Why You Should Be Kind to Medical Staff

Mentors Influence How Much College Grads Drink

By Daniel Butcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay Transparency May Breed Malicious Envy

By Daniel Butcher

Overall, researchers have found that pay transparency benefits organizations with fair compensation structures by incentivizing top performers to continue working hard and reducing turnover of talented contributors. But in certain situations, it can breed envy of high earners and undermine organizational culture.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University explained that envy can be either benign or malicious, with benign envy increasing a person’s motivation to help others, while malicious envy tends to decrease motivation. Bamberger said that in cases he studied where pay transparency bred malicious envy among colleagues, the frequency of employees helping one another decreased.

“So if I’m envious of you, and I can see that you’re having difficulties at work, will I help without you coming to me and asking for assistance? Will I come to you and say, ‘Hey, I can see you’re having some problems, here’s advice or some type of information that could help you solve some of the problems that you’re experiencing?’” Bamberger said.

“I’m less likely to do that if I’m feeling envy toward you, and I’m more likely to feel envy toward you under conditions of pay transparency,” he said.

“For people who are natural helpers, it won’t make much of a difference, but for most people, particularly among those who are more competitive or have less prosocial motivation, it can make a big difference.”

Some business leaders and managers complain that transparency is problematic, because it makes people jealous, but Bamberger and his colleagues didn’t buy that argument. Their hypothesis was that people are jealous whether pay is transparent or not, and they imagine what other people’s pay is and base their jealousy on that.

“Whether or not employees see other people’s pay, it’s still a basis for jealousy, because they believe the worst,” Bamberger said. “The difference when pay is transparent is that it’s slammed in your face, and you can’t deny it, and therefore, it’s particularly in that case where the malicious envy can be sufficiently robust to be problematic, while one of these problems was reduced unsolicited helping among coworkers.”

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.”

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.”

Rudeness Doesn’t Motivate Workers—Quite the Opposite

By Daniel Butcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Daniel Butcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect the Dots from Training to Learning

By Daniel Butcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Many Big Brands Reneged on Diversity Commitments

By Daniel Butcher

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

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

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

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

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