Going Beyond Being Proactive at Work

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.”

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.”

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.”

Why Retirees Change Their Alcohol Consumption

By Daniel Butcher

Whether people increase or decrease the amount of alcohol they drink after retirement depends on a range of factors, including what role and industry they retire from.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that he and colleagues studied the implications of general work-related transitions on health and well-being, with a particular focus on subjects’ behavior with regard to drinking alcohol, before and after retirement.

“We actually started with people as they move towards retirement, and we did a 10-year study,” Bamberger said. “The research was finding mixed effects of retirement on alcohol consumption; some studies found that retirement is a great way to address your drinking problems, because you’re often removing people from a high-risk environment where people around them drink a lot.

“But other studies were finding that people go into retirement and move into a retirement community and happy hour starts at noon,” he said.

Bamberger’s and colleagues’ question was, ‘Is retirement good or bad with regard to alcohol consumption or misuse?’ They were looking at various factors that determine when a person’s level of drinking goes in one direction and when it goes in the other direction.

“A simple finding is, if you’re coming out of a high-risk occupation, for example, iron workers, people who build skyscrapers—this is an occupation that has its roots with very heavy drinking communities, so if you joined that occupation, at least in the past, you were likely to adopt those patterns, or you wouldn’t stay in the occupation,” Bamberger said. “So retiring from that is obviously going to be beneficial, because you’re taking yourself out of a social context of high alcohol consumption.”

But there are other variables to consider, including relationships with friends, family, and spouses. A best practice for retirees is keeping busy with hobbies, volunteerism, or even some part-time work, any activity aimed at staying engaged and connected and ensuring a continuing sense of self-worth and contribution.

“We looked at some of the factors that are associated with retirement, like financial stress and marital strain, with one member of a couple working the other one not, and we can find implications there as well for drinking,” Bamberger said. “The routine is disrupted; there’s more free time for one partner in the relationship but not the other.

“There’s a vast array of moderating and conditioning factors that determine when retirement has one implication—more drinking—versus another—less drinking,” he said. “Retirees who plan how to structure their time post-separation from work tend to have better health outcomes.

“Overall, work-related transitions can be difficult for people, and our current research has aimed at exploring the mental-health implications of other such transitions, including for students and soldiers transitioning into career employment for the first time.”

Showing Emotions at Work Shouldn’t Be Taboo

By Daniel Butcher

Many managers and leaders overlook how employees’ emotions can affect their on-the-job productivity. An underappreciated management skill is monitoring team members’ emotional responses to their roles and tasks, as well as significant personal life events unrelated to the organization, and adjusting their management tactics and leadership strategies appropriately.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said that—contrary to the old-school mentality that emotions don’t belong in business—it’s so important to accept that professionals feel a range of emotions at work.

“Emotions are a part of our everyday lives, and we have all sorts of emotional responses at work,” Rothbard said. “I did a study looking at the emotions that people brought with them into the workplace and how their emotions in response to customers and other types of interactions affected them throughout the day.

“This was an experience sampling study where I asked them multiple times a day, ‘How are you feeling?’ and I was able to really monitor what their productivity was and the various ways that they were able to engage both from a quantity and a quality perspective in their work,” she said. “What we found in this study was that emotions mattered a lot—the emotion that people brought to work affected them throughout the day.

“And when people experienced more negative emotion throughout the day, they were less productive, and they had to emotionally regulate themselves a lot more.”

On the flipside, when the workers Rothbard studied were more positive, they actually produced higher-quality work—especially their customer service.

“Managers really need to pay attention to the emotions that people bring with them as they start their workday, and they need to be aware that people vary from one day to the next,” Rothbard said. “Managers need to pay attention to those emotions, and give people the opportunity to regulate them, to help label them for them, to check in with them, and to recognize that they may need to take a little time in order to get in the right headspace to be able to do their jobs well.

“There’s actually other research that shows that managers and leaders who are able to read their employees’ emotions better are rated by their employees as being better managers,” she said. “Now, what’s interesting is that those managers don’t always realize that that’s part of their job, but in fact, it is a central part of their effectiveness as managers and leaders.”

Professionals Must Walk a Tightrope on Social Media

By Daniel Butcher

Professionals interact in complex ways with one another on social media that we’re living in. Technology is blurring the boundaries between work and home and changing the ways that peers establish relationship boundaries and how bosses communicate with colleagues.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said that something as simple as accessing Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn on their phones all day is affecting the ways interactions and connections with people happen during—and after—work. The pressure to connect with clients, members, colleagues, peers, and even bosses via social media, along with expectations that say something interesting, but nothing controversial or off-putting, can create a real bind.

“It’s really complicated, because on the one hand, it is a huge asset to be able to connect with these people in various ways—think about your social networks and how LinkedIn and other sorts of connection technologies make sure that you’re networking,” Rothbard said. “We’re taught that you have this low-level connection to lots of people—more people than you could ever connect with personally face-to-face, so there’s lots of positives to online social media and how that connects us to other people.

“But there are also real risks that are associated with the boundaries that become blurred in these contexts, for example, people at work learning something about you that you don’t want them to know, and they see you in a different light as a result, and you might worry about how that would reflect on you professionally,” she said.

“People are really uncomfortable with that across organizational hierarchy, but when they connect with people online through these technological platforms, they do expect some level of personal disclosure—they don’t like it when someone doesn’t ever post, because then they think that there’s something wrong or that person is spying on them, if they’re not disclosing anything personal about themselves.”

Counterintuitive Aspects of Workaholism

By Daniel Butcher

Most people see workaholism as hurting emotional and physical well-being and personal relationships. Continually working long hours can affect professionals’ health and lead to all sorts of other problems. But a passion for work can mitigate the consequences of workaholism and may even give some workaholics a sense of purpose.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said her research with colleagues revealed that there are actually two types of workaholism. The classic type of workaholism is significantly negative due to the detrimental effects it has on workaholics’ health, wellness, and long-term on-the-job engagement. But another set of workaholics are really passionate about their work.

“For the set of passionate workaholics who are really engaged and love their work, it turns out that the negative health implications were not there, and in fact, they had a lower risk of metabolic syndrome, which essentially means risk of cardiovascular disease,” Rothbard said.

“When we unpacked those findings to try to understand what was going on there, we found that people who are engaged workaholics have more social support, they have a better handle on their recovery activities, things like going to the gym and managing their health in real time,” she said. “They are workaholics; they’re very engaged in their work; they feel obsessive about their work, but they also love their work.

“And so, they’re not being drained in the same way over time and, despite working very long hours, had better work-life balance or more social support from their managers, peers, and family than what we call non-engaged workaholics.”
Managers can help to avoid some of the negative effects of non-engaged workaholism.

“There are ways to increase the engagement of your employees through providing them with a strong set of goals and vision,” Rothbard said. “All the great leadership types of activities that we that we know work are really important for increasing engagement.”

Organizational Hierarchy Complicates Work Friendships

By Daniel Butcher

Friendship at work is important for many professionals as a crucial source of connection, especially for people who spend a lot of time working.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said that her research highlighted that workplace friendships can be a little bit trickier than non-workplace friendships for a couple of reasons.

“One is that you don’t have the same level of voluntary choice in an organizational setting about who you interact with—sometimes you don’t get to choose who’s on your team,” Rothbard said. “And so, if you are or aren’t friends with people on the team, that can impact the way that you interact with them.

“You have to be careful about the boundaries of those friendships and how they play out, you also have to be careful, because sometimes you can really go in deep, and it can be very distracting for your own ability to do your work if you’re always trying to help a friend,” she said. “A third reason why friendship at work can be really challenging is that you can be seen as having a clique, or people can be envious of that friendship, or they can think about the friendship as something that they’re worried about, and so that can be really challenging.

“The last reason is, sometimes when you’re known to be friends with somebody, people might perceive the decision-making as less fair, whether it is fair or not, if you’re seen as making that decision with, or about, a friend, and so that’s another issue you have to be aware of, monitor, and manage when you are friends with others in the workplace.”

Research has also shown that workplace friendships are even more challenging when relationships cross hierarchical levels.

“These personal disclosures or issues are more awkward or can be seen by others in ways that make them seem problematic when it’s across these levels of hierarchy,” Rothbard said. “I have a AOM article titled “OMG! My Boss Just Friended Me: How Evaluations of Colleagues’ Disclosure, Gender, and Rank Shape Personal/Professional Boundary Blurring Online,” which looked at that exact issue of hierarchy and friendship, that is, personal disclosure across hierarchical boundaries.

“We found that that was quite uncomfortable for people being connected across hierarchical levels, much more so than being connected to peers,” she said. “If your boss sends a friend request, you feel pressured to accept it.

“People don’t want to accept it, but they often feel obligated to accept it, and so then it creates a whole host of other issues.”

Do Signs of Privilege in Resumes Indicate Excellence or Entitlement?

By Daniel Butcher

Class cues in resumes have a huge impact on which candidates get called in for interviews and provide an advantage to privileged candidates during the recruitment process. That leads to organizations bringing in employees more likely to be—or perceived to be—entitled.

Academy of Management Scholar Sean Martin of the University of Virginia says leaders and hiring managers would do well to pay attention to “class signifiers” on resumes and in interviews through the lens of what kinds of employees would be most beneficial to the organization and contribute most to its success.

Examples of class signifiers include:

• Names associated with a particular race, ethnicity, region, or culture
• The level of prestige and cost of schools listed
• Types of extracurricular activities or interests listed
• The perceived competitiveness, political affiliations, or target demographics of past internships and employers

“Leaders who say they want to promote the ideals of most cultures around the globe and cultivate the kind of workplace where anybody can work hard and do well might want to hire people whose resumes show signs of upward mobility and growth from humble beginnings,” Martin said. “There’s evidence that that doesn’t happen very often right now.”

Research on levels of entitlement that Martin did with AOM Scholar Stéphane Côté of the University of Toronto found that people who had been upwardly mobile or always in a lower-social-class position did not express particularly high levels of entitlement. In every single case, the group that expressed the highest levels of entitlement were the folks who were born into privilege and had remained in privilege, Martin said.

“I find that interesting, because one of the things that I’ll hear from people who are hiring is, ‘Boy, this next generation just seems so entitled,’ and I find that funny, because my interpretation of the implications of the research we did on entitlement would be that, by just looking for a long track record of privilege, you’re selecting the people who are the most likely to be that thing you said you wanted to avoid—you’ll get the people who are most likely to have high levels of entitlement.”

Insecure Leaders Discourage Employees from Speaking Their Minds

By Daniel Butcher

Some iron-fisted leaders consciously discourage lower-ranked employees from contradicting them or initiating fierce conversations. However, many more senior executives and managers do so subconsciously. They may have an “open-door policy,” but believe that they’re more approachable and open-minded to criticism and off-the-wall ideas than they actually are.

Academy of Management Scholar Sean Martin of the University of Virginia noted that people in positions of power can be bad judges of how safe they make other people across the organization feel about speaking up, especially with regard to criticism, contrarian or out-of-the-box ideas, or anything else that could ruffle leaders’ feathers. That makes sense given that bosses decide which employees get promotions and raises—and who gets let go.

“I would highly recommend people carry around a healthy paranoia about their degree of approachability and ask themselves, ‘Do people view me as someone to come to with their best ideas and their thorniest problems?’” Martin said.

“You can start making headway on that by getting out of your office, walking around, spending time with people in informal settings, expressing an interest in them, and asking for input—and, when someone does speak up or challenge the status quo, not being dismissive or reactive, but instead saying, ‘Thank you for challenging the way that we’ve done things; thanks for pushing us in a new direction,’” he said.

“And look, while you can’t take every single suggestion, the third piece of advice is, if someone gives you an idea, you have to follow up with them about it and explain why you did or didn’t take this suggestion—otherwise, people get this idea in their head that it’s completely useless to speak up anyways; even if you seem nice, they won’t speak up because ‘What’s the point?’ so you need to correct those kinds of misconceptions actively.”