Four Social Media Communication Strategies for Professionals

Pay Transparency Can Push Reward Inequities Under the Table

By Daniel Butcher

Performance-based pay—including merit-based salary increases and bonuses—can be complicated by pay transparency rules that make the details known to coworkers, according to Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University.

A reaction to that can lead to pay compression—when wages for low-skilled or low-performing workers and wages for high-skilled or high-performing workers move closer together—or an increase in requests for deals with special perks, also called idiosyncratic deals or i-deals. I-deals are non-standard work arrangements that individual employees negotiate to get remote work or flexibility, training opportunities, special assignments, and even performance benchmarks that would trigger bonuses. I-deals are often used to reward high-performing candidates and employees who have specialized skills in the hopes of retaining them long-term.

“You can imagine, if you’re a star performer and your bonus or merit-based raise is lower than it’s been before, you’re likely to think about leaving that organization and going to work somewhere else—and that’s exactly what some economists have found, that where we have pay compression, the star performers actually pick up and leave,” Bamberger said. “I recently published a paper that also shows the same thing, that pay compression very quickly leads to star performers’ departure.”

So what can organizations’ leaders do?

“What we find is that employees don’t necessarily push for more money; they make their requests for other types of rewards, primarily benefits as part of what we call idiosyncratic deals, things like the number of days per week that they can work from home or the number of weeks per year that they can work from Hawaii,” Bamberger said. “There’s a large body of literature on i-deals in management, and they include various types of benefits packages.

“What we find using data from about 120 organizations in China is that where pay is more transparent, the differentials in the pay of higher and lower performers are more compressed,” he said. “Perhaps because such a situation could drive higher performers to look for alternative employment, when pay was more transparent, employers rewarded the higher performers in other, less observable ways using these idiosyncratic deals. If fact, higher performers asked for these types of deals, and in 50% of cases where they ask for it, they got it.

“What’s actually happening is that transparency is shifting the pay differential from where it can be seen, annual raises and bonuses, to those types of rewards where it’s not transparent, that is, idiosyncratic deals.”

Two Factors that Determine Young Professionals’ Drinking Levels

By Daniel Butcher

Early-career professionals often drink as much alcohol as they did in college or even more after graduation, especially if they’re working in a sales role with a boss or mentor who drinks a lot, research shows. But young workers in roles that make them feel empowered and who are surrounded by supportive coworkers who tend to drink alcohol in moderation are more likely to deal with socialization and stress in healthy ways and avoid problem drinking.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University, who said supportive peer relationships with abstainers or moderate drinkers can be influential, as can jobs that provide a higher level of psychological empowerment.

“A combination of the two—peer support and empowerment—make it so that people aren’t as stressed out by being given roles and tasks that they may not be able to handle, because underlying a lot of what’s involved with this drinking are two main motivations,” Bamberger said. “One is a normative social motivation to go out and drink to become socially integrated in their workplace.

“The second is a stress motivation: ‘This is how I coped with stress in college; I went out to drink, and now I do the same thing at work,’” he said. “One of the critical things that we show in our research studies is that if managers can find alternative ways of coping with stress, actually being proactive in terms of trying to address some of the stressors that newcomers face at work, like uncertainty, they may be able to speed up that maturing out process that can lead to reduced levels of alcohol consumption among early-career professionals.

“Support from peers and psychological empowerment were keys to success in that.”

Binge Drinking Decreases After College, Right? Not So Fast…

By Daniel Butcher

Contrary to popular belief, university students don’t get drinking out of their systems during their college years before entering the workforce. Studies show drinking levels increase after graduation and peak in the mid-20s.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that especially for some client-facing roles such as sales, on-the-job pressures and social situations often lead to increased alcohol consumption among young professionals.

“The common perception is that people’s drinking is at its highest levels for young adults, at least when they’re in college, and then as soon as they get out of college, they take on employment; they start their career, and their drinking very quickly declines,” Bamberger said. “However, there’s been some indication already for the past 10 years that that may not be the case.

“In fact, the data on young adults shows that, particularly among college students and twenty-somethings, the peak levels of alcohol use and misuse are actually at around ages 25 and 26, and they’re continuously rising after graduation,” he said. “It’s not like people graduate from college and mature out of their drinking—the party continues.”

Bamberger and colleagues have studied different profiles of alcohol drinkers. Their research findings don’t always align with popular narratives about booze consumption.

“We’ve looked at how people drink alcoholic beverages, how frequently and when they drink, and there are certain patterns that are more problematic than others,” Bamberger said. “First of all, where individuals engage in heavy episodic drinking, like binge drinking, and they do it more frequently, and they do it not necessarily only on a weekend but during the week as well, that’s a very risky pattern.

“And then you have more in the middle of the range, moderate traits and patterns, and then you have patterns like only drinking socially or only on special occasions, and you have abstainers, but and most college students do drink—most are not abstainers,” he said.

“We have these three patterns among people who drink, and when we look at the likelihood of people shifting from a really risky pattern of heavy drinking to a more moderate pattern, or from a moderate pattern to light drinking, what we find is that these patterns are in fact rather sticky.”

Young Heavy Drinkers in Non-STEM Jobs Earn More Money

By Daniel Butcher

There is no meaningful correlation between levels of alcohol consumption and compensation among early-career professionals working in roles focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). But heavy drinking is associated with higher pay for non-STEM professionals who are recent college graduates.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that he and colleagues have researched levels of alcohol consumption and compensation of STEM professionals versus those working in non-STEM fields.

“We were looking at the link between consumption patterns and income growth in the initial years of employment after graduating from college, and surprisingly, what we found is a positive relationship between drinking and income growth in non-STEM roles,” Bamberger said.

“The findings are actually capturing the dynamic that, if you’re not in a STEM job and you want to move up in the organization, you need to engage in these social practices that often revolve around alcohol, and the more you do that, the higher your growth in income is going to be,” he said.

That finding is—at least in part—tied to the prevalence of non-STEM professionals working in sales, marketing, distribution, customer-service, and business-development roles who routinely partake in adult beverages while meeting with clients and prospects.

“A lot of non-STEM people are engaging in marketing and sales and support in building and maintaining relationships with customers,” Bamberger said. “In STEM roles, they’re working in a lab or in front of a computer terminal coding, so there’s less of a role for alcohol as a basis for increasing your salary—drinking is not going to do a hell of a lot for your career if your role isn’t client-facing, right?

“But early-career non-STEM salespeople who drink on the job with clients may be more likely to get promoted and rewarded financially,” he said. “That was the logic behind the research, and that’s what we actually found.”

However, there’s an obvious caveat. Bamberger noted that recent research shows that daily alcohol intake—even in moderate amounts—increases drinkers’ risk of health issues.

“There have been a couple of studies that have come out recently that that directly contradict the line that’s been pushed a lot by a lot of the alcoholic-beverages companies, which is that having some wine with your meal every day is going to prolong your life—it’s healthy,” Bamberger said.

“You’re best off not drinking any alcohol whatsoever, not so much because of its implications on mental health, but rather largely because of its implications with respect to alcohol as a carcinogen, specifically as a leading cause of esophageal cancer,” he said.

“Many younger employees nowadays recognize the risks in drinking; a lot of young people are actually picking up on those problematic implications of drinking alcohol even at the lowest levels and understanding that health risk.”

Can Performance Be Managed Upward?

By Daniel Butcher

Employees evaluating managers’ performance, not just vice versa, also can benefit organizations.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of at the George Washington University School of Business and author of Performance Management for Dummies, who cited Dell Inc., where everyone—from entry-level employees to the top management team—completes an annual employee engagement survey called “Tell Dell” with questions about performance and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Dell leaders use the survey data to hold personnel—including leaders—accountable.

“Before they get promoted upward, every Dell manager needs to have really good ratings from their subordinates or direct reports, so it’s not just the supervisor evaluating the performance of their employees, but also the employees evaluating the performance of leadership and their supervisors—it goes both ways, upward and downward,” Aguinis said.

An even more extreme experiment in a new way to do performance management is “radical transparency,” which Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates, initiated more than three decades ago. He’d been looking for ways to improve the company’s performance and establish a culture of openness and independent thought. The organization has encouraged employees to review their direct manager or supervisor and even senior executives honestly, even harshly—real-time performance evaluations often deliver “radical truth.”

While Dalio found success with this approach, it’s not for everyone, as it can ruffle feathers and make people uncomfortable. Radical transparency means that leaders—and everyone else at the company—open themselves up to oversight and critiques. They must have thick skin and open minds to listen with humility to the feedback that lower-ranking employees give them and respond to it in ways that are productive, without getting defensive or seeking retribution. They also have to deliver brutally honest feedback to their direct reports in ways that improve their performance and morale rather than discouraging them.

Seven Steps to Improve Staff’s Time-Management Skills

By Daniel Butcher

Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington University School of Business, one of the most influential management researchers, said that performance management—when organizations’ managers and leaders do it properly—is critical for organizations because it drives decisions about who gets a bonus, who gets promoted, who gets demoted, and who gets transferred or cut. He offered the following tips for business leaders to help build “time management-friendly” organizational cultures:

1. Follow through on lessons learned during employee training programs:

“Understand that training programs aimed at building time management skills, such as to-do lists, quiet time, and so forth, are only the first step. Employees need a role and work environment conducive to using these skills. If employees face structures and norms that make them waste time, the skills they learned will be useless and lost if they are not put to use,” Aguinis said.

2. Set a good example for rank-and-file employees and put them in a position to succeed:

“Leadership is critical in creating time structures and norms conducive to good time management. First, leaders need to manage their own time well. For example, running meetings efficiently and not letting people waste time at meetings. Also, leaders need to implement performance management and reward systems that discourage wasting time based on how well people manage their time and the results they obtain. Measure the time management performance of middle management. How many performance and rewards systems measure time management? Not many.”

3. Embrace flexibility and hybrid work schedules

“Use technology to minimize commuting time, allow flexible hours and telecommuting.”

4. Avoid and eliminate recurring meetings that aren’t likely to move the needle:

“Don’t create committees and task forces that study issues endlessly without taking action.”

5. Recruit candidates with strong time-management skills:

Use situational interviews to screen out candidates whose attitudes about time do not match those of the organization. For example, job applicants can be asked to choose an alternative among several available choices. Or, job applicants can beasked, ‘tell me about the last time when,’ and they are presented with a situation when they need to make decisions about how to manage their time.”

6. Analyze the implications of the cliché “time is money”:

“Benjamin Franklin wrote that ‘time is money.’ But time is more than money. It is the most fundamental resource that allows people and organizations to get other resources, such as financial, social, physical, and human resources. Without sufficient time, we cannot get any of these other resources that allow a firm to get ahead of the competition,” Aguinis said. “But time itself is often under the radar because ‘what is not measured does not exist.’ It is critical to raise awareness of time as a resource, measure it, and reward units and individuals who manage time well. Also, business leaders should identify and remove systems and norms that prevent people from managing their time well, such as bad bosses who force people in their departments to engage in time-wasting activities.”

7. Reimagine formal systems that can affect employees’ time-management effectiveness, including:

• Time structures: “Systems used to manage time, such as performance appraisal and reward systems that reward individuals for working long hours. For example, using punch- or time clocks or including a question on a performance appraisal form about how many hours a week employeesare at their desk.” Other time structures include project timelines, cleaning schedules, and holidays.
• Time norms: “Informal rules about how to do things right and wrong about time at work. They are based on values and are often implicit, but everyone knows them. For example, arriving at meetings late is not a big deal in many organizations or cultures.”

Ask Ethical Questions as the Lines Blur Between AI and Media

By Daniel Butcher

As generative AI’s usage continues to grow rapidly, critics point out that OpenAI’s ChatGPT fabricates sources, including citations, journal names, and articles, that sound legitimate and scholarly, but are often made up. Sometimes, it doesn’t attribute direct quotes to the person who said or wrote them. Other generative AI platforms have been accused of plagiarism or failing to properly cite sources or even producing “hallucinations” that fill information gaps with inaccurate statements or outputs. Still, these may be more growing pains rather than chronic illnesses.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington University School of Business, who said that every new technology presents ethical challenges in producing and using it. Problems arose in the early days of the Internet, too. He noted that generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT have largely corrected the issue of hallucinations.

“You can Google something and copy and paste something from the search results, but plagiarism has been around for a long time…you could grab a paper book from the library and copy a whole paragraph from it,” Aguinis said. “AI is making these possibilities and the potential for cheating in these ways much easier and more straightforward.

“ChatGPT 3.0 was doing that, but the GPT-4o version not only gives you the right source name but also a quote or sentence from the source—it is absolutely incredible, and that’s going to get even better,” he said.

As for using generative AI in the workplace, Aguinis believes that leaders have to create sensible policies.

“One sensible general blanket policy that applies across industries, jobs, and tasks is to openly and honestly describe exactly how you use AI for your specific task, essentially, user beware,” Aguinis said. “It’s really important to offer an explanation, qualification, or warning of how you used AI.

“Second, the issue of AI output verification is absolutely key—you should verify the accuracy and appropriateness of the information that you received through ChatGPT,” he said. “Those are the guardrails, and while this is evolving, and we’re immersed in it, people shouldn’t be too scared about it, because every time we lived through those technological advancements, there were all these alarms going off that there’s going to be all kinds of problems.

“Every technology can be used, abused, and misused, so there’s nothing new about AI—we need to think about verifying the information and being open and honest about how we use it.”

Leaders’ Paradoxical Mandate of Current Success and Innovation

By Daniel Butcher

Business leaders and managers know disruptive technologies such as AI are going to upend a significant portion of what their company does. But does that mean that they have to throw out much of what they currently do? Many executives struggle to deal with strategic plans for dealing with a future marketplace where AI, machine learning, and related technologies are omnipresent, while simultaneously maintaining their company’s current business model and core competencies.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that she’s done research on business leaders who’ve had to grapple with these kinds of tensions and issues balancing the present (the current technology and business model focused on short-term profitability) and the future (innovation and long-term sustainability).

“We teach leaders to face these dilemmas and make really clear choices and move on and be really consistent within their strategy, but that’s not what I found in the most successful leaders,” Smith said. “The leaders who did it well were able to hold both the past, present, and future—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—the short term and the long term, the existing world and the innovation, hold them in their mind simultaneously and commit to both at the same time, and that’s what we refer to as paradox.”

Such issues and tensions related to that paradoxical mandate come up in leaders’ meetings about strategy, innovation, and sustainability. But it also comes up in our personal lives and how we make career decisions.

“There are all these questions that emerge, and we tend to experience them as either/or tradeoffs, but underlying those binaries or paradoxical decision trees are the question of innovation and his relationship between the short term and the long term,” Smith said. “What we mean by paradoxical is that these dual experiences seem conflicting, or they are indeed in conflict with each other creating tension, but they’re also interdependent contradictions that define each other.

“And successful leaders can look at that paradoxical relationship, hold both aspects of it in their minds, and recognize that they have a much more creative, sustainable way of navigating these tensions, and that’s what we call both/and thinking, which is our lay language for explaining how leaders can accommodate the yin and yang, hold both opposing ideas in their mind, and embrace paradoxes.”

Navigating Political Polarization

By Daniel Butcher

Numerous studies show that democracy has been in decline in many nations worldwide in recent years, and polarization exacerbates the difficulty of reforming political systems that many people are fed up with.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that a key challenge that citizens are confronting worldwide is that political systems work better if people across the ideological spectrum of beliefs can value and accommodate different value systems, perspectives, and approaches and set aside those differences to engage in more holistic, productive, solutions-oriented conversations.

“Our world has really big problems,” Smith said. “Effectively solving these problems requires engaging with multiple diverse voices; that is the value of civic discourse.

“Instead of solving the complex problems that the world faces, politicians and individual citizens are just pointing their fingers at one another, leading to polarization,” she said. “Social media only reinforces this polarization, which cyclically makes the problems worse.”

While civic discourse can solve problems, effectively connecting across diverse perspectives is challenging.

“People understand that shouting from different soapboxes across politically opposing perspectives is polarizing and detrimental,” Smith said. “Yet it remains challenging to sit down and respectfully listen to someone with a different point of view.”

Smith pointed out that leaders and individuals can learn both/and thinking skills that can more effectively enable such discourse.

“Solving our problems depends on bringing together multiple, diverse perspectives,” Smith said. “To do so, people need to learn how to embrace both/and thinking—valuing differences, listening to one another, and seeking integrative approaches.
“Our research shows that these are skills that people can learn over time.”

Pew Research Center found that the ideological gap between the political right wing and left wing is wider in the United State than in other countries on many issues, including abortion, climate change, and same-sex marriage. In a 2022 survey conducted by the nonpartisan fact tank, 88% of Americans said that there are strong conflicts in the country between people who support different political parties, indicating they’re keenly conscious of their internal divisions.

These days, what it takes to get into office is not what it takes to govern effectively. It takes expressing extreme positions to get elected, whereas it requires being in conversation across party lines to govern effectively. Citizens in democratic countries should consider looking themselves in the mirror before simply blaming politicians from political parties they don’t support for the systemic dysfunction. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

“We look to politicians, and we lay the blame on them, but we no longer have the townhall meetings, where people who could trust one another because they were neighbors and yet have different opinions and still be in conversation with one another,” Smith said. “Today, we’re shouting on social-media platforms, and as a result, the populace doesn’t have the competency to have these difficult conversations with people who disagree with them politically, and that’s problematic.

“It’s very idealized, but we need to find ways to use technology to connect with each other, not to sit behind our screens and no longer be in conversation, but to use it to be in deeper conversation with people that are different from us,” she said. “And that’s hard—it’s just hard.”

Technical AND Soft Skills Are What’s Needed Today

By Daniel Butcher

Some mentors and career counselors advise students and early-career professionals to focus on acquiring technical skills to make themselves desirable candidates for high-paying jobs. Other experts say that technical skills can always be learned on the job, so students and young professionals should focus on soft skills, since that’s what ultimately impresses hiring managers during the recruitment and interviewing processes. However, the reality is that most successful business leaders and managers excel in both areas.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that there’s debate over whether to prioritize social skills and emotional intelligence (EQ) or technical skills and intelligence quotient (IQ). If a person has tons of technical skills but no social skills, they call that the competent jerk, but if you have tons of social skills but don’t have the technical skills, you may be a lovely person who’s going to build the team, host barbecues, and charm clients but not really get the work done.

“There’s an underlying paradox, and the important piece here is figuring out how to do both—look, you’ve got to do both,” Smith said. “The big question is, ‘How does engaging the social skills enable you to learn the technical skills more effectively, and how are these interwoven with one another? How does engaging the technical skills using your IQ enable you to learn the social skills more effectively?

“If you are somebody with technical skills, then it opens up the possibility to have conversations with more confidence with other people with technical skills in your business and then develop a network of connections that allows you to then learn from and engage with other people,” she said. “If you are somebody who has the emotional intelligence to know how to build those networks and connections, then you’re the kind of person who’s not just stuck behind a computer on their own in the cubicle in the corner, but you’re someone who’s going to be able to learn from what’s going on and understand what’s required of you and gain more technical skills along the way.

“So it’s not just that these things sit side by side and we have to allocate resources between the two; it’s that—if done right—there is this interwoven, dynamic nature of hard and soft skills where they can help each other, and that’s an important insight of paradoxical thinking, or paradox theory.”