Anita Blanchard

A true issue in the social and organizational sciences is construct proliferation: when scientists believe they have identified/discovered an entirely new, un or understudied construct, when in fact, it is an old construct with a new name. It’s the “old wine in a new bottle” issue: researchers think they have something new, but really it’s something old and has been studied to death.

THAT SAID.

My I/O grad class and I read an article by Nimon et al examining the redundancy between work engagement and job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement. There is a lot of overlap between these constructs to the point that many academic researchers think work engagement is basically these other constructs called by a new name whereas practitioners consider them different and engagement as the most important. That is certainly how I have thought of them.

Nimon et al though provide some empirical analysis that while they do overlap they are distinct constructs with different outcomes and processes of interest for employees, researchers, and practitioners. They demonstrate that positive affect underlies all of these constructs and the distinct overlap between these constructs and engagement is less than 10%. Positive affect, on the other hand, explains nearly 50% of work engagement and it’s not clear how much variance it explains of these other constructs, but let’s say, it’s about the same amount.

In our discussion, we asked if we should just look at PA or the distinct constructs? Paul Spector has addressed this issue with negative affect and has concluded that we are “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” by focusing on negative affect instead of the more proximal constructs of interest in our research.

As we began to discuss the contributions of engagement to our understanding compared to commitment and satisfaction along with the concerns of construct proliferation, I had a thought. So of course I have to share it.

In linguistics and psychology of linguistics, we believe that language has an effect on our experiences and we need to “name” or label our experiences in order to better understand them. For example and as verified by my German goddaughter, Waldeinsamkeit means “the feeling one has of standing alone in the woods.” It’s a good feeling and is quite spiritual. OK. I get that but it’s not something I have ever named. And I’m not even sure she has stood alone in the woods, she certainly understood what this feeling was and it’s a commonly understood emotional experience for Germans.

Perhaps construct proliferation is an effort to more precisely label these abstract constructs that we study. Yes, some of these new constructs are redundant. But some may be attempts to more precisely define and distinguish our understanding of Waldeinsamkeit. I think we might determine that there are broadly defined emotional and individual characteristics (PA, NA, etc) that underly many of our constructs. Nonetheless, these distinct constructs still provide us with more nuanced and precise understanding of our phenomena.

It’s a thought. I want to think about it some more. What do you think?

My mentor, Dr. Lynne Markus, wrote a very important article (Culnan & Markus, 1987 and while that is not the direct link to it b/c it’s a handbook article, the article I do link to is a follow-up that is similar). ANYHOOOOO, the gist of Culnan & Markus is stop trying to make computer technologies replicate FtF communication. Computer communication can do things FtF can’t. Find those communication differences and use them to your advantage.

I have to honestly admit that during the pandemic, it’s my normal, initial tendency to replicate online what I’m missing FtF. But then I take a breath, remember Lynne’s research, and start trying to think differently. We did this for the INGRoup 2020 virtual conference and it’s been a great experience. Some folks say it’s the best virtual conference they’ve attended this year. (They could be exaggerating but I don’t care. I am having a blast with it) Honestly, we (at INGRoup) surveyed our members, asked what they liked most about our past conferences, and did our best to replicate exactly that in our first virtual one. (What did they like, you ask? Our conference is know for being very friendly and having lots and lots of informal, interdisciplinary conversations about our research on groups that leads to new ways of thinking and researching)

And I’ve tried to do this for my online grad class this semester. This class is an intro into our grad program and an overview of I/O Psychology. I must admit I had just finished grading the last year’s comprehensive exams, I had “Ideaz” on what I wanted our students to do. And I didn’t want this fall’s zoom classes to be the shitshow of what I did over the spring.

I’M GETTING TO THE PODCASTS! HOLD YOUR HORSES!!

What I’m doing differently:

• If I plan on doing any sort of lecture, I prerecord it in 10 minute (or so) chunks. They watch it before class. There’s no need to waste precious interactive time with me droning on. That said, however long my recorded lectures are, we cut that time out of our regular class.
• We use padlets for discussions and sharing info. It’s so much more visual and interesting to read
• All interactions are in gallery view on Zoom with their videos and often mics on. This has been AMAZING for discussions. We are all “equal.” I am no longer standing or sitting apart from them. We are all together at the same level of power and it’s awesome. We have had some of the best grad discussions I can recall.
• I strongly encourage that they use chat during the lecture both to everyone and privately. Our chat discussions are how some of my students make their best contributions.
• I use google docs for them to turn in in-class assignments. I’ve made a drive for the whole class and each week’s in-class assignments has its own doc for each randomly assigned groups.
• And PODCASTS!!!

Each week, one or two students does a deep dive into a topic. In the past, I’ve had students do Formal Presentations for this part of the exercise. At best, they’ve been ok and at worst they’ve sucked. During a discussion with my dept peers, someone mentioned Fishbowl discussions. Two students face each other and have a discussion while the rest of the class watches.

And I immediately remembered all my favorite podcasts: You’re Wrong About, My Favorite Murder (Holla to the Murderinos!), and Hidden Brain among others. In all of these podcasts (well, not so much Hidden Brain, but I love it), one host has taken a deep dive into a topic and then explains it to the other host, who reacts to the info and shares his/her own experiences. It’s so interesting to listen to!

So that’s what my students are doing. They started with a lit search on their topic at the beginning of the semester (graded) where I reviewed what they found and had strong ideas on which ones would be good to use. (recent, good journals, of high manager/science interest). They read these articles and summarize the topic generally and the article particularly in a discussion to the class. The “hosts” pin their screens to each other so they only see each other and discuss the topic. The rest of the class leaves our screens in gallery and sometimes provide questions in the chat “Anita from Charlotte NC wonders…..”

They DISCUSS. TALK, SHARE. Not Present. IT’S SO MUCH BETTER and SO much more INTERESTING. As my students have commented, “This is like a real podcast!!” And we voluntarily listen to podcasts, right? It’s awesome.

I am having a blast with the discussions and while it is very stressful for the students, dadgum, I feel like it’s so much better than a formal presentation. I feel like this translates more into a coffee chat with their manager about important I/O topics than standing in front of them and Telling What They Know. It’s just better communication sharing altogether.

I would honestly love to hear what is working with you right now on Zoom or online teaching in any method. Just remember: what can online communication do that FtF cannot. And DO THAT.

And here’s a picture of my lab in our last zoom for the photo tax. Isn’t my lab cute?

So, I saved this as an idea to blog about in April. Who should we be able to trust as “experts” in whatever field we need information? Here is the conundrum I start with:

We should most trust the people who are experts in their field.  I am not an expert in teaching people who experts are. Ergo, I should not tell you who to trust as experts.

However, by saying that I am not an expert gives me a bit more credibility to tell you how to figure out how to trust someone’s expertise than someone on Facebook or YouTube who says I KNOW WHO THE EXPERTS ARE! TRUST THEM AND NO ONE ELSE!!!

I do know some things about mentoring though.  I’m not an expert on mentoring, but I know people who are and I’ve written papers with them. So I approach telling you what I know about how to choose experts as a peer-mentor or perhaps even a step-ahead mentor (someone who is very much like you with a bit more knowledge/experience). 

So here we go.  Here is my checklist to determine if someone is trustworthy.

Credentials
First, have they moved up the ladder in their own field?  A professor is more of an expert than an undergraduate.  The head of an agency should have more knowledge and broader understanding than a front-line employee. There are exceptions to both of those examples, but generally, those criteria are a good starting point. My example for clarification: a nurse on YouTube at an Open Up Rally in Raleigh is NOT more of an expert than Dr. Fauci. 

Further, PhDs mean people specialize in particular aspects of their field.  I am an Organizational Psychologist.  I am not qualified to diagnose anyone on their mental health or illness even though I have a PhD in Psychology.  If someone starts to overreach their area of training, you should be highly suspicious.  Easy examples: Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, that woman in Plandemic. Experts will tell you when you’ve asked them for information outside of their expertise.  

Money and Power
Does someone have something to gain from their position? Big red flags are if they get money or power if you believe what they say.  There are several great examples and several ways to go deeper into this evaluation. The twins’ pulmonologist violated both the credentials and the money this week when he moved from talking about the twins’ susceptibility to COVID (they have “hypersecretious” asthma) to advocating that all kids should be in school and no businesses shut down so that we can develop herd immunity ASAP. “Old people are at the end of their lives anyway. People with underlying conditions are just going to die.”  

Yeah, the Sweden model won’t really work in individualistic America.  Also, we got into his private practice as new patients almost immediately. The twins haven’t been then in more than 3 years so they are “new. Clearly, he is not overly busy and he is probably not making the same salary he has been used to. They need more patients.  Further, an MD in pulmonology NE (a PhD in public health or a PhD in Epidemiology). In layman’s terms: Stay in your lane, dude.

So the money thing requires some explanation.  I hear LOTS of laypeople say you cannot trust a PhD who has been given grant money from a private or possibly public organization (like NIH or NSF). Here is why that is an erroneous argument.  If I get funding from NSF, let’s say a $200,000 grant, MOST of that money goes to my institution (I think 46% or something like that? Some expert with more grants will let me know!).  I would get one month’s salary in the summer for each year of the grant. For researchers who survive on “soft” money (i.e., grants), they would get more, but it never surpasses their annual salary (I believe) and most of the money (I believe) still goes to “overheard” and the institution. See how I’m using “I believe” to let you know what I KNOW and what I THINK so that you can evaluate my expertise? 

I am MUCH more concerned about people who want you to believe what they have to say so that you will buy their book, watch their YouTube channel, attend their for-profit conference, come shop at their store, shop in general to increase their stock portfolio, or bring your sick kids to their office.  Those folks are not getting a small addition to their annual salary: YOU ARE THEIR ANNUAL SALARY. 

Further, just because someone gets a grant doesn’t mean their data is suspect. IF IT GOES THROUGH PEER REVIEW, it is evaluated exactly like non-funded research and possibly even more skeptically because researchers are supposed to acknowledge every single grant that funded their research.  If it is NOT peer-reviewed, it’s bullshit.  Blogs and books are not peer-reviewed.  No skeptical eyes have evaluated whether what they are saying is methodologically valid and theoretically reasonable. 
But don’t the real mavericks in a field get suppressed, especially by all those folks who have privately funded grants?  Aren’t the researchers/PhDs/laypeople who go against the mainstream and say X IS TRUE suppressed by all the other researchers who say X IS WRONG or even Y IS TRUE? 

No. Simply, no.  If a researcher can build a stream of peer-reviewed research (so more than one study that could be just a statistical fluke) that challenges our current beliefs and says “BY JOVE, X IS TRUE NOT Y!!” they would become very, very famous.  That’s how the Academy works.  
So that’s my peer and possibly step-ahead mentoring for how to determine if someone is an expert.  The key issues are Expertise and Money.   There are obviously some exceptions and that’s why I’m not the expert on who is the expert. But for the most part, this is where you can start when you are trying to believe who to trust. 

I am hoping to write about using the philosophy of science, epistemology, and ontology to understand How To Science: Understanding Specific Studies in a future blog soon. 

And because all blogs should have a picture now so social media pays attention, here is an expert we should pay attention to.

My research focuses on entitativity: a person’s cognitive assessment that they are in a group.  The classic example compares a “group” of people waiting for a bus stop compared to the same group of people at a cafe sharing coffee and conversations (pre-COVID, of course). The cafe is “groupier” than the bus stop. 

Way back in the day (like, seriously, the 1950s) when Don Campbell identified entitativity as a fundamental component of groups (i.e., you need to perceive you are in a group before you enact group processes or experience group outcomes), he focused on a couple of important antecedents to entitativity: similarity, interactivity, history, and “pregnance.” Must like “entitativity” is an ostentatious name for a simple concept (how groupy a group is), pregnance is a BS word meaning that when you look at a group you can see its form/shape.  It’s been called the boundary separating the group for the not-group, but I currently think pregnance in today’s psychological concepts relates more to environmental psychology (especially my training in behavior settings and/or sociomaterialty). Think of the people sitting around a table at the cafe: you can see them forming a group much easier than the folks dispersed in an unidentifiable pattern around the bus stop.

What does this have to do with social distancing?  I believe a heckuva lot.

Humans are born with a need for belonging, a psychological need to belong to a group that’s as important as the biological need for eating. When people are together face-to-face, they want to form and be part of a group.  I simply do not believe that we can create “pregnance”–an easily identifiable grouping–from 6′ feet apart.  I think that’s why even when we believe strongly is social distancing, when we are interacting with people that we like, it is nearly impossible to stay 6′ feet apart from them.  We want to be closer to form a boundary between our group and the not-group. 

I think it’s easier to socially distance around others when you have your own “pod” of people you can be closer to, like going on a picnic with others and staying on the blanket with your family 6′ from another family. 

But at work, when we are trying to belong to a group with our co-workers? At school, when we are trying to belong to our group of friends?  At any religious gathering, when we are trying to belong to our faith community? I believe it goes against our innate human development to stay 6′ away from other people in these settings, and it links directly back to entitativity–our perception that our coworkers and friends are more like a cafe than a bus stop. 

This is obviously, a testable hypothesis. However, it is a hypothesis the IRB will not allow me to test until we are out of this pandemic. Although, if you have skills at drawing or drafting pictures of anything to scale, hit me up: I have an idea of how to test this.  

Until then, interacting FtF with meaningful others outside of our pod is going to be extremely difficult at 6′ apart. 

Surely, you are saying this at some point. We are. I know my husband and I are old farts, but this song is right on. And, indeed, I spent more than a few nights dancing to this song with the special R.E.M. dance moves (mostly straight arms, snapping hands, shuffling feet) on top of the coffee table in the apartment over ours.

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But that’s another story.

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This post is about generations. I wrote a rambling post two years ago about my doubt that there are actually generational cohorts in our society. My premise is, basically, that something dramatic has to happen to have a generation. Something dramatic like a world war, the first booming economy, the start of communism, the end of communism. I don’t buy that a new decade starts a new generation. So I’m skeptical that Gen-X, Gen-Z, Millenials, etc are really generations instead of just old people looking at young people, shaking their wrinkled fists, and saying “GET OFF MY LAWN.”

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That said, I think we can all reasonably say that for kids coming of age and young adults right now, this has the potential to create a new generation. The world is sharing social isolation. We are relying on technology to connect us in ways we never have before. I honestly don’t think one to two weeks will do it. But if the rest of the world continues down that paths that China, South Korea, and Italy are going down, well, yeah. We may look back and call these the Coronakids.

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HOWEVER, what just about breaks my heart is my parents’ experience. They were born right after a worldwide depression. They are hitting their twilight years during a worldwide pandemic. That is a sucky-ass set of bookends to their lives. Fortunately, they don’t read this blog and I’m not going to point this fact out to them.

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So, yeah. Also, I also kind of hate this blogging platform. The letters (at “normal”) have been too small for me to read. I’m hoping this looks a bit better at “medium” and if so, I’m going to go change the rest of my posts so I can actually read them (cf., old farts). I’m not sure the university web platform is really set up for blogging.

My lab had our second online meeting this week. Part of our discussion was keeping socially connected even while practicing social isolation. A 21st century Love in the Time of Cholera as it were. ((Or maybe not. I’m rereading the wiki summary and clearly, I did not understand it the first time I read it))

In any case, a few thoughts are bubbling up on Day 3 of the family and work isolation. First, my family is not nearly settled into any sort of routine. We started homeschooling yesterday and I’m about to go wake everyone to start Day 2 but we are not anywhere close to a new normal.

Second, a great idea from my lab: do something “normal” (in our case, research-related) every day. Right now, I’m writing a response to the reviewers on a Revise and Resubmit and I cannot fully state how much I do not give a flying fig newton about trying to convince these folks why my changes meet their critiques. They do. Suck it. ((Hmmmm, my tone on my professional blog has become much more aligned with my tone on my personal one)) We just read Silvia’s book on How to Write a Lot and right now, his advice to do something work-related every single work day seems like it can help with mental health as well as productivity.

Finally, for today, be gentle with your friends who seem unattached to reality regarding this pandemic. Psychology has done a lot of research on people’s attitudes about their health. Believe it or not, not everybody approaches their health, their healthcare, and their relationship to health authorities the same way that you do! Also, denial is not just a river in Egypt. ((And I’m going to digress for a minute and say that I am so old that when I said that tired cliche to my lab students, they thought I was clever and had invented it on my own. Le sigh))

OK. Hang in there, folks. Don’t forget to make a live connection with someone outside of your home today. I know some friends have said it’s still too soon for them to do that (i.e., it’s still too overwhelming and their heads are still spinning), but keep it in your mental health toolbox for now.

I don’t know if that reference is only relevant to Boomers, geeks, geeky boomers, or geeky Gen Xers. In any case, the world is about to reboot.

We are fixing to see (now, I know that’s an old time Southern phrase) what happens when we all start working at home as well as seriously curtailing our and our children’s extracurricular activities. FOR MONTHS. People: MONTHS!

This is not a two-week delay-of-game. I believe Japan has been working at home since January 25th. Their schools are still closed, too. They are heading past 6 weeks and into 8 weeks of socially isolating. We are probably looking at similar time frames.

It’s a hard reboot on the world’s society in order to flatten the curve and save lives! So what is going to happen? Good question! As one of the people who said NO WAY! WE DO NOT NEED THE WORLD WIDE WEB! WE HAVE GOPHER AND FTP, I feel uniquely qualified to throw some ideas out there. Also, that was at the beginning of my grad career, and now I have tenure. So I’m extra fancy smart now. ((Note: I am not))

But I do see a few things positives that may develop from this hard reset:

1) We are going to be less busy running all over town driving our kids and ourselves to appointments. While that may sound horrible to you, I for one look forward to slowing down.

2) Our work is going to get down to the essential components. (I hope) All the fluff that justifies some middle managers may (PLEASE) be deemed unnecessary as we do what needs to be done to keep this world running.

3) We’re going to learn how to enjoy our neighbors, our neighborhoods, and even–gasp!–our families. A walk around Plaza-Midwood yesterday was packed, even when we kept our social distance

4) Finally, for now, we’re going to help the environment by learning that telecommuting actually works. Pollution is down in China. Venice’s streams are clear. If we can figure this out–keeping socially connected while working at home–we might be able to save the planet as well as our fellow humans.

This is the positive outlook. We’ll see what happens after we’ve been home for a few more weeks.

Two weeks ago–before I left with 15 students for a Spring Break study abroad trip to Berlin–I saw a few coronavirus cases in Germany and was joking that if I had to be quarantined when I came back I would prefer the Army barracks to home because I could work as well as catch up on sleep, knitting, and Netflix.

One week ago, I was contacting the University asking if they were ABSOLUTELY sure we were ok because the number of cases in Berlin were starting to increase–doubling over a few days–and should we consider quarantining ourselves when we got back. I’m not going to throw them under the bus but the response seemed to be focused more on the CDC and their unwillingness to officially raise Germany’s health threat level to what was actually happening on the ground with my students and me. Feel free to check Worldometer for Germany from 2/29 to 3/4 and understand my concerns.

Today, my students and I continue our self-quarantine for another 10 days, I’m moving my university classes online, and I anticipate that my three children will be doing homeschool/online school for at least through April. Dave (hubs) works at a retirement community. This is not a drill for them. And this NY Times piece suggesting the peak infection rate could be JULY says we could all be here a lot longer than April.

So, to keep from going crazy(er), I’m starting my Vlog back up. I’m going to be posting more here. And I’m going to share lots of advice (assvice, really) based on my research and experience of being online since 1984.

First, show you care. Work is important. School is important. But the human, socio-emotional connection to your family, friends, work colleagues, and students is THE most important thing right now. We are all scared. But soon we are all going to be very bored. ((Hopefully. I ready for it to be boring)) So: SUPPORT. Act like you care about your people more than you care about their work, the education, and following the standard organizational rules. Now following the pandemic rules? Hell to the yeah.

Second, embrace that things are going to be very different. Try new ways of connecting and working. Email is a cold medium. Google video chat with your colleagues instead. I don’t care if you are not “dressed” for work (as I am not dressed for work right now). We can keep our connections closer and work, learn, support each other better if we can see each other and share socio-emotional cues. Try it. I am going to do so today. I’ll report back on Monday

We may be here for a very long time. Vow that you are going to check on the most vulnerable in your community: the elderly, the single moms, the working poor, the homeless. If we take aggressive measures, we’re going to keep the infection rate down. We will slow the roll, flatten the curve, and keep more people alive. BTW, whoever came up with “flatten the curve” as a public health policy slogan deserves a raise. ((See what a google search can tell you???)) It’s as good as “Brexit” as trying to explain what we need to do. I hate Brexit as a policy, but it’s a very catchy phrase.

So, hey y’all! I used my personal blog to work through all the stresses I had with starting a family. Seems like a good time to use this blog to think about work/home/life in a pandemic.

Y’all, I think that we, on campus, who give a flying fig newton about our students see the next big educational bubble: Students who have already graduated with a university degree who know only a little more than when they left high school. Let me share some background and then some ideas.

Last year, I wrote about my department’s widespread dismay that our students (and yours) are cheating. That post was met with a widespread: Meh.

Denial. Not just a river in Egypt.

There were some surprising responses. From an Academic group I belong to: So what. Cheating has been around for years. Back when I started teaching, sororities and fraternities had file cabinets full of old tests for their members to study. Ok! Great! So (white, upper SES) communities with file cabinets can cheat their way through school and that’s just fine.

More typically, faculty said “Not My Students.” OK. Maybe not. If every evaluative exercise is new, in-class, and written by hand, then I agree with you. But any activity that you have used more than once and requires outside work is suspect. A colleague told me yesterday that she found plagiarism on personal experiences essay. The student couldn’t even write about his or her own personal experience with the topic; there’s no right or wrong answer here!! There’s just WRITING about what happened to you.

And I understand. A new instructor said that she doesn’t want her students to think that she thinks they are cheating, that she thinks that they would ever do something as wrong as that. I get it. Trust but verify was my advice.

The worst reactions, however, are coming from the upper administration, although not necessarily ours. A former student and now professor elsewhere was told by her provost: “But they sign the honor code! We go over it during Freshmen orientation! If they see that we are monitoring them, they will think we don’t trust them.” So, they aren’t going to cheat because you told them about the honor code and any sort of monitoring will make them feel bad.

That’s what they say, but it’s possible what they actually mean is this: We can’t mess with our business model of getting as many students in and out of this organization as quickly as possible.

Here’s the bubble:

We are graduating a fair number of students with high GPAs (and business schools, I’m looking DIRECTLY at you) who have NO IDEA what they are doing and will have an ish ton of student debt they are carrying. I can already tell you, although only anecdotally, that some prestigious employers no longer trust the degrees people say they have and are having potential employees answer basic and then advanced questions in their field before they start the interview. This is in addition to my friend whose direct report, despite being a finance marketing (recent) graduate did not know the difference between a fix and a variable rate mortgage. My husband attended a SHRM conference last week in which the SHRM presenters provided data that more and more newly graduated employees are not prepared for their jobs.

Folks, we may be seeing graduated students who have high GPAs and no substantive knowledge from their degree, students who cheated their way through college and could and should have just started working right out of high school.

At what point did some of our students stop believing they are supposed to learn something in class and getting an A is the only point? Have we, as a society, so emphasized grades as a measure of a child’s innate value that unless they Score Highly they are worthless? What about learning?

You can say I told you first: This bubble is going to burst. We are going to have a generation of students who are carrying a ton of debt who learned nothing from their university education.

Next Blog is what we’ve learned to make sure our students are actually learning. We have some best practices from my colleagues and current students that we can use to help our students against their poorer choices.