that a lot of interruptions are problematic in that sense,” she said.

“If somebody is interrupting you, or you don’t have dedicated space, it’s going to be very hard to get into that sense of group flow.”

Rouse and her research colleagues theorize that a lot of the factors that contribute to good group functioning, such as feeling comfortable in the workplace and feeling trust from senior management and colleagues, help get individuals and, by extension, teams in that flow.

“When we think about this state of flow at the group level versus the individual level, the idea that this is something like improv is instructive—responding to a team member by saying ‘yes, and…’ contributes to the idea that you’re building on each other,” Rouse said. “You actually want to be there for that purpose, and you want to build on other team members’ ideas.

“And this can be difficult in the context of organizations, because we have political motivations; we have our own agendas,” she said. “We have different things we’re doing at work that hopefully are related to the work assignments or objectives but may be actually getting in the way of you feeling that necessary trust and willingness to build on other people’s ideas.”

Why Some People with Mental Disorders Thrive as Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

Symptoms and traits associated with certain mental disorders, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, dyslexia, and autism, may help entrepreneurs and other businesspeople succeed, noted Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

Shepherd said that conditions that might be seen as a negative, particularly in employment, can sometimes be an advantage in entrepreneurship.

“Some mental disorders are perceived to negatively impact reliability in traditional nine-to-five employment but can actually be an asset in entrepreneurship,” Shepherd said. “Research has found that people with dyslexia tend to have weaker aspects in their left hemisphere of their brain, but their right hemisphere is stronger, and so therefore they can enter entrepreneurship and be successful in it.

“We have the statistics to say that the people with dyslexia are more likely to become entrepreneurs than the general population—in fact, it’s true for many groups who feel like they’re constrained in being promoted in corporate employment turned to self-employment or entrepreneurship,” he said.

“That includes minorities, marginalized groups, and people with all sorts of disabilities, for example, women and immigrants, because they feel like they have constraints or face discrimination in the workplace and that they don’t have those as much in entrepreneurship.”

Research has found that people with ADHD are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

“People with ADHD are more prepared to engage in risk taking, they’re more proactive, and they’re more innovative, and we also found that people with autism are actually getting used by companies engaging in software testing, because they have some advantages in being able to test software,” Shepherd said.

“Entrepreneurship may cause some mental disorders through high stress or loss when a business fails, which can be an important point to consider when deciding on your career path, but people with disorders are also drawn to entrepreneurship,” he said.

Disabled U.S. Veterans Are Finding Success as Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

A higher percentage of disabled U.S. military veterans become entrepreneurs compared to the general population due to their experiences both before and after getting injured, according to research by Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues. Most of the disabled veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq who became entrepreneurs did so for two main reasons.

“The first reason is they felt that following orders were the things that almost got them killed, and what they wanted to do now was to run their own businesses where they were the boss and they weren’t following someone else’s orders,” Shepherd said. “There’s a mental aspect here that causes them to say, ‘I cannot work with someone who’s telling me what to do—I must have that kind of freedom and independence.’

“And in a related issue, they spent so much time in hospitals being told what to do by doctors and nurses that, again, they had this strong desire to become entrepreneurs because they could follow their own orders,” he said. “And the other thing was, because of their disabilities, they still had a lot of medical work that they needed to go on, but also sometimes they’ve had traumatic headaches and different symptoms, which meant that they couldn’t be regular about when they could attend and perform work.

“And under those circumstances, an entrepreneurial career gives them the freedom and flexibility about when they work, and they can work when they’re feeling good—they can work around their medical visits and things like that—and so that’s why entrepreneurship was a good career for those people.”

Immigration Debates Rarely Mention This Important Fact

By Daniel Butcher

Many immigrants—both legal and illegal—are willing to do the kinds of unglamorous, undistinguished, and downright dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame. He likens their psychology to that of Dalits, India’s most oppressed and stigmatized people, many of whom are garbage collectors who scavenge through slum trash dumps for items to sell. They’re commonly called “ragpickers.”

“In some ways, immigrants think like the ragpickers, because they say, ‘I’m doing this so we can eat tonight, but I’m mainly doing this so my children get educated, so that they can get a good job, so that they can marry well, and so that our family’s future generations are going to move forward,” Shepherd said. “And researchers have found that in a lot of immigrant communities, they place a high emphasis on the children’s education—and that’s the reason they’re willing to do dirty jobs.

“They come over to a new country, and they work very hard in order for their for their children to have a better education,” he said. “That’s why they immigrate in the first place, in order to have a better life for their family.”

In the United States in 2023, foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service, natural resources, construction, and maintenance jobs, as well as production, transportation, and material moving occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Foreign-born workers were less likely than native-born workers to be employed in sales, office, management, professional, and related occupations.

“We spoke to ragpickers and other entrepreneurs that live in slums, and we asked them, ‘What are your personal goals?’ and they almost don’t understand the question, because their goals are all to do with the next generation,” Shepherd said. “They don’t see much hope for themselves, because when we asked them, ‘What do you plan on doing after retiring?’ they told us, ‘What retirement? I’m never going to retire.’

“It’s all about future generations, and immigrants do the same thing,” he said.

Finding Meaning in Menial Work

By Daniel Butcher

Even if it’s a dirty job, somebody has to do it. It will probably make you miserable, though, unless you see it as a means to fulfill a purpose or achieving a goal.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research he conducted on poor people living and working in India’s slums shed light on how to find meaning in any job.

“When you’re at work and you aren’t having such a terrible day and you think, ‘but imagine if I was picking up trash in the slums of India—how could you find meaning in that? How could you be happy?’ because they describe their work as dirty,” Shepherd said. “They’re walking through effluent and rubbish and dead animals and picking everything up and getting the trash to a landfill or recycling it.

“But even then, they had made meaning, and they did it through a couple of ways: One was to look back at their [own and their parents’ job] history and say, ‘It was my destiny that I pursue these types of things; my family has done it for a long time,’ so it had meaning, because it put them in a historical context,” he said. “They also gave themselves a pat on the back in the present, because they say, ‘Because I’m doing this, we can eat tonight, and my children can go to school tomorrow,’ and then they would also think about the future to say, ‘It might take multiple generations to escape poverty—by me doing this, my children are able to go to school; if they go to school, they might get a good job, they might marry well, and they can move out of the slum.’

“So in some ways, they’re saying they cannot change their condition because it’s history; on the other hand, they say, ‘but I can change the history of my children,’ so in some ways, it’s a contradiction that they hold in a way that makes them feel better, because they think, ‘I’m helpless; I can’t blame myself for the situation, but I also have some ability to influence the future of my children,’ which actually also gives them meaning, so they have meaning coming from from both ways of thinking about doing a dirty job.”

That’s despite the fact that dirty work is stigmatized in India, as it is in many countries.

“When you know the person who’s engaged in dirty work, often they have intersectionality, which means if you if you come from a stigmatized family or class doing stigmatized work, you’re often from other stigmatized groups,” Shepherd said. “In this case, there was dirty work.

“They came from the lower caste, and they lived in the slums, and both of those were highly stigmatized, and in most cases stigmatized work, like being a mortician or a sex worker, is often tied in with other intersectionality, things like gender, location, place of origin, those types of things,” he said.

“So finding meaning in this work has a little bit of generalizability to other forms of dirty work and other stigmatized groups.”

Entrepreneurs’ Taboo F-Word

By Daniel Butcher

There’s an F-word that used to be taboo among entrepreneurs and researchers who study them: failure.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that when he was a doctoral student at Bond University in Australia teaching entrepreneurship to undergraduates and MBAs, the assigned texts on entrepreneurship rarely mentioned failure.

“On the one instance that one of them did, the textbook said, ‘Entrepreneurs don’t fail—businesses do, but entrepreneurs are just motivated to try again,’” Shepherd said. “Then one day, I got a phone call from my father, and the family business that he’d created and run as long as I’d been alive was failing badly, and I said, ‘You have to close it down,’ and that caused him and me great distress and anxiety.

“And so it felt funny going back into the classroom and trying to encourage everyone to become an entrepreneur and not be able to say, ‘There is a chance that it’ll fail,’ and also not give them the tools to say that, if you do fail, this is how you cope with it,” he said. “I waited for quite a few years before I wrote a paper about it, and I went into the psychology literature on bereavement and grief, because there, psychologists had tools to help people overcome grief.

“And I thought, ‘My dad’s reaction wasn’t as bad as losing a loved one, but in some ways, it’s still grief, where grief is the negative emotional reaction to the loss of something important.”

Some entrepreneurs even call the business they start—or help launch—their baby. Their ventures are entwined with their own identities.

“When people ask them, ‘What do you do?’ they say, ‘I’m an entrepreneur,’” Shepherd said. “Are you still an entrepreneur once your business fails?

“And so the psychology literature really gave us some good tools to say that maybe you do a bit of grief work; you talk it through with someone, and as you come up with a story for why it failed, then it makes it a little less painful,” he said. “The negative emotional reaction can diminish.”

Resilient Entrepreneurs Don’t Shy Away from Failure

By Daniel Butcher

Some of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make are focusing too much on past successes, pretending that hard work always results in success, and not learning from failure, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

Shepherd said that the shocking closure of his own father’s business was what inspired him to study the effects of entrepreneurial failures. He described loss orientation as communicating about the disappointing or traumatic event and restoration orientation as thinking about other things, including next steps.

“It was a family business in residential construction formed around 1965—I am not sure how large it was, but [it built] maybe 100 houses per year, and there were no full-time employees; my father used a lot of sub-contractors,” Shepherd said. “It started to experience some difficulties approximately one year before he closed it down.

“He was very much a restoration-orientation person, so he refused to talk about it, just like a typical Australian male, and he and I never discussed it,” he said. “He never engaged in loss orientation, [grieving the] loss of his business; he never oscillated between loss orientation and restoration orientation, and so he suffered for a long time as a result of that.

“I did research on scientists working in Germany, and when their projects failed, those that were able to oscillate between the two, loss orientation and restoration orientation, were the ones who were most successful at processing the setback or loss, bouncing back, and moving forward.”

Shepherd cited the work of Eric Ries, an entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, as emblematic of a strain of entrepreneurship that doesn’t shy away from failure but actually highlights the need for it to inform the organization’s plans, budgeting, and initiatives.

“A lot of entrepreneurs now, including the author of The Lean Startup, are trying to think about different projects like real options, so they’re probes into an uncertain environment, and if we have many of them, then we gain information, and as we get that information, we can kill some projects and redeploy the resources to the ones that show promise,” Shepherd said. “That’s a way to try and manage the uncertainty, and it really has failure as part of the process, because we must terminate those initiatives that don’t show promise in order for this strategy to work.

“If we have an anti-failure bias and we choose not to terminate them, or we take longer to make the decision to discontinue them, then the downside losses actually start to increase,” he said. “The best examples are my dad, who struggled to process failure, and the studies of the German scientists, some of whom were able to deal with failure in a productive way.”