How empathy makes room for innovation.
The economic impact of the pandemic has highlighted an important question of strategy for organizations: lean in hard or make time for self-care? Anecdotally, many leaders are reacting to the stress by asking employees to work more hours than ever, even as those employees admit that they are already burning out.
To survive the pandemic, organizations need agility, innovation and high levels of productivity. Pushing hard is a solid method in the short term, but it stops making sense in a pandemic that is predicted to impact the world economy for years to come. …
It’s well documented that when a narcissist is in leadership, organizations are less ethical, less collaborative and do not perform as well. But how exactly do narcissists create this in an organization? The authors of a new paper suggest they do it by “infecting” their corporate cultures, and that infection rages on even after the narcissist leaves.
If you’ve ever had a narcissistic boss, you’ve seen some of the behaviors they employ to get ahead. For instance, narcissistic leaders are paid more than other leaders. The study authors believe that this occurs because narcissists are experts at stealing credit for the work done by others or by their employees. On the other hand, if something goes wrong narcissistic leaders shift the blame and refuse to take responsibility. …
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, an intriguing poll shows that Americans agree on one key issue: science. The survey published by Research!America shows that Americans overwhelmingly support science, regardless of their political parties.
According to the survey analysis, a strong majority of Americans agree that “the Covid-19 pandemic is a disruptive event and requires urgent refocusing of America’s commitment to science.” 88% believe that science benefits them and 89% believe that America should maintain its global leadership in science. Exactly.
The unprecedented avalanche of misinformation that has been spread during the Covid-19 pandemic has been discouraging to both scientists and the public they serve. As people struggle to find the information they need to make decisions about life in the pandemic, the survey indicates that they still consider science the standard. …
Misinformation has become one of the most pressing problems we face as a society. How can we find effective solutions when we can’t agree on what the facts are? And misinformation has entered just about every domain in our lives. From our healthcare to our choices as voters, how can we differentiate true from false?
At least when it comes to politics, researchers have found that simply playing a video game can help. A new video game teaches players to how spot misinformation by letting them attempt to undermine democracy. …
Researchers find a simple practice that changes how people get along at work.
Whether working from home or the office, we all want to work with a team where people get along. Yet the workplace is sometimes a place of gossip, exclusion, and bullying. Dealing with those behaviors from colleagues been shown to make us so unhappy with our jobs, it can impact our health. And that’s in addition to the loss of productivity. But finding a solution to office politics is not easy. Now, new research finds that writing in a gratitude journal can lead to less rudeness and mistreatment in the workplace.
Gratitude has well-established benefits.
Gratitude has been a hot topic for researchers lately. Studies have shown that grateful people are better at finding perspective. They are also more agreeable to be around and show greater openness to ideas. Grateful people also behave in prosocial ways. Further, gratitude has been tied to lower rates of burnout, greater happiness, and a greater feeling of social support. …
Research find this masculine stereotype hurts men.
Sleep deprivation is the norm for adults in America. The CDC recommends a bare minimum of 7 hours, but the average adult in the U.S. gets less than that. And that’s not working out well because just under half of Americans report negative consequences resulting from their sleep loss. And it’s worse for men, because sleep deprivation is more common among men than women. Researchers at the University of Oregon believe that this is due to “The Sleep-Deprived Masculinity Stereotype,” which is also the name of their paper published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
The study authors examined the idea that men don’t get enough sleep in part because of stereotypes about what it means to be a man. They found that getting less sleep is perceived as manly, as if real men don’t need sleep. …
New research shows that being selfish does not give you an advantage at work.
Despite the body of research on leadership that shows the importance of likability, there is a persistent myth that jerks get ahead. But in exciting news for anyone who has dealt with difficult people, a new research study shows that being intimidating, manipulative or selfish does not help people get ahead after all.
In findings from Berkeley Haas and UC Berkeley, evidence consistently showed that disagreeable people do not have an advantage at work. “I was surprised by the consistency of the findings. …
Monopoly was intentionally designed to make you miserable.
It was Labor Day, and we were looking for a way to spend time together as a family. “How about a board game,” my husband suggested. The boys headed to our game cabinet because we’d been having a lot of fun with board games lately.
But then we made a huge mistake! Maybe all those good family experiences made us overconfident, or maybe we just weren’t thinking. Whatever the reason, we decided to play Monopoly.
I should have known better. After all, I hate Monopoly. I have so many horrible childhood memories of Monopoly: they all ended in tears. …
New research suggests that a healthy dose of hedonism is just as important to our happiness as self-control.
In our never-ending search for happiness, researchers have been focused on self-discipline and grit for a while now. In fact, the discussion has been so dominated by the value of self-control to creating a happy life, that we often need to be reminded about “self-care.” But even self-care has become a kind of work: a vital task to schedule into our high-performance routines. All of this is supposed to lead us to success and happiness. So why does it feel like something is missing?
According to a new study, indulging ourselves sometimes is as fundamental to a happy life as self-control. That means we all need to start having more fun, but according to this study that may be harder than we think. The demands of our lives, and by extension our self-discipline, have a way of intruding on our pleasure and distracting us. …
If we weren’t sad right now, something would be wrong.
These are heavy times. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the globe and has reached unprecedented numbers in America, we are facing the reality that it’s not going anywhere soon. In pandemic life, with all the associated hardships it brings, many of us are feeling a bit down. But are we sad or are we depressed?
Dr. Pauline Boss, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and the pioneer who discovered ambiguous loss in the 1970s, wants us to understand that there is a big difference between sadness and depression. …
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