Applying lessons from social psychology and looking at typically female characteristics as a strength rather than a weakness can make women more effective managers, writes Richard Waters
Here is a management tip for getting the most out of your female employees: if you want to fire them up before an important business negotiation, just talk to them about former Harvard president Larry Summers's view on the differences between the sexes. Only you may find that this tactic also delivers some undesirable side effects.
Laura Kray, a social psychologist at the Haas School of Business at the University of California in Berkeley, has used the case of the former Harvard president as a subtle way to change the behaviour of students in the "lab" where she works. It is part of a broader approach to applying lessons from social psychology to management that is starting to spread though academia.
Social scientists such as Kray, an associate professor at Haas since 2002, are preaching a different approach to management based on an understanding of how people behave in groups.
"Managers would benefit from thinking like social scientists," she declares - just the sort of message likely to strike fear into the heart of the average manager, who may already feel called on to play amateur psychologist, philosopher and pedagogue.
Kray specialises in the psychopathologies that affect decision making and negotiation - which she describes as "a decision making process where you're interdependent with someone else". Among her studies are how an awareness of sexual stereotypes can be used to influence performance in negotiations, and how to improve the quality of group decision making.
At the heart of the approach used by academics like Kray is a belief that managers would be more effective if they understood and were able to apply some basic tools of social psychology. Knowing how to drop Summers's name into a conversation at the right time would be a start.
In her Berkeley experiment, Kray used a classroom discussion about Summers's controversial views on the innate differences between the sexes to provoke a strong subconscious reaction among women in the Haas MBA programme.
The same women, carrying out an unrelated negotiation exercise afterwards, displayed far more aggression and other stereotypically "male" characteristics and achieved more from the negotiation than they otherwise would have.
Being exposed to Summers's views had provoked what Kray describes as "stereotype reactants - they're saying: 'Wait a minute, you can't tell me what I can and cannot do, I'll show you'. If the stereotype is really blatant, then the motivation to disprove the stereotype kind of energises and leads them to work to disprove it."
Stimulating women to act more like men, though, can have its drawbacks. The female negotiators may have achieved a better result in the main negotiation, but it came at the expense of other side benefits. The negotiators "failed to recognise where they had compatible interests," says Kray. The better option, she says, is to encourage women to think of stereotypically female characteristics as a strength, not a weakness. Get them to think of a negotiation as a joint effort to solve a crossword puzzle, not as a chess game where one side is trying to outflank the other.
"What I'm trying to do when training future managers is show that there's a lot you can do before you get to the bargaining table to psych yourself up, to really understand how the stereotype might be undermining your performance," she says.
Kray's other main area of study has been in group decision making. How do you stop groups of workers from making bad decisions when the information needed to make better ones is already known to one member of the group, or to a minority, she asks. Group think involves a safe consensus around what is already generally known. Individuals with unique but important information are often afraid to share it, while others are not prepared to listen. Groups converge instead around shared knowledge.
Mental exercises that prompt group members to think more critically can counter that deadening effect, according to Kray. She stages classroom discussions as exercises: students discuss the failure of Nasa technicians to anticipate the catastrophic technical failure that brought down the space shuttle Challenger, for instance, or the inability of US intelligence services to identify the plot to destroy the World Trade Center as it took shape.
Prompting group members to discuss cases such as these induces what she calls a "counterfactual mindset" - a greater willingness to consider things not as they actually happened, but as they might have happened. "By activating that, you can get people to think more analytically," she says.
The message from experimental business school studies such as these is: in the practice of management, awareness and preparation are all.
When it comes to preparing for a negotiation, says Kray, it would pay to make employees aware of the sexual stereotypes that dominate their thinking - and, rather than fight them, to accentuate their positive aspects. "It's about showing people what their beliefs are and how it affects their performance," she says.
