Every day we learn from those around us how we are expected to behave. Employees observe their colleagues and from them learn the behaviors and attitudes that typify the organization’s culture; investors study organizational signals to pinpoint investment opportunities; and negotiators evaluate their counterparts in order to determine their own negotiation strategies. Across situations, individuals are constantly perceiving and evaluating social information: examining the dynamics of their team’s hierarchy, learning their group’s descriptive and prescriptive social norms, and evaluating offers and counteroffers in negotiations. These perceptions can have powerful effects on individual behavior and thus on group and team interactions and organizational performance.
My research focuses on how individuals perceive, process, and use social information in groups and teams. In two intersecting research streams I investigate how individuals perceive and evaluate information, both social and asocial, and how individuals’ perceptions affect their interaction in groups and teams. Several of my projects combine these streams and examine how individuals perceive social norms, and then act on these perceptions, in small groups and teams.
My research focuses on how individuals perceive, process, and use social information in groups and teams. In two intersecting research streams I investigate how individuals perceive and evaluate information, both social and asocial, and how individuals’ perceptions affect their interaction in groups and teams. Several of my projects combine these streams and examine how individuals perceive social norms, and then act on these perceptions, in small groups and teams.
Social outliers draw a lot of attention from those inside and outside their group and yet little is known about their impact on perceptions of their group as a whole. The present studies examine how outliers influence observers’ summary perceptions of a group’s behavior and inferences about the group’s descriptive and prescriptive norms. Across four studies (N = 1739) we examine how observers perceive descriptive and prescriptive social norms in groups containing outliers of varying degrees. We find consistent evidence that observers overweight outlying behavior when judging the descriptive and prescriptive norms, but overweight outliers less as they become more extreme, especially in perceptions of the prescriptive norm. We find this pattern across norms pertaining to punctuality (Studies 1-2, 4) and clothing formality (Study 3) and for outliers who are both prescriptively and descriptively deviant (e.g. late arrivers), as well as for outliers who are only descriptive deviants (e.g. early arrivers). We further demonstrate that observers’ perceptions of the group shift in the direction of moderate outliers. This occurs because observers anchor on the outlier’s behavior and adjust their recollections of non-outlying individuals, making their inferences about the group’s average behavior more extreme.
Related Work
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Inferring a group’s norms: To whom in its hierarchy do we look for insight?
The present research examines the weight individuals assign to the behavior of higher versus lower ranking group members when inferring the descriptive social norms of a group. Across several studies we demonstrate that when individuals attempt to estimate a group’s social norms they prefer to observe the behavior of lower ranking individuals, give more weight to the behavior of lower ranking individuals, and focus more on the behavior of lower ranking individuals. We suggest that people’s preference for focusing on lower versus higher ranking individuals when estimating social norms is based on the belief that the former are more representative group members and, in the case of advice, provide more useful information.
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Lay understanding of outliers
Individuals must frequently make sense of distributions that are often complicated by noise. How do individuals determine whether a particular outlying observation is part of the greater target distribution and should be incorporated into judgments or a fluke that ought to be disregarded? In a simple prediction task, we examine how individuals incorporate outliers into their estimation of the average and compare this estimation to various prescriptive models (averaging, Bayesian updating, tests of discordancy) as well as directional predictions made by theories such as anchoring. We find that individuals correctly discount outlying values but still give more weight than optimality.
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Behavioral processes in long-lag intervention studies (2017, Perspectives on Psych Science)
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We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend, stems from psychology’s long tradition of short-lag lab experiments where there is little scope for intervening behavioral processes. Studying process in the lab invariably involves studying psychological processes, but in long-lag field experiments it is important to study causally relevant behavioral processes as well as psychological ones. To illustrate the roles that behavioral processes can play in long-lag experiments we examine field experiments motivated by three policy-relevant goals: prejudice reduction, health promotion, and educational achievement. In each of the experiments discussed we identify various behavioral pathways through which the manipulated psychological state could have produced the observed outcome. We argue that if psychologists conducting long-lag interventions posited a theory of change that linked manipulated psychological states to outcomes via behavioral pathways, the result would be richer theory and more practically useful research. Movement in this direction would also permit more opportunities for productive collaborations between psychologists and other social scientists interested in similar social problems.
Hierarchy in Groups and Teams
Expertise individuation ameliorates status hierarchies in teams. |
A meta-analysis of the effect of team hierarchy on group performance. (paper) |
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Status hierarchies are often thought to be functional for team coordination and performance. However, status hierarchies often fail to realize such purported coordination benefits, and the psychological processes explaining this dark side of status hierarchies are poorly understood. We address this gap by proposing that a status hierarchy can threaten team members’ distinctiveness and self-esteem, and create anxiety among members about the ability and willingness of themselves and others to coordinate with the team. We test whether these self-esteem deficits, and associated coordination anxiety, can be overcome when teams have high intra-team expertise individuation, where each member has identified their own unique expertise profile within the team. A survey experiment and a field experiment involving 80 start-up teams show that expertise individuation can help teams overcome the psychological dark sides of team status hierarchies.
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We synthesize extant research on how, why, and when hierarchy impacts team effectiveness into an overarching framework, integrating the two dominant theoretical perspectives on how and why hierarchy impacts team effectiveness with different contingency models that have recently emerged. We test the main, mediated, and moderated effects predicted within this framework with a meta-analysis that draws on results from 54 prior studies (N = 13,914 teams). Our findings show that, on net, hierarchy negatively impacts team effectiveness, that this effect is mediated by increased conflict-enabling states, and is exacerbated when aspects of the team (membership instability, skill differentiation), and hierarchy (mutability) can make hierarchical teams seemingly prone to conflict. The positive mediating role of coordination-enabling processes and the moderating roles of other aspects of the task (interdependence, complexity) and hierarchy (form) were not supported, with the exception that task ambiguity enhanced the positive effects of hierarchy. Given our findings largely support dysfunctional views on hierarchy, future research is needed to understand when and why hierarchy may be more likely to live up to its purported functional benefits.
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Other work in team dynamics
Can diversity improve firm performance? Evidence from Silicon Valley Diversity Announcements.How does diversity affect firm performance? In 2014, Google released a diversity announcement that revealed for the first time its racial and gender diversity levels, which were both surprisingly low. Other Silicon Valley firms soon followed suit. We use event study methods to evaluate the impact of diversity announcements on firm financial performance, as measured by stock market valuations. For example, we estimate that Google's announcement of surprisingly low diversity caused a strong valuation loss. Our findings suggest that, for major technology companies and perhaps other firms who rely on innovation, more diversity could improve firm financial performance.
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In this chapter we provide an integrative overview of the large and growing body of research on conflict in teams. We begin with an overview of the largest body of work in this area – on the effects, moderators, and antecedents of the different types of conflict in teams. We highlight work on traditional distinctions between task conflicts over the ideas and goals of task work, and relationship conflicts about personalities and interpersonal issues, and we also give attention to work on two additional types of conflict in teams: process conflicts about the logistics of task accomplishment, and status conflicts about disagreements over prestige and hierarchy within the team
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