Is Your Best Performer Pathological or "Driven"?

High performers are welcome in any business and people who consistently meet their performance objectives are likely to be promoted over those who don’t. Some employees are so "driven" they spend every waking moment accomplishing their career goals and soon become budding stars. Is your best performer "driven" or is there something else going on?

Driven people are highly motivated and focused on their goals. They make compromises in their life to reach those goals. There are times when they make mistakes and make a wrong choice, but ultimately they continue on the right path. They believe that through persistence and hard work they can obtain what is important to them.

Pathological workers may also show high drive toward their goals and similarly make mistakes. However, they also carry with them other traits such as hostility, risk-taking, deceitfulness, callousness, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsivity and manipulativeness (De Caluwei, Decuyper & De Clercq, 2013). The value of the goal succeeds other considerations in much the same was as a gambling addict can't stop gambling.

Employees who are goal driven are an asset to any organization and create high expectations for others to achieve. They raise company performance and are a positive contributor to workplace culture. They do not neglect their needs, and they concern themselves with how they achieve those goals. High ethical standards and performance can work hand-in-hand.

Workers who show pathological behavior are outside the normal and seem to put an inappropriate weight on the achievement of a particular goal. Its obtainment appears to be more of an extension of the self, and its importance is artificially raised until few things else seem to matter. People become a nuisance in the process and their input can be discarded.

“Win at all costs” pathological behavior should be discouraged in the workplace. I have seen organizations where individuals achieve their goals at the expense of the entire company. Pathological employees get promoted because they create results but also damage their teams and departments in the process. They are the chaos creators that lower departmental performance, develop toxic work environments, and increase turnover rates

Well rounded employees can put their goals in perspective of the rest of their lives and the needs of others. They understand that while their objectives are essential they must also raise the status of the group and fulfill the needs of the company. Pathological employees are incapable of such reasoning and are only loyal to themselves. Higher human performance comes with focus and drive. To those with a conscious the ends is not the only justification of the means.

De Caluwe, E. Decuyper, M. & De Clercq, B. (2013). The child behavior checklist dysregulation profile predicts adolescent DSM-% pathological personality traits in 4 years. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 22 (7).

Pushing Our Brightest to Higher Performance through Awareness Coursework

Gifted individuals are untapped national treasures that represent what is best about society in the sense that they push human thought and performance to new levels. Unfortunately, our society has a difficult time identifying gifted individuals, challenging them, and encouraging them to perform at the highest levels. Identifying potentially giftedness in college students and placing them in a course designed around self-awareness of their unique talents can improve their performance and raise their confidence.

Giftedness is a physiological and psychological difference that leads to higher levels of performance. The process of challenge, stress, disintegration, and reemergence is uncharted territory for many researchers. Theories have discussed the difficulties gifted individuals face in their over excitabilities (OE) and positive disintegration that leads to higher performance.

Students may go through their whole lives wondering why they think differently, act differently, get excited about some ideas, and can move in and out of “flow” where the outside world ceases to exist. The higher their intelligence, the more different they see themselves as they rub against conventional wisdom. It is precisely these traits and challenges that push them willingly, or unwillingly, into higher forms of human development.

If the purpose of higher education is to enhance individual knowledge and performance, then such classes should be seen as important. According to Overzier and Nauta (2014) having a gifted class can lead to stronger overall performance of the student. Some individuals may go on to invent new things and solve world problems.

One of the reasons why an awareness class leads to higher performance is that it gives a stronger context for one’s behaviors, thoughts and actions that leads to higher forms of confidence. That confidence can make its way into future ways of thinking and performance. Confidence and high performance can be an unbeatable combination.

The idea of a class for gifted and high-performance individuals may have positive benefits for the students, colleges, and their countries. It makes one wonder that if students were selected based on performance and creativity and then offered a class about leadership, self-awareness, etc…that heavily loaded with these ideas, would it have an impact throughout their lives? In an online university, it may be possible to have a class that focused on the universal traits of high-performance individuals.

Overzier, P. Nauta, N. (2014). Coping with qualities of giftedness. Gifted & Talented International, 29 (1/2)

Using Action Plans to Increase Performance

Action plans offer the opportunity help people think through the various challenges they face and apply some type of plan on how to overcome these difficulties. Whether discussing students, employees our yourself it is beneficial to consider the benefits of implementing action plans in a way that encourages greater insight by the person writing them. Insight sometimes leads to higher levels of performance.

In my experience in labor relations and as a professor in business I find that performance issues may not be willful but are a result of a lack of experience or understanding. For example, in labor relations I have found attendance to be a major employer concern. Through the standard grievance process employees can promise to make it to work on time but without an action plan the problem isn't likely to be resolved soon.

The same idea applies to students who consistently fail to turn their work by class deadlines. Each assignment they scramble for some excuse that will get them off the hook. The problem is not the creativity of the excuses but their processes. Understanding how chronic poor performance is part of a process of thinking is beneficial for finding solutions.

Before giving grace to poor performance consider requiring an action plan to ensure the person has some understanding on how to improve the situation. Requiring the person to develop a plan on how to change their processes helps them think through what is causing the problem and how it can be improved. They can search through their strengths and weaknesses that help them discover equitable solutions to the problem.

Most of us live our lives by patterns and reflecting on those changes needed to adjust the pattern is beneficial to sustainable performance.  An employee who has an attendance problem could discover the necessity of starting early, putting out their items the night before, and getting plenty of rest. A student who turns their work in chronically late may need to start assignments at the beginning of each week and also devote a full hour to writing each day.

Are Satisfied Employees Less Willing to Help Others?

Organizations can be regarded as a system of relationships between individuals. Social exchange theory (e.g. Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005) provides a general framework to understand these relationships, arguing that positive interactions are likely to increase cooperation among individuals in organizations. While there is much information about how cooperative relationships evolve, far less is known about how these relationships affect each other. Now, taking into account that employees have multiple relationships as they are dealing with coworkers and with supervisors, the question is whether cooperation in one direction may affect cooperation in the other. 

From an organizational perspective, career systems may be viewed as a means to create cooperative relationships with employees. At the same time, however, they can reduce cooperation among coworkers as they will compete for higher positions. This mechanism was found in a study among Dutch organizations: the more satisfied employees were with their career opportunities, the less willing they were to help their colleagues (Koster, 2014). This suggests that the motivational effect of career systems may be at odds with the conditions that are needed to create positive work relations among employees. Organizations that are based around teamwork should be aware of this potential trade-off of between career incentives and cooperation among employees.

 References

Cropanzano, R., & Mitchell, M. S. (2005). Social exchange theory: An interdisciplinary review. Journal of Management, 31, 874-900.

Koster, F. (2014). “When two worlds collide”. Career satisfaction and altruistic organizational citizenship behavior. International Journal of Business Science and Applied Management, 9(1), 1-12.

Bio

Dr. Ferry Koster is Associate Professor of Labor, Organization, and Management at the department of Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), the Netherlands. Besides that, he is a researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His empirical research includes the cross national comparison of formal policies and individual attitudes, the comparative study of organizations, and organizational behavior. A general theme across these studies is the question to what extent and how social context relates to individual outcomes.

EUR profile of Ferry Koster

 http://www.eur.nl/fsw/sociologie/profielen/profiel_mis/10538/

Don’t Make Resolutions! Set Goals!

By Dr Andree Swanson

Another new year and guess what I received in the mail?  Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, 24-hour Fitness and a whole slew of advertisements that weigh in on (no pun intended) those people who believe in the power of the New Year’s Resolution.  While surfing Facebook, a family member posted that she had to park a mile away from the gym.  In a month, parking will return to normal.

To affect change, you must change your behavior.  Norcross, Ratzin, and Payne (1989) conducted a study on 213 adults who made New Year’s resolutions.  “Successful resolvers were also found to report employing significantly more behavioral strategies and less self-blame and wishful thinking than unsuccessful resolvers” (Norcross, Ratzin, & Payne, 1989, Abstract).

Consider creating a vision board, instead of making New Year’s resolutions.  This is not only fun to make, but can be a constant reminder of your focus for the year.  (I used to do this on a large post-it note on my wall).

Picture provided by Dr. Andree Swanson

Here are some tips on how to proceed with your Vision Board.

Picture provided by Dr. Andree Swanson.

To learn more about creating a vision board, visit:

http://marthabeck.com/2008/07/the-subtle-tricks-to-building-an-effective-vision-board/

       

Reference

Norcross, J. C., Ratzin, A. C., & Payne, D. (1989). Ringing in the New Year: The change processes and reported outcomes of resolutions. Addictive behaviors, 14(2), 205-212.

Subconscious Priming of Performance

Priming is a concept that entails embedding a concept into the human subconscious in an effort to alter behavior. Dr. Minas, Dr. Bhagwatwar, and Dr. Dennis from the University of Indiana have studied priming on a group to improve business communication and creativity on a group level (2013). They used computer simulated games to provide neural priming and then test creativity and ideation thereafter and found that there was a high correlation between the two. 

Organizations often seek to create higher levels of creativity and innovation to produce new products and services for market. Some are searching methods for using online communication methods in order to develop a stronger level of communication performance. This can help in everything from workplace productivity to effective marketing methods. If online communication can influence behavior the overall financial and social benefits are large. 

Our subconscious cognition influences our online behavior.  The use of priming taps into our working memory through beliefs, values, and attitudes that impact subsequent behaviors.  It can be primed through words, pictures, symbols, and a number of other ways. The researchers used a simulation game to create primed behavior. 

The use of supraliminal priming allows the participants to know the stimulus but not know its overall intention. Postmes et al. (2001), found that priming online in pro-social stimulus produced positive pro-social behaviors. An anonymous group’s behavior changed to develop higher levels of performance in social ways.

The key to priming is to activate mental representations (i.e. images). The use of subliminal priming focuses on imperceptible bursts of information that is then masked.  Supraliminal priming is an obvious stimulus that activates mental representations but the intent is hidden from the participants conscious. The two can be used together or separate to influence follow-up thinking. Participants shouldn’t be aware that they are being primed in order for it to be effective. 

Priming can impact access to categories of concepts through a series of words. The author uses the word “popcorn” to show how categories of eating, corn, family, etc… can be primed. The primed words can be used in an individual or within a social setting. When groups are primed for performance or creativity they can perform better due to previous mental representations that were activated. 

The researchers used 175 sophomores working in groups of five participants creating thirty-five groups. The participants worked on generating ideas for increasing tourism as well as reducing pollution. They were instructed to generate as many ideas as possible and build off of the ideas of other groups. They used group chat rooms to foster their discussions. Participants were performance primed or neutral primed by sequentially picking words that created newspaper headlines. 

The researchers found that those who were primed for performance achieved significantly higher new ideas and performance than those whose primes were neutral. The priming impacted an individual’s semantic networks and they in turn influenced other peoples. The impact is additive as each person generates ideas and builds off of others ideas. 

The significance is profound as it could impact both marketing and group performance. By using proper primes within a sequence it is possible to ensure that the priming effects do not wear off and that certain behaviors are more likely to be exhibited based upon their semantic category mapping (i.e. mind mapping). We are consistently and randomly primed in our environment. How, we act and react to others primes our next thoughts and behaviors. People are not able to often connect the primes to accurately understand their environment. If a group of people are negatively priming others they can expect lower performance while if they are positively priming others they can expect higher performance. This is done without intention but is a natural part of living socially and helps us create culture. This is why our social environment is extremely important to our overall success. Organizations can seek to create positive priming environments that foster higher levels of creativity, performance, and development. 

Dennis, A., Minas, R. & Bhagwatwar, A. (2013) Sparking creativity: improving electronic brainstorming with individual cognitive priming. Journal of Management Information Systems, 29 (4). 

 Postmes, T. et. al. (2001). Social influence in computer mediated communication: The effects of anonymity on group behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27 (10)