Newsletter: 2005 November Issue

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Newsletter

November 2005

Spotlight: Lechery's Toll
Study Links Sexual Harassment to Poor Team Performance

Managers and leaders may be surprised by the results of a ground-breaking new study by Jana Raver of Queen's School of Business. It shows that the ill effects of sexual harassment aren't limited to individual victims. They ripple out and damage a team's ability to work together — and ultimately, the bottom line. ...more

This Issue: Teamwork Triple-header: A recent Queen's IRC research symposium yielded insights for leaders of high performing professional work groups, investigating virtual teams, compensation for teams, and teams in primary health care ...more The Great Divide: Lucinda Bray on the disconnect between North American management concepts and European ideas ...more Prized Subscriber: Learn who won our contest and gets a jump on the leadership gap ...more Free Download: Check out Dr. Linda Duxbury's insights on the work-life crunch ...more Free Download: Learn about the National Hockey League's collective bargaining with players, and why last season was a lockout ...more

Upcoming Programs All - Toronto- Regina - Halifax Sept. 21 - 26, Kingston Industrial Relations Register Sept. 22 - 25, Kingston Building Smart Teams Register Sept. 23 - 26, Toronto Change Management Register Sept. 30 - Oct. 03, Regina Dispute Resolution Register Oct. 07, Toronto Performance Management Essentials and Strategy Register Oct. 07 - 08, Toronto Compensation Clinics (Performance+Group Benefits Programs) Register Oct. 08, Toronto Employee Group Benefits Register Oct. 15 - 17, Toronto Business Strategy Register Oct. 19 - 24, Kingston Negotiation Skills Register Oct. 21 - 24, Regina Building Smart Teams Register

Teamwork Triple-header: new research yields valuable insights for leaders of high-performing professional work groups

Three new research papers on multidisciplinary professional teams, funded by IRC to advance knowledge in the area and presented at a recent symposium at Queen's, examine virtual teams, compensation for teams, and primary care teams.

• If you have ever wondered whether virtual teams are as effective as those in one geographical location, “A Meta-Analysis of Virtual Teams Literature,” by Ana Ortiz de Guinea, Dr. Jane Webster, and Dr. Sandy Staples of Queen's School of Business, will provide valuable insights. The researchers found that as team structures increase in “virtuality,” it appears there is a negative impact on team processes but a positive impact on team effectiveness. For example, they found “significant associations between the degree of virtualness and cohesion and communication (negative); conflict (positive) and quality productivity and satisfaction (postitive).”
  
  
  
• In “Incentive Pay, Teams and Earnings: A Multi-level Approach Using Contract Data,” by Dr. Chris Riddell of Queen's School of Policy Studies investigates whether group-based incentive plans enhance incentives in teams. He found that there are “large earnings premiums for incentive pay plans when using a cross-section of business units.”
  
  
  
• Are there characteristics of high performing teams in primary health that predict effectiveness? Dr. Diana Delva and Dr. Roberta Jamieson of Queen's Department of Family Medicine say yes in their paper, “High Performance Teams in Primary Care: The Basis of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Care.” There are three key factors, they conclude. “Understanding team goals and performance, team identification/membership, and team potency predict team effectiveness in a family medicine teaching practice.”

For further details, please watch for links to downloads of the research papers in upcoming newsletters.

The Great Divide: in Europe, North American management concepts often strike a sour note

Queen's IRC faculty member Lucinda Bray is a management development consultant based in Dublin, Ireland. In the following article, she talks about the gulf between European and North American ideas about leadership — and the hidden perils this presents for an HR consultant training executives in the Old World.

Although there have been many books published on how to manage a multicultural workforce, not much is available on how to teach management and leadership across cultures. As a Canadian HR consultant working in Europe, I have long felt uncomfortable with much of the management development literature from North America because it just didn't fit. A recent book by Jeremy Rifkin provides some insight into the cultural values that underpin North American management and leadership models, and why these may not travel well.

In The European Dream, Rifkin compares the assumptions behind the American Dream with those he sees emerging as the European Dream. “The American Dream,” writes Rifkin, “is the idea that anyone, regardless of the circumstances to which they're born, can make of their lives as they choose, by dint of diligence, determination, and hard work.” “Freedom” in a North American context means autonomy, self-reliance, and personal independence. In contrast, Rifkin identifies the characteristics of the European Dream: a focus on interdependence rather than autonomy, quality of life rather than workaholism, and sustainable development rather than perpetual economic growth.

These differences present hidden challenges for the management development consultant. For starters, the cornerstone of the American Dream is the notion of individual self-determination; that anyone can become President (or Prime Minister). Much of current North American thinking about management and leadership (e.g. empowerment, personal goal-setting, servant leadership) rests on this fundamental belief in personal autonomy. Yet European history has taught some very different lessons about personal freedom, and the ability of the individual to create his or her own future, and this leads to deep skepticism about North American “flavours of the month.”

To read the full article, go to:
http://www.industrialrelationscentre.com/talent-management/articles/great-divide.htm

Prized Subscriber

Congratulations to Jennifer Johnston-Heikamp, who won a copy of The Leadership Gap: Building Leadership Capacity for Competitive Advantage, in our previous e-newsletter contest.

Free Download: “Work-Life Balance: Standing Still is Not an Option”

Click here to download a paper in which Dr. Linda Duxbury shares her rich insights on the work-life crunch, and how organizational culture is ruining the health of Canada's employees ...more

Free Download: “An Investigation Into the Collective Bargaining Relationship Between the NHL and the NHLPA, 1994-2005”

Click here to learn about the National Hockey League's collective bargaining with its Players' Association, and why last season was a lockout. The paper was prepared by James Wilton Baillie, Master's of Industrial Relations program, Queen's University. ...more

Spotlight: Lechery's Toll
“Sexual hostility” strongly linked to poor team performance

Jana Raver, Assistant Professor and E. Marie Shantz Research Fellow in Organizational Behaviour at the Queen's School of Business, is an expert in counterproductive behaviours at work. We spoke to her upon the release of her ground-breaking study, “Beyond the individual victim: Linking sexual harassment, team processes, and team performance.” Managers and leaders may be startled by her findings: that sexual harassment is widespread and is not just a problem for its direct targets; it's also bad for team performance and the bottom line.

Why should managers pay attention to this study?

I would like them to first take notice from an absolute bottom-line standpoint. This research directly demonstrates that when sexual harassment occurs in teams, it is associated with important financial implications. So it's not just that women are suffering or men are suffering on an individual basis; there are performance implications where team members don't work together as effectively when sexual harassment is occurring. Managers need to take this seriously in a business sense – and not only in a moral and legal sense.

What exactly did you examine in your research?

We looked at different types of sexual harassment – sexist hostility, sexual hostility, and unwanted sexual attention – and looked at their effects on teamwork (conflict, cohesion, citizenship behaviours) and team financial performance.

Sexist hostility is harassment simply based on gender – “Men are all pigs,” or “Women aren't smart” – and lot of this goes on. This was highest level of harassment experienced. [26% of the 160 women in the study said they had experienced this in the previous two years.]

This was separated from sexual hostility – insulting verbal and nonverbal behaviours that are explicitly sexual in nature, such as trying to get you to talk about sex. This is about sexuality versus just gender. The last type was unwanted sexual attention, which consists of behaviours aimed at eliciting sexual or romantic co-operation, such as repeatedly asking for dates despite efforts to discourage the harasser. [17% had experienced sexual hostility, and 10% unwanted sexual attention.]

We surveyed 160 women at a large food services organization that operates restaurants in the mid-Atlantic United States, in which 35 teams operate independently of one another. If anything I think our results have underestimated the prevalence of sexual harassment and its impact on teams because the organization had done a pretty good job reducing harassment. The incidence of sexually harassing behaviours was 31%. Other studies have shown higher levels of 40%-60%, or up to 70% in the military.

What were your key findings?

Different types of harassment are associated with different outcomes. We found a huge distinction between sexist hostility and sexual hostility regarding outcomes associated with teams, for example.

Sexual hostility – for example, people making very crude sexual comments, or maybe commenting to a woman that she is very promiscuous on weekends and trying to get her to talk about who she was with – had a strong relationship with the levels of team conflict, cohesion and financial performance. Teams with high levels of sexual hostility had significantly more conflict, less cohesion, and ultimately had worse financial performance than teams with little or no sexual hostility.

Sexist hostility – for example, derogatory comments about gender – didn't have any relationship with team functioning. Cohesion, conflict, citizenship behaviours and financial performance were all unrelated to sexist hostility. To a certain extent it may be that the team gets together, and there are gender battles, and it hurts individuals. For instance, there is good evidence that if woman is called not smart because she is a woman it is individually damaging. However, it doesn't seem to affect the team as a whole. That was a surprise.

Unwanted sexual attention – for example, when someone is trying to get a date even though it has been made clear to them that the person is not interested – was associated with increased team conflict, but didn't affect cohesion or financial performance. ...more

To read the full Spotlight article, go to:
http://www.industrialrelationscentre.com/infobank/articles/the-leech-effect.htm

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