The Recruitment Bias that Undermines Meritocracy

Why We Love Time-Travel Tales

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By Daniel Butcher

People love stories that involve time travel, from books such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (adapted into a TV series) and shows such as Doctor Who and Quantum Leap to comedy movies such as Groundhog Day, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Hot Tub Time Machine and action/adventure films such as the Back to the Future and Terminator series.

What’s so universally compelling about the concept?

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that the appeal of time-travel stories is that people often imagine what it would be like to travel backward and forward in time.

“We live in any given moment, but in those moments as we mentally time travel, we can remember select things, we can forecast things, and so we can create whatever story we want,” Shipp said. “When we see it in movie or show form, it fascinates us to be able to move into the future and see, ‘How did that play out?’—there’s a little bit of certainty that comes with that, so that’s one element.

“Another part of that is that we forget how things change,” she said. “For example, we assume, ‘If I am in an accident and suffer an injury and I lose the use of my legs, I would be so unhappy,’ and there’s a lot of research on this; yet we know that people have happiness set points.

“We forget the resilience that we have over time.”

Popular fantasy

“I was just thinking about this today in terms of the weather,” Shipp said. “We’re having this really weird cold snap in Texas, and so, of course, my brain is thinking, ‘Well, if this is what the weather is going to be from now on, I’m going to move someplace else.’

“But that thought assumes this experience would be the same in another 10 years, rather than be temporary or change in another way,” she said. “What do I know about what the future holds?

“Some of those time-travel films get us thinking about the elements we’ve forgotten about the past or what might be in the future, so it’s as much a fantasy as it gives us something to sink our teeth into when we think about what’s continuous versus what’s changing.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Time-Management Hacks Don’t Work for Everyone

By Daniel Butcher

When it comes to time-management tips, people respond to work schedules and deadlines differently, and what works for an early bird might not be useful for a night owl.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that time management is a common headache for many workers.

“There’s still a really big push to better manage your time, and even right now, I’m still seeing elements of post-pandemic burnout,” Shipp said. “My theory is that many people struggle with time management because leaders have never gotten down to the meaning of people’s time at work and an individual perspective of how workers are currently managing—or would prefer to manage—their time.

“Time-management hacks that are so commonly prescribed might work for some people but not for others—for some people, it might make it worse,” she said. “For example, it is widely prescribed to block your workday to work on certain things at certain times—but that overlooks how some people work better in a state of flow, working based on events, not time.

“There’s a couple of time-management issues that have been around for a long time, but we’re looking at them too simplistically, without understanding how people experience and view time individually.”

Instead, experts and influencers are touting life hacks, including time-management strategies, that resonate with a percentage of the population but might not work for everybody.

“It’s really comparable right now to the research on nutrition—they’re finding customized diets that are optimized for different metabolisms and making individual prescriptions for workouts and what to eat,” Shipp said.

“We used to think of this as ‘calories in, calories out,’ but now we realize, ‘Wow, it isn’t that simple, because you could eat the same things as me, but we have different outcomes because we have different biological makeups,’” she said

The same thing goes for individuals’ cognitive makeup and their chronological perceptions of time.

“For example, are you an early-morning person or are you a late-night person?” Shipp said. “That can affect your performance as your time management and task prioritization needs to be shared to your energy level.

“Similarly, rigid work schedules of certain hours in the office may work for some employees but not others,” she said.

“There are so many things that we don’t yet incorporate into workforce discussions that that would help us to get away from these blanket hacks and one-size-fits-all recommendations.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

The Pitfalls of Thinking about Your Jobs Instead of Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Far too often, workers either stay too long in a job that isn’t a good fit, or, at the other extreme, hop from job to job without a coherent plan for achieving their desired career path.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that when it comes to people deciding whether their current job is a good fit or which jobs to apply for, they shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Put another way, think of each job you apply for in the context of the career that you’d like to have over the long haul.

“Career-planning is a long-lived topic, but in many ways, people have moved away from thinking about careers and instead it’s just a string of jobs—maybe you have this job for a year and that job for a year, but none of them ties into a larger career path,” Shipp said. “One of the things that you may regret is accepting a job without thinking about your fit over time, for example.”

Over time, it’s crucial to plan for the career you want and articulate the story you’re telling yourself, the narrative of what that looks like, and whether the job you’re in or applying to fits that narrative, she said.

“If we aren’t doing long-term career planning and lose the ability to think of ourselves as the protagonist in a continuous story from past to present to future, then people can make job changes that don’t necessarily fit or work any better than where they were before,” Shipp said.

“Many companies in America seem to simply accept this job-hopping trend, recruiting constantly to overcome the short-term tenures that are now so common,” she said. “But individuals can create a better experience for themselves if they give some thought to their career narrative.

“If crafted thoughtfully, they may even find a better fit with an organization that values the same things.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Focusing on the Past vs. the Present vs. the Future at Work

By Daniel Butcher

Are you not seeing eye-to-eye with your boss or a colleague? It may be that you focus more on the past, present, or future than they do—and this could be both good and bad.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that talking with your boss and colleagues about your temporal orientations—how often you both tend to think about the past, the present, and the future—can be illuminating and may even enable better collaboration.

“I work with somebody that, when we compare these things, they’re very much present- and past-focused, and so they’re the person that is constantly telling me, ‘You’ve come so far; look at what you’ve done—do you remember this happened five or 10 years ago?’” Shipp said. “Whereas I’m saying, ‘You need to know that my future focus is really pushing me into the future, because things are uncertain, and I haven’t done enough yet—I need to do more.’

“I’m pushing, pushing, pushing, whereas they’re saying, ‘Wait, hold on, savor this, acknowledge where you’ve been,’ and vice versa; ‘I’ve helped that person with strategic planning and things that don’t come as naturally to them,” she said.

“As individuals, we need to understand where your mind naturally tends to go and understand too how other people’s minds might look different than yours.”

Although different temporal orientations or ways of perceiving time can be helpful, Shipp noted that they can also lead to conflicts among colleagues within a team or department or between bosses and their direct reports.

“Originally, I got into arguments with the person with whom I worked, because we didn’t realize what different world views we had—we were literally opposite,” Shipp said. “He would say, ‘Why are you always thinking about this thing going forward?’ and I would say, ‘What? Why can’t you think about something that’s so important?’

“Understanding yourself, making that temporal orientation explicit for yourself and for the people that you work with—that’s when you can start to see, ‘Oh, hey, you’re focused on this other period of time’ so that I might ask you to fill in the gaps of the things that I can’t see because I’m so future-focused,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

How Focusing on the Past, Present, or Future Affects Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Ask yourself: In any given day, how much time do you spend thinking about the past, the present, and the future? That ratio has implications for:

• your performance at work
• how well you collaborate
• how you manage time

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that she and colleagues have measured how much people think about the past, the present, and the future for various research studies.

“A new research method we developed enables us to look at not just those three different dimensions separately or the interactions among them but also at prototypes—typical combinations of past, present, and future focus,” Shipp said. “For example, people high in all three are hyper-temporal individuals, whereas people low in all three don’t think about time at all.

“There are also people that only think about the present moment—they don’t really think about where they’ve been or where they’re going,” she said. “It’s just ‘carpe diem.’

“What was neat about that method is that we could use data to show that despite all the different combinations that could result from being high or low on each of the three different dimensions, there really were just a couple of different prototypes, and they’re differentially related to outcomes.”

Shipp and colleagues found that people with a strong future focus see certain benefits, but there are also drawbacks if they ignore the past and present altogether.

“Much of the literature has looked at future focus as positive given that it helps you to plan and anticipate events. But what we found is that future focus on its own doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all good—it can make you more anxious because it can highlight uncertainty,” Shipp said.

“So although future focus can make you more successful because you plan ahead, also having a stronger present focus tends to make people a little bit happier,” she said.

Shipp also found some other unexpected findings for other dimensions of temporal focus.

“We didn’t really find that people were only past-focused, nostalgic types,” Shipp said. “However, these were limited samples, so we called for more profile research to study this in more depth.

“It really extends the findings of prior research and takes them in new directions,” she said.

In addition, Shipp said that such a profile approach is important for collaboration at work.

“When we start to look at, ‘What’s your profile versus my profile?’ as opposed to just saying, ‘We’re both high on future focus; we should have the same outcomes,’ that could help people regulate their own work schedules and productivity, and it could have implications for managers and leaders in terms of recognizing how different team members perceive time,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

RTO Has a Steep Learning Curve for Young Workers

By Daniel Butcher

Many young employees, some of whom graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic or took on a fully remote role after graduation, never experienced integrating with—and thriving in—an office culture. Pandemic or no, young professionals often experience a learning curve in transitioning to becoming a professional. They have to figure out how to bond with fellow employees, make a good impression on management, and act professionally in an office.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter said that many early-career workers haven’t been fully socialized into their employer’s culture. The quality of organizations’ onboarding procedures varies widely.

“One of the concerns that we’ve been hearing a lot from newer employees is they weren’t onboarded effectively,” Methot said. “They’re brought into a new role, but they don’t get a chance to meet the team, develop a rapport with their boss, or form relationships with this team to build trust and learn how to collaborate effectively with them.

“Maybe they worked remotely when they were hired into the organization, and then—all of a sudden—they’re brought back to the workspace, and now they have to reevaluate how they were interacting with these individuals and almost create new relationships with them,” she said. “The pandemic created this disruption to our understanding of how to interact, and so it calls into question what types of information do recent hires require?

“How are we socializing these new employees to help them navigate the social norms and political landscape of the organization? How do they build a relationship with their supervisor or their direct reports when they never meet in person, and then, what does that look like if a group of them is required to come back to the office? It’s really disruptive.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Email Jokes Fail

By Daniel Butcher

Most people seem confident in their ability to get their point across in emails. Few realize that writing an email is actually a minefield, and common errors can blow up in the sender’s face.

Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University said it’s important to remember your audience, especially if you’re trying to be funny or ironic. She published a research article on this topic in Academy of Management Review.

“I would hope that the people who I communicate with the most know I’m a sarcastic person; I joke around a lot, but I still try to make sure that there’s little ways indicating that,” Byron said. “If I am joking around, I’ll try to make sure they know; I might even just say, ‘Of course, I’m just joking,’ or I’ll add a smiley face or another emoji just to make sure that people know that I’m joking it or being sarcastic.

Including humor, irony, or sarcasm in an email can be risky, especially for work-related messages. Depending on the stakes and how well you know the recipient, it may not be worth the risk of being misunderstood and potentially offending that person.

“If you don’t know a person really well and you’re sending them an email, then usually I would not even try to be sarcastic or funny, just because they don’t know you, and they don’t have a way to tell from your facial expression or tone of voice if you’re joking,” Byron said. “They don’t have the context or knowledge about you—they lack sufficient personalized information about you to know how to interpret it, and they might not appreciate your sense of humor.

“I get it: Everyone is not everyone else’s cup of tea, so you have to proceed with caution when making a joke or using sarcasm,” she said. “I do think that you want to be careful—if you don’t know someone, I would not try to attempt humor generally.

“That’s the big takeaway: Know your audience.”

You Aren’t as Good at Writing Emails as You Think You Are

By Daniel Butcher

Here’s a hard truth: Most people aren’t as good at writing emails as they think they are. Humor gets lost or misinterpreted, and emails intended to be positive typically come off as neutral, while messages intended to be neutral often come off as negative. Email recipients often interpret constructive criticism as more disparaging and hurtful than the sender intended.

Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University said that the main problem is that people are overconfident in their ability to craft a written message that conveys exactly what they intend. She published a research article on this topic in Academy of Management Review.

“Before hitting send on an email, people might want to pause and ask themselves, ‘What am I trying to say?’ because most forget that there’s a strong possibility that their message could be interpreted more negatively than they intend,” Byron said. “That’s really the most likely error.

“We don’t know how other people will interpret what we write—when we’re typing, we can hear our own voice in our head,” she said. “We can hear the way we’d say it, so we know what our own tone is, but once someone gets that message, they don’t hear that same thing.

“There’s just this real disconnect, which means that people can misperceive them.”

A common email mistake to avoid

A common email pitfall is to be too task-focused, Byron said. Cutting to the chase—“Just the facts, ma’am”—can come off as terse to the point of being rude.

“This is just generally how I am—when I’m working, a lot of times, I’m just trying to get my work done,” Byron said. “I used to have to go back and add the pleasantries to the top and bottom of my emails, but usually when I write an email now, it’s something I do—it’s a habit.

“In almost every email that I send, I include, ‘Is everything going all right?’ or something like that; ‘I hope you’re doing well,’” she said. “That’s the big thing—people are so task-focused that they just immediately jump into work, and that’s good to a certain extent.

“We should be staying on task at work, and, yes, you need to get work done, but also it’s really important to maintain strong, positive, good relationships with people, and the way work gets done is relationally.”

Especially when delivering criticism via email, even if it’s intended to be constructive, Byron said that it’s a good idea to take a step back and think, How can I soften this up a little bit?

“This is not a big ask to just write a pleasantry or compliment or two, even if it’s just something that’s a little trite or cliché, for example, ‘Happy New Year!’ or ‘Hope you’re doing well,’ something little to make your email not be quite so harsh-seeming to the person who receives it,” she said.

Imagining Interactions at Work in Advance

By Daniel Butcher

Imagining potential work-related interactions in advance helps professionals to prepare responses to their ideas, suggestions and questions. It can also make introverted or less talkative people more comfortable making conversation and speaking up in meetings.

Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University said that as jobs become unstable and employees are increasingly geographically separated and likely to communicate via technology, professionals may find it more difficult to feel connected with one another. Imagining interactions with bosses and colleagues can help workers communicate more effectively.

Byron and research colleague Beth Schinoff of the University of Delaware published an article on this topic in Academy of Management Review.

“A benefit is that you might be more prepared; you’ve been thinking through various scenarios for how a conversation or meeting might play out,” Byron said. “Let’s say you want to discuss a potential new initiative, so you might anticipate that there’s going to be some resistance to that, and that’s a possibility that you should be anticipating, that with any change, you might be met with some resistance.

“And it’s really useful to think through: What would that look like? How are you going to respond? How do you keep your cool?” she said. “Maybe this feels like something really cool that you came up with, and so it would be really important to think through: How are you going to not appear defensive when someone pushes back on your proposed initiative?

“In that way, thinking through the possibilities is really important.”

Bryron said people should think through: How could this go wrong? But it’s also important to think through: What are the ways this could go really well?

“That’s because you need to keep yourself energized and enthusiastic about what you’re going to do,” she said. “The best-case scenario is that you think through lots of different scenarios of how this could play out, so that you’re über-prepared for whatever might come at you.”

What It Takes to Be a Powerful Leader

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By Daniel Butcher

To climb the ladder in your profession and achieve success, hard work is table stakes, not a differentiator. And to progress from rank-and-file employee to manager to respected, powerful leader might require a fundamental mindset shift of letting go of a need to be seen as likeable and authentic while cultivating professional relationships.

Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University, one of today’s most influential management professors and researchers, offers some takeaways on that subject from his book7 Rules of Power, which isa manual for increasing the ability to get things done and benefitting from job performance.

“Good performance by itself is not necessarily going to bring you the level of career success that you need,” Pfeffer said. “In addition, you need technical and political skills to have your boss recognize your good contributions.

“If you think about management, and leadership is managing through other people, you need to learn how to interact with other people across your organization in ways that build your influence and permit you to get the things done that you want to get done,” he said.

Pfeffer’s seven rules power are:

1. Get out of your own way: “Lose the self-descriptions and inhibitions that hold you back, for example, the idea that you have to be liked, because, as an executive, you’re hired to get things done, not necessarily to win a popularity contest. Lose this currently popular idea that you need to be quote-unquote authentic, which is, of course, incorrect.”

2. Break the rules: “In strategy and organizational leadership, if you do what everybody else does, you will probably not succeed—you need to differentiate yourself.”

3. Show up in powerful fashion: “Body language and how we communicate is obviously important.”

4. Create a powerful brand: “If you’re perceived as a powerful, effective, efficacious leader, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—good people want to work with you, invest with you, and buy from your company.”

5. Network relentlessly: “That’s something that people often don’t want to do, so they underinvest in networking because they feel dirty about it and don’t see it as the value-adding activity that it is.”

6. Use your power: “Not all use of power will be met with unalloyed approval, so leaders need to be willing to incur some level of social disapproval. But because most people are usually averse to conflict, it is surprising how much one can accomplish by seizing the initiative.”

7. Understand that once you have acquired power, what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both: “Once you have power and status and success, no one will care how you got it, and people will people will accommodate themselves, because people like to be close to power.”

Upon reading or hearing about those precepts and their implications for workplace power dynamics, many people have an adverse reaction. That’s natural and understandable, Pfeffer said.

“Every person should understand and come to terms with the seven rules of power, and most will go through stages: first, denial—‘This doesn’t work in my organization’s culture’—then they will have anger, which will mostly be directed at me, which is fine,” he said. “Then they will have sadness—‘I’m depressed by it’—and finally, they often come to acceptance that this is not only the way the world works, but they can build agency around this.

“My biggest contribution is causing them to see their own agency and encouraging them to be more ambitious and more agentic around navigating their own career and getting their boss to recognize their talents, instead of sitting back and waiting for the human resources department to offer promotions and raises.”