Author Archives: Brandon Jordan

Task Conflict and Team Performance: The Role of Team Composition and Personality

As groups and teams have become a vital part of almost every business, we are understanding more clearly the benefits and challenges of individual contributors coming together to reach a goal or complete a task. This application of systems thinking is striving to prove that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, a team has more potential impact than the value of all the constituent individual contributors combined. 

What Kind of Employee Survey Cadence is Best for Me?

Employee engagement often leads to more workplace happiness, productivity, and business success. Yet, it can be challenging to understand what drives employee engagement and what can be done to help workers find or rediscover passion in their jobs. 

Boosting Organizational Performance Through DEI Practices

Many organizations are realizing the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Laws are put into place to ensure that there is representation and equal opportunity for all individuals to advance professionally. Even with laws in place to guide organizations, the way that top management implements DEI within their organization may determine the effectiveness. DEI goes beyond having a visually diverse organization. Organizational leaders must help create an environment of inclusion, which recognizes their employee’s full potential.

Old Wine in a New Bottle: Lessons on Quiet Quitting from Psychological Science

What is quiet quitting?
There is some confusion around this and really the term has a branding problem. What quiet quitting is really trying to get at is inequity in the employee-employer relationship. It means that if employees feel undervalued and overworked, they tend to disengage and reduce their productivity to reach an equilibrium. On one hand it is good that employees are drawing a line in the sand and asserting themselves to avoid burnout and being taken advantage of. On the other hand, the “quiet” part invokes feeling of insubordination and disrespect from leaders and managers. Employers need to recognize the issue within the organizational culture, subcultures, and the employee experience before employees feel this way in their thoughts and feeling leading them to behaviorally check out. 

Ability and Motivation on Employee Performance: Implications for Hiring

Employee performance, the thing all organizations wish to maximize. But what are the key things that influence employee performance? Specifically, what attributes do individuals possess that determine their performance on the job? According to Organizational Psychologists and researchers Iddekinge et al., it was indicated that there are two things that interact together to influence performance: cognitive ability and motivation. 

Role Breadth: Are Two Roles Better Than One?

When I was younger, I worked at a fast-food restaurant. I noticed that while most of my peer coworkers and I each held the job title of “restaurant team member”, we performed very different jobs and all had very different responsibilities. I mostly worked at the cash register and interacted with customers over the drive-thru intercom. Other employees were trusted with cooking, baking and preparing orders, and a couple of employees were trusted with being slotted into any sort of role. Often, this last group had been with the restaurant longer and had accumulated a variety of job-related skills during their tenure. These were the employees who were given priority for overtime shifts and were flagged for promotion into management positions at other store locations. In other words, the employees who performed the greatest variety of job tasks were also considered the “best” employees.

The term role breadth is used to describe how many different tasks or projects a person performs in their job.

How to Maintain Employee Engagement Levels High Once Your Company Starts Growing

Employee engagement is the critical aspect of workplace happiness, regardless of internal and external circumstances. It’s not a fading trend or a buzzword; employee engagement is a critical part of a comprehensive business strategy.

It Turns Out Honesty Actually is the Best Policy: What it Means for the Workplace

The old adage, ‘Honesty is the best policy’, seems like an obvious and hackneyed platitude; of course honesty is better than dishonesty! But it’s actually backed up by the science.

Closing the Scientist-Practitioner Gap: Can Personality Defeat a Pandemic?

In light of the pandemic, research by Chen et al. delves into what role a proactive personality may play in combating crises – specifically COVID-19. Their study sampled healthcare professionals in Wuhan, China shortly after the crisis began.