Experienced job interviewers are no better than novices at spotting lying candidates

This post was written by Christian Jarrett and originally found on the BPS Research Digest blog.
 
For the penultimate round of the TV show The Apprentice, the competing entrepreneurs must face a series of interviews with a crack team of hardened executives. The implicit, believable message is that these veterans have seen all the interview tricks in the book and will spot any blaggers a mile off. However, a new study provides the reality TV show with a reality check. A team led by Marc-André Reinhard report that experienced job interviewers are in fact no better than novice interviewers at spotting when a candidate is lying.

The researchers filmed 14 volunteers telling the truth about a job they'd really had in the past and then spinning a yarn about time in a job they'd never really had. The volunteers were offered a small monetary reward to boost their motivation. These clips were then played online to 46 highly experienced interviewers (they'd conducted between 21 and 1000 real-life job interviews), 92 interviewers with some experience (they'd interviewed at least once), and 214 students who'd never before acted as a job interviewer. The participants' task was to identify the clips in which the interviewee was speaking truthfully about their work experience, and the clips in which the interviewee was fabricating.

Overall the participants achieved an accuracy rate of 52 per cent - barely above chance performance, which is consistent with a huge literature showing how poor most of us are at spotting deception. But the headline finding is that the more experienced interviewers were no better than the novice interviewers at spotting lying job candidates - the first time that this topic has been researched. Greater work seniority, having more work experience and having more subordinates at work were also unrelated to the ability to spot lying job candidates.

There was a glimmer of hope that interview lie-detection skills could be taught. Participants who reported more correct beliefs about non-verbal cues to lying (e.g. liars don't in fact fidget more) were slightly more successful at recognising which job candidates were lying (each correct belief about a non-verbal cue added 1.2 per cent more accuracy on average). Experienced and novice interviewers in the current study didn't differ in their knowledge about lying cues, which helps explain why the veterans were no better at the task. The more experienced interviewers were however more skeptical overall, tending to rate more of the clips as featuring lying.

"Our results provide the first evidence that employment interviewers may not be better at detecting deception in job interviews than lay persons," the researchers said, "although it is a judgmental context that they are very experienced with."

Although the main gist of the results is consistent with related research in other contexts - for example, studies have found police detectives are no better at spotting lies, despite their interrogation experience - this study has some serious limitations, which undermine the applicability of the findings to the real world. Above all, the study did not involve real interviews, which meant the participants were unable to interact with the interviewees in a dynamic manner.

Reinhard, M., Scharmach, M., and Müller, P. (2013). It's not what you are, it's what you know: experience, beliefs, and the detection of deception in employment interviews Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43 (3), 467-479 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01011.x

Who pays the biggest price for managing emotional displays in the workplace?

Understanding workplace demands on our emotions is one of our popular topics. Recent research combines two issues we've reported on previously: surface acting, the form of emotional labour that involves expressing emotions you don't genuinely feel, and affect spin, a measure of the variability of a person's emotional experiences. The paper suggests that overall, surface acting places greater demands on people high in affect spin.

Daniel Beal and colleagues ran their study with 64 restaurant servers from seven US restaurants. At regular stages in a shift, participants used PDA devices to record states and behaviours they had experienced since the last collection stage. This included how much surface acting they had performed, stress and fatigue measures, and ratings of various emotional states (eg happiness, guilt). The latter was used to compute affect spin by determining each individual's 'emotional centre' and then establishing how much they varied from this centre across the study. Participation was for an average of 10 shifts, with four collections per shift (shift start, pre-rush, post rush, shift end).

The ultimate study outcome measure was fatigue, and the data confirmed the researchers' prediction that surface acting would affect this in two ways. Directly - effortful strategies use up psychological resources - and indirectly through heightened stress, as a consequence of body physiology being forced away from natural expressions. The researchers suspected that affect spin would further influence this story and put this to the test using a multi-level model of how acting, stress and fatigue interact, both for individuals with low-affect spin - meaning their emotions are relatively consistent and non-dynamic - and for those with high-spin.

High spin participants saw surface acting increase their fatigue to a greater extent than their low spin co-workers. We know that high emotional variability makes it difficult to anticipate what emotions will emerge; this may make it harder to wrangle these sudden states into shape - especially if the emotion to be masked is extreme.

Similarly, whereas low spin individuals find surface acting slightly stressful, those with high spin seem to be more affected. Beale's team predicted this, as high spin individuals are generally more reactive to emotionally resonant situations, exactly the situations where surface acting tends to be needed.

But there is a silver lining for high spin: although they feel more stress, they can shrug it off more easily. It's plausible that their nature leads them to experience more daily drama, and they have learned to cope with it as a part of life. weakening somewhat the path from stress to fatigue. Still, overall the high spin individuals ended up more fatigued from surface acting than their counterparts.

As emotional labour is part of so many jobs nowadays, in the burgeoning service industry and beyond, it's important to understand what the consequences are for employee wellbeing. Stress and fatigue are predictors of burnout and job turnover, so understanding risk factors for different kinds of people gets us a step closer to supporting them and helping the workplace to contain natural smiles, as well as forced ones.
 

Beal, D., Trougakos, J., Weiss, H., & Dalal, R. (2013). Affect Spin and the Emotion Regulation Process at Work. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0032559

Wish you were here!" - how a postcard can help attract the best talent

In 2004, in Silicon Valley, Google posted a huge billboard ad featuring a mathematical problem. The answer led to a web address with yet another puzzle to crack. People who successfully followed this intellectual treasure hunt ended up being invited in for a job interview.

This is an extreme example of a recruitment  principle spelled out in a new article by psychologists in Belgium. They say that distinctive recruitment procedures are the secret to attracting more and better job applicants, especially in fields like engineering where competition for the best talent is intense.

Working with a Belgian technology company, Saartje Cromheecke and her colleagues sent out a real job opportunity to 1,997 potential applicants, around half of them via email (as is the industry standard), and half via a hand-written postcard depicting a coffee mug and a blank daily agenda. The email and postcard message featured the same layout and included the same written information and content about the job vacancy.

Sixty-two of the contacted engineers applied for the job - 82% of them had received the postcard, just 18% had received the email. Stated differently, only 1% of the engineers who were emailed actually applied for the job compared with 5% of those who received a postcard. This latter figure represents a high response rate for the field. Moreover, the respondents to the postcard tended to be better educated, consistent with the researchers' prediction that a recruitment message sent via a "strange" medium will be more likely to grab the attention of better-qualified personnel who aren't actively looking for new opportunities.

The researchers said that social cognition research has shown how we adopt mental "scripts" for different aspects of our lives. "... recruiting in a strange way that differs from what competitors are doing is likely to be inconsistent with recruitment scripts," they said, "enhancing potential applicants' attention, attraction, and intention to apply."

It's important to note, Cromheecke's team aren't saying that postcards will always be the answer. Rather, "this field experiment puts forth 'media strangeness' as a more general evidence-based principle, which recruiters might take into account when selecting media for communicating job postings."

This post was written by Christian Jarrett and originally found on the BPS Research Digest blog. 

Cromheecke, S., Van Hoye, G., and Lievens, F. (2013). Changing things up in recruitment: Effects of a ‘strange’ recruitment medium on applicant pool quantity and quality. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/joop.12018

Accountability provokes more team-focused behaviours in leaders who are outsiders

Sometimes leaders epitomise the group they seek to lead, such as a former trucker heading a transport trade union. In other cases leaders are less prototypical; while they may have the attributes for the role, they 'come from outside'. How might leaders from these two moulds respond when the workplace demands more accountability for their actions?  A team led by Steffen Giessner of Erasmus University set out to know more, investigating the team-oriented behaviours that leaders engage in when they know they will be scrutinised by followers.

At first blush, the prototypical leaders might be highly responsive under conditions of accountability. After all, it's harder to justify treating yourself as special and above a group when you resemble them so closely; better to act for 'your people' and cement your position as 'one of them'. But a first experiment with 152 students suggested otherwise.

Here each participant was led to believe they were leading a virtual team of three followers, and had been selected on the basis of either being very group prototypical or group non-prototypical, according to their answers to a questionnaire. They were then to complete decision-making tasks by assigning analysis work to their followers and making the final call on what answers to provide. Better answers would score points - some for each follower, and more for the leader - with group combined scores and individual scores both leading to possible financial reward.

What the researchers cared about was how the leaders would carve up the points-pie when they were given the authority to do so themselves. Just before this decision, half the participants were told they would need to justify their reasons to the team, and meet with them face to face before the end of the experiment. In this high accountability condition, the non-prototypical leaders dropped the proportion of points they kept for themselves to a level significantly lower than the baseline set by the experimental rules up to that point. Without the accountability, they held on to the baseline number of points, or even a little more.

 Meanwhile the prototypical leaders showed an intermediate level of generosity across both conditions. Their team-oriented behaviours didn't alter when accountability was put on the horizon.  Giessner's team believed that this reflects the relative security that prototypicality provides: by nature part of the in-group, there is less pressure to try and prove it when under scrutiny.

The investigators followed this with a field study  of 64 leaders and 209 followers. Leaders self-rated their prototypicality and how much accountability was present in the job, as well as another factor: team identification. Giessner's team suspected that in reality, accountability may not motivate non-prototypical leaders when they don't care about being part of the team, such as an interim manager aiming to get their job done before parachuting out. This hypothesis was borne out: followers' ratings of their leaders team-oriented behaviours (such as willingness to sacrifice own time for the benefit of the team) were high for non-prototypical leaders under accountability, but only if team identification was also high.

To make sense of this, I think of the postgraduate-trained specialist leading the salt-of-the-earth law enforcement team: at the end of the day, do they consider themselves police too? If so, they are likely to respond to increases in accountability with visible team-focused behaviour.

Of course, this research doesn't address other reasons why you might demand scrutiny of leader decisions, such as keeping them honest or providing transparency to a wider audience and thus helping information exchange. But as a tool for encouraging team behaviours, this evidence suggests that accountability may be most potent when aimed at outsiders who care about being included.

Giessner, S., van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W., & Sleebos, E. (2013). Team-Oriented Leadership: The Interactive Effects of Leader Group Prototypicality, Accountability, and Team Identification. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0032445

Further reading:

Rus, D., van Knippenberg, D., & Wisse, B. (2012). Leader power and
self-serving behavior: The moderating role of accountability. The Lead-
ership Quarterly, 23, 13–26. DOI:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.11.002 

 

Workplace psychopathy: what consequences does it have?

Continuing our report on Smith and Lilienfeld's review of workplace psychopathy (part one here), we turn to the consequences it has - for leadership, for the organisation, and for unethical, even criminal behaviour.

Leadership effects

Is psychopathy behind 'dark-side' and maladaptive approaches to leadership? Last post discussed a study by Babiak et al study looking at rates of psychopathy. The study also collected 360 data, and that data suggests that high scorers tended to be seen as weaker in supporting their team. However, they were also seen as more innovative than lower scorers. Some research suggests that start-up entrepreneurs tend to have stronger psychopathic traits, consistent with this, but a recent study counters this, suggesting that once core entrepreneurial traits are taken into account, psychopathy doesn't assist in innovation-related entrepreneurial outcomes.

Turning to research on leadership style, a study with management students suggests those who score higher in psychopathy are more likely to use passive leadership styles rather than transformational leadership. However, monomethod issues apply here. Another interesting study called for presidential historian experts to rate features of various presidents. Poorer presidential performance was associated with the Fearless Dominance subscale, and the Self-Centered impulsivity subscale with problems like tolerating unethical behaviour in subordinates and events like empeachment.

As you can see, a range of effects have been observed, but what the literature could really do with is corroboration of specific effects, preferably via replication.

Organisational consequences

Psychopaths are toxic for organisations, undermining them and making them less effective. Right? The review reaches a surprising conclusion here. Drawing on a meta-analysis looking at workplace performance and counterproductive work behaviours, it concludes that while there may be an effect, it appears very weak. One trend in the data was that psychopathy had an even weaker affect on work outcomes when found in positions of authority, running counter to the concept that 'nasty' traits are survivable but lead to senior derailment.

Recent single studies suggest that aggressive negotiation tactics such as threats and manipulation are associated with psychopathy directly or with dark triad trait scores (this includes psychopathy alongside related constructs such as narcissism and machiavellianism).
Again, these studies (and some of those in the meta-analysis suffer from the mono-method flaw which can artificially inflate findings.

This all suggests that at best, the impact of psychopathic traits on measurable CWB and performance is not as ruinous as popular reports may suggest.

Unethical and criminal behaviour

Ok, maybe not ruinous, but how about unethical? There is some evidence for this. Global psychopathy scores in students are associated with more willingness to take an unethical route in response to a hypothetical work dilemma. And MBAs with lower levels in Kohlberg's cognitive moral development and take a subjectivist approach that places personal values over universal moral ones were on average higher in psychopathy, albeit almost entirely due to a single subscale rather than higher ratings across the construct.

Moving from hypothetical decisions, another study found that employees with managers they rated higher on psychopathic traits believed their organisation showed less social responsibility and committment to employees. However, this again falls foul of mono-method issues.

What about perpetrators of white collar crime? This is where popular accounts really bandy about connections, with prominent criminals such as Bernie Madoff depicted as "poster boys for successful corporate psychopathy".
Studies looking at undergraduates  suggests that willingness to countenance white collar criminal acts is associated with psychopathy traits.

But when it comes to direct evidence, there is very little. One modestly sized sample of encarcerated individuals with either white collar, non-white collar or a mixture of convictions was assessed on a range of psychopathy sub-scales, but none of the hypothesised differences were observed. While other subscores did differ across different combinations of groups (e.g.,  (Machiavellian Egocentricity for the White+Mixed was higher than the non-White-collar) but these non-predicted findings are exploratory.

Conclusion

Smith and Lilienfield conclude that 'current evidence that psychopathy is tied to negative outcomes in the workplace is suggestive, but not conclusive'. I find the review important in reminding us that cruel, selfish or aggressive acts don't require the perpetrator to be psychopathic, and asking us to be a little more careful in attributing the ailments of the business world to one specific condition.

Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 204-218 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007

Workplace psychopathy: the knowns and unknowns

Workplace psychopathy was an obscure, unknown issue prior to the mid-1990s, but hundreds of popular accounts have been published since then. A measured review by Sarah Francis Smith and Scott Lilienfield gets to the heart of what we really know about the phenomenon. There is a lot to cover so we're publishing about it in two posts.

Psychopathy? It's complicated

From the off, the authors raise how complicated the issue is. Many studies rely on psychopathy and outcome data from single sources, leaving open the possibility of both rater bias - the manager whose performance and 'psychopathic tendencies' are rated by the same hypercritical individual - and halo effects, where a rater sees their organisation as ethical because their boss is so personally pleasant. Where possible I've flagged this as a monomethod issue.

Moreover, psychopathy is measured and defined in many ways, using approaches that are variously clinical or occupational. One durable distinction is between primary psychopathy - the emotional and personality traits of an individual - and secondary psychopathy, concerned with behaviours. The primary are arguably key, as a restrained psychopath can choose to refrain from unproductive behaviours.

How common in business and in leaders?

A commonly cited figure of 3% prevalence in managers versus 1% in the general population is based on a single study, so is there other evidence out there to corroborate higher psychopathy in business? Yes, but it's still tentative.

One study compared a small executive sample to larger psychiatric and forensic populations, and did indeed find the executives scored higher on specific scales that were argued to relate to psychopathy. However, the scales were designed to measure other traits like narcissism, not psychopathy per se, using a measure that was not well-validated. Another study reported that commerce majors showed higher psychopathic traits, but not behaviours, than other undergraduates.

Perhaps the clearest support comes from Babiak et al's (2010) finding that psychopathic traits are higher within a corporate sample relative to community controls, and that high scorers tended to have higher executive positions.

So psychopathy may be more common in business and even leadership, although we don't yet have comprehensive indications of how much. But does it matter?

We'll find out tomorrow.
Update: see part two here.

Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 204-218 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007

Highly extraverted sales people perform more poorly

What sales manager wouldn't hire extraverts? They tend to be comfortable in interactions, naturally display enthusiasm and confidence for their own ideas, and can be firm and persistent when they meet with resistance to their agenda. Scrutinise many sales forces and you'll probably spot this reasoning at work.

Yet research finds weak and sometimes inconsistent relationships between sales performance and extraversion, with three meta-analyses finding the summed effects to amount to .07 - a non-significant finding. A new study by Adam Grant from the Wharton School, Pennsylvania, suggests that the sweet spot for sales performance might instead be balanced between extraversion and introversion.

Grant looked at week-on-week sales performance (revenue earned) for 340 outbound sales executives over three months. All completed a big-five personality inventory beforehand, comprising extraversion along with the other four primary personality dimensions; the inventory required them to rate their agreement with various items using a seven-point Likert scale. Regression analysis on the data revealed no linear relationship between extraversion and sales performance, instead finding a quadratic effect. Specifically, performance rose with extraversion until a peak at 4.5, well before the maximum of seven. From this point, performance actually decreased.

In hard numbers, the performers at the peak made on average $151 per hour, versus $127 for those whose extraversion was a standard deviation below, and a more meagre $115 for those a standard deviation above. Grant's analysis confirmed that the findings were not being driven by a confound from other personality factors, for instance a toxic combination of low agreeableness and high extraversion which might invite conflicts.

Why might those falling more towards the middle of the scale perform better? Grant dubs these 'ambiverts' and suggests that they are more likely to engage in give and take with clients, falling back to listening as introverts tend to, but then being willing to act and engage. Meanwhile, the strongly extraverted may fall into a range of traps - the dark underbelly of their strengths - by dominating others, projecting overconfidence, and sending obvious 'influence' signals that may lead to prospective customers raising their defences.

Grant concludes that organisations may want to look harder at the relationship between personality and sales performance to guide recruitment strategies, and that they may 'benefit from training highly extraverted salespeople to model some of the quiet, reserved tendencies of their more introverted peers'.

 
Grant, A. (2013). Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463706


Further reading:

Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A. (2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next? International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9–30. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2389.00160