Entrepreneur Weirdness
Plus: Universal Leadership Potential, Turnover Intention, & Small Businesses in Bloom
Nothing will work unless you do. - Maya Angelou
From the Show
One of the world’s foremost experts on the psychology of video games is one of us! Jamie Madigan, Ph.D. is the I-O psychologist behind the blog, podcast, and media empire called The Psychology of Video Games. In the first level, Jamie and I talk about how a good workplace is like a videogame and why that’s a cool topic for book. In the boss level, we talk about science communication, sounding like a person in your writing, and the differences between writing for a popular audience and writing for other nerds. Finally, in the bonus level, Jamie shares his tips for working with journalists. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
What I-O Folks Are Reading
Selections from published articles, articles in press, and other academic resources.
Stay Weird?
…we propose that weirdness, as a form of non-normativity, yields both positive and negative outcomes for entrepreneurs through two distinct pathways. Specifically, the weirdness advantage operates through entrepreneur creativity, whereas the weirdness liability operates through lower entrepreneur competence. Our empirical analyses of non-normativity suggest that entrepreneur weirdness indeed is a double-edged sword.
Entrepreneur Weirdness as a Double-Edged Sword: Effects on Product Creativity and Investor Attraction. Personnel Psychology.
Universal Leadership Potential
People can believe either that only some individuals have high leadership potential (i.e., a nonuniversal mindset) or that most individuals have high leadership potential (i.e., a universal mindset). Five studies investigated the relationship between these mindsets and decision-makers’ gender biases in leader evaluation and selection decisions…this research demonstrates that, although they are seemingly unrelated to gender, mindsets about the universality of leadership potential can influence the extent to which people express gender bias in the leadership context.
Reducing Gender Bias in the Evaluation and Selection of Future Leaders: The Role of Decision-Makers’ Mindsets About the Universality of Leadership Potential. Journal of Applied Psychology.
Error Management Intervention
These results strongly suggest that team error management climate can indeed affect performance and is not merely a correlate of unknown third variables that were unmeasured in previous correlational research. From a practical perspective, this research provides guidance on how principles of social influence may be leveraged to induce an error management climate.
How to Induce an Error Management Climate: Experimental Evidence from Newly Formed Teams. Journal of Business and Psychology.
What Everyone Else is Reading
Articles, books, and resources from the popular business press.
Haters, Doubters, & Naysayers
But remember, my friends, the key to overcoming haters lies not in their approval but in your unwavering belief in yourself and your vision. Embrace their negativity as fuel for your fire, and let it propel you toward success.
Haters, Doubters and Naysayers — How to Rise Above Negativity in Business. Entreprenuer.
Leadership Development & Culture
And yet, all too often, leadership development programs don’t adequately account for the culture, norms, and system within which the leader is working. Leaders may be asked to think long term in a culture that fixates on immediate results, or they may be taught to collaborate across organizational boundaries when they’re rewarded for work within their own group.
Don’t Let Your Company’s Culture Stifle Leadership Development. Harvard Business Review.
The Small Business Boom
Startup registrations remain 42% ahead of 2019 levels, with growing numbers of companies founded by women and minorities.
The Pandemic Small-Business Boom Is Fueling the US Economy. Bloomberg Businessweek.
New York Times’ Bestselling Business Books
Links lead to short summaries.
Atomic Habits, James Clear
The Creative Act, Rick Rubin with Neil Strauss
I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Ramit Sethi
Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman*
Dare to Lead, Brené Brown
* First week in the top five.
Construct of the Week
A psychological construct relevant to work psychology.
Turnover Intention: An employee’s willingness or intention to leave a job or organization.
The Research Quiz
Test your intuition against this research finding.
Does hearing about a particular kind of corporate wrongdoing multiple times affect our moral judgment? Researchers sent participants text messages about corporate wrongdoing as they went about their days. After 15 days, did participants view these acts as more unethical or less unethical than they did before the experiment started?