Hot MedFax

You wouldn't know it from our current crook- er - commander-in-chief but it pays to be humble , new research is showing. It’s good to be humble when you’re the boss – as long as that’s what your employees expect, according to newswise.com. Researchers studying workplaces in China found that some real-life teams showed more creativity if the employees rated their bosses as showing more humility. “Whether leader humility is a good thing really depends on the team members’ expectations,” says  Jia (Jasmine) Hu , lead author of the study and associate professor of  management and human resources  at The Ohio State University’s  Fisher College of Business . Humble leaders are most effective when team members expect a low degree of distance between the leaders and followers, Hu explains. When there is "low power distance" (I assume, this means when the boss is humble), employees share power with their boss in a collaborative way. But humility may be seen as a we...

Some days you're the manager.  Some days you're the employee.  And some days you just don't feel like coming in to work at all. Sound like you? A new study has found that struggling with those different identities at work may just affect your job performance. According to newswise.com, employees who believe their different identities enhance each other are more productive than others, the study found. But workers who feel their identities are in conflict see a hit to their performance.  “We tend to think of our work role identities one at a time, as if they were completely separate,” says Steffanie Wilk , co-author of the study and associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business . “But this research shows that the interactions are important. The way we manage and think about our different roles could be affecting how well we do our jobs.” People are familiar with the concept of identity confli...

If you're a woman, you're far more likely to get derailed long-term in your career than a man. Don't get mad at me. That's what a new study says.  It's not so much what you'd expect -- us leaving the work force to have children, then trying to get back in - as it's that old nasty thing -- gender bias .  And that old, be nice to everyone cliche. I thought we got rid of that with the real possibility (please, God) that a woman is going to become president. But it seems gender bias is alive and well. In the study University of Florida management professor Joyce Bono examined a phenomenon called managerial derailment, where a seemingly up-and-coming manager gets fired, demoted, or doesn’t advance as expected. She found that supervisors can have subtle, even subconscious differences in expectations for the behavior of male and female managers, which can have costly consequences for women in the workplace, most notably the loss of mentorship, accor...

This may surprise you.  I know it did me. But singing the company song in a circle or going to camp with your colleagues, like they used to do at IBM,  may just not be good for you. They did it to instill spirit in workers, but now a new study says inspirational managers may actually harm employees. "Managers who inspire their staff to perform above and beyond the call of duty may actually harm their employees’ health over time, according to researchers from the University of East Anglia," newswise.com reports. The findings suggest that constant pressure from these "transformational leaders" may increase sickness absence levels among employees. They also indicate that some vulnerable employees in groups with transformational leaders may, in the long term, have increased sickness absence rates if they ignore their ill-health and frequently show up for work while ill, known as "presenteeism." Transformational leaders are defined as those wh...