1st Annual Workshop on Workplace Humor SUCCESS!

We recently welcome 20 international experts and early career scholars for our first annual winter workshop on workplace humor at the University of Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland. Cecily Cooper (Miami Business School) and Brad Bitterly (Michigan Ross) presented their recent workplace humor work and gave feedback for management scholars, while Paul McGhee (Professor Emeritus) and Tracey Platt (University of Wolverhampton) presented their thoughts on the humor habits and gelotophobia and gave feedback for psychology scholars. Thanks again to everyone for their participation and active engagement!

For a summary of the key takeaways, see here. This was created to enhance long-term learning from the event but also as an inclusion initiative for interested persons who were unable to attend.

I represented UZH business to develop and organize this interdisciplinary workshop with my super co-organizers Jennifer Hoffman and Christian Kastner (UZH Psychology). Our event was funded by a generous grant from the UZH Graduate Campus. As suggested by our title, we hope to make this a regular event. So stay tuned for details about a 2020 event!

No funny business: Leadership soft skills for a digital, dispersed, and diverse age

I’m delighted to share that I just won a Lehrkredit teaching innovation grant to develop and lead a new course on soft skills for our future leaders at the University of Zurich.

Such a course is increasingly necessary in light of the rising rates of digital disruptions, computer-mediated-communication, and employee diversity, as soft skills like humor separate humans from robots and are critical for successfully interacting with people with diverse backgrounds and interests. This interdisciplinary course will blend science and practice with an all-star line-up of guest lecturers (e.g., Swiss comedian Fabian Unteregger).

Master's students will get the first chance to participate in this course in Fall 2019, after which it will be offered once more for master’s students (in Spring 2020) and again for PhD students (in Fall 2020).

Researchathon: Leadership in the Digital Age

24 scholars + 24hrs + 4 mentors, teams, & innovative ideas = 1 successful researchathon!

Our team developed and presented an exciting new idea, “From a distance: Digital leaders’ trust building and repair.”

Thanks to Ellen Schmid, Ulf Steinberg, Emanuel Schreiner, & Simon Pfältzer for the organization. Thanks to Deanne Den Hartog, Ilke Inceoglu, Claudia Peus, & Ronit Kark for the mentorship. And last but not least, thanks to all of our enthusiastic attendees: Fabiola H. Gerpott, Brooke Gazdag, Tanja Hentschel, Kristin Knipfer, Stephanie Rehbock, Armin Pircher Verdorfer, Petra Kipfelsberger, Aldijana Bunjak, Corinna Bertling, Oliver Niebuhr, Paul Westhoff...and many more!

What a fabulous way to kick-off the new Technical University of Munich campus in Heibronn!

AMJ Paper & Idea Workshop in Paris

On September 21, I presented “Laugh it up? Interpersonal and career effects of humor” in the selective Academy of Management Journal Paper & Idea Development Workshop at ESSEC Business School in Paris La Défense.

AMJ editor-in-chief Jason Shaw, deputy editor Marc Gruber (also from Switzerland!), and 6 other Associate Editors (e.g., Brian L. Connelly, Pursey Heugens, Sucheta Nadkarni, Anthony J. Nyberg, Zeki Simsek, and Balagopal (Bala) Vissa) convened from across the world to provide feedback on 24 international scholars' research.

It was an intense but inspiring and fun experience. Now to get to work incorporating feedback on my (eventual) AMJ submission…

Did you hear the one about the (free) workplace humor workshop?

We are pleased to announce an exciting, interdisciplinary event for early career scholars interested in humor research. Please reserve the dates now and plan to be in Zurich. Research at all stages of development is welcome, as we will have paper roundtables for more developed work as well as science slams for new ideas. There will be no participation fees due to the gratefully acknowledged funding by the UZH Graduate Camps. UZH Prof. and humor expert Willibald Ruch will welcome you, while the following international humor experts will give keynotes and serve as mentors: 

• Dr. Brad Bitterly (OB/Business) Post-Doc, University of Michigan, USA
  Research interests are humor, status, power, and trust

• Dr. Cecily Cooper (OB/Business) Professor, Associate Professor, University of Miami, USA
  Research interests are humor, leadership, fairness, and trust

• Dr. Paul McGhee (Psychology) Professor Emeritus
  Research interests are development of humor in children, primates, and across the lifespan; sense of humor; humor training and malleability; humor response

• Dr. Tracey Platt (Psychology) Senior Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton, UK
  Research interests are gelotophobia (fear of being laughed at), comic styles, class clowns, laughter, facial expressions of amusement

Application criteria:

The workshop is aimed for early career academics (e.g., PhD students, post docs, assistant professors), and exceptional master's students (depending on availability). Applications can be sent until December 1st to Dr. Jamie Gloor including:

• Extended Abstract/Full Paper (what you can share, depending on the stage of your research)

• CV (current affiliation, email, education, experience, and presentations/publications)

• Short summary of motivation for participation and expectations (max. 200 words)

As many of our mentors also study trust, power, status, and leadership, we also encourage submissions on these topics.

"Improving Lives" @AOM 2018 in Chicago

78th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management

The 5-day Academy of Management (AOM) Conference just concluded in Chicago, USA. With more than 11,000 experts from around the world, I joined 6 of my Munich team members and my UZH team member to actively engage in scholarly conversations about ways that leaders and organizations can improve employee well-being as well as our society as a whole.

Together with Claudia Peus (TUM), I organized a symposium on early career (female) leaders and fit, drawing from leading international scholars from China, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, and the USA. Together with Xinxin Li and Sandy Lim (NUS), I presented a new experimental study on gender, parenthood, and selective incivility at work. Finally, through the OB early career faculty workshop, the leadership research incubator and the GDO early career faculty paper workshop, I received invaluable advice on other papers, including my new humor project with Agnes Baeker (UZH).

It was fantastic to reconnect with colleagues and coauthors, make new connections over shared curiosities, start some new projects, and see a little bit of Chicago. However, 5 days of packed schedules with 11,000+ conference-goers and a 7-hour time change is enough to make even this extreme extrovert a bit tired...

Predictors of parental leave support: Bad news for (big) dads and a policy for equality

We are very pleased to share that our new paper on coworker support for parental leave is now published in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. This article is part of a special issue on addressing gender inequality, edited by Prof. Dr. Michelle Ryan and Dr. Thekla Morgenroth.

Although men typically benefit from widely held gender biases in employment (e.g., selection, promotion, and pay), they are often disadvantaged when it comes to work-life. This interferes with fathers' ability to care for their children, but it may also hinder women's career development, thus reinforcing traditional gender roles and sustaining challenges to balance work and family for men and women. Best practices specify that benefits should be equally available to employees, but such policies may only be effective if there is a work culture to support them. As coworkers' responses have not yet been tested, we examine for whom coworkers show the most (and least) support for parental leave (Study 1), we replicate this finding using different methods and show the process whereby employee characteristics influence coworker support for their parental leave (Study 2), and then we test a policy-based intervention to further increase equality in coworker support for parental leave (Study 3).

Gloor, J. L., Li, X., & Puhl, R. M. (2018). Predictors of parental leave support: Bad news for (big) dads and a policy for equality. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21(5), 810-830. doi: 10.1177/1368430217751630

This paper's findings and implications are relevant to our current ForGenderCare project at Professor Peus' chair at TUM. You can find the full publication here.

We're hiring leadership scholars!

 

In this position, you will conceptualize, implement, and conduct innovative, multimethod studies (e.g., field surveys, lab and behavioral experiments, panel data) to investigate the effects of leaders’ behaviors on employee health, well-being, and performance, as well as exploring new forms of modern leadership (e.g., leadership duos, shared and part-time models) and how technology can facilitate diversity and leadership. You will have the opportunity to program and optimize experiments, analyze data, present findings at national and international conferences, and write scientific manuscripts. We are looking for someone who is comfortable presenting ideas to both scientific and non-scientific audiences and open to teach students, researchers, and/or executives.

We offer an experienced, international supervision team combining award-winning expertise in leadership research with business economics and psychology (Prof. Dr. Claudia Peus, Dr. Jamie Gloor). You will work in a collaborative environment in a truly interdisciplinary team that fosters an open-minded, participative, and friendly work atmosphere. Finally, we will facilitate your scientific creativity and independence, while supporting your scientific development, career goals, and professional network.

If this interests you and if you have relevant qualifications, review our job ad. If you know someone who could be interested feel free to share the job ad with them. We also have 3 other open positions on leadership + social neuroscience or leadership + educational technologies, which you can find here.

What leaders actually do...

3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium

Last week, a small, interdisciplinary group of international leadership scholars gathered for the 3rd IPLS symposium in Crete, Greece. I presented a new paper coauthored with Agnes Baeker on humor in potential leaders (see below).

UZH was well-represented with our incoming chair of HRM and Leadership, Jochen Menges. TUM was also well-represented, as Peus chair alumni Susanne Braun, Brooke Gazdag, Tanja Hentschel, and Jennifer Sparr also presented their work (three of us pictured below).

We were encouraged and entertained by organizers Niels van Quaekebeke (KLU) and Olga Epitropaki (Durham), and challenged by critical keynotes from Jeff Edwards (UNC) and John Antonakis (Lausanne).

Fix the game, not the dame: Restoring equality in leadership evaluations

Fresh off the presses in Journal of Business Ethics:

Female leaders continue to face bias in the workplace compared to male leaders. When employees are evaluated differently because of who they are rather than how they perform, an ethical dilemma arises for leaders and organizations. Thus, bridging role congruity and social identity leadership theories, we propose that gender biases in leadership evaluations can be overcome by manipulating diversity at the team level. Across two multiple-source, multiple-wave, and randomized field experiments, we test whether team gender composition restores gender equity in leadership evaluations. In Study 1, we find that male leaders are rated as more prototypical in male-dominated groups, an advantage that is eliminated in gender-balanced groups. In Study 2, we replicate and extend this finding by showing that leader gender and team gender composition interact to predict trust in the leader via perceptions of leader prototypicality. The results show causal support for the social identity model of organizational leadership and a boundary condition of role congruity theory. Beyond moral arguments of fairness, our findings also show how, in the case of gender, team diversity can create a more level playing field for leaders. Finally, we outline the implications of our results for leaders, organizations, business ethics, and society.

This paper was part of my dissertation, coauthored with fantastic people: Manuela Morf (Erasmus University), Samantha Paustian-Underdahl (Florida State University), and Uschi Backes-Gellner (University of Zurich).