This article explains the impact of stereotyping and expectations we have of our employees, as well as how engaging personas can be used as a framework to increase productivity in virtual teams.

Why do we stereotype? And how does stereotyping affect trust and performance in (virtual) teams?

A stereotype is a “fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people”. (Cardwell, 1996). Stereotypes help us simplify our social world and it enables us to respond rapidly to situations, but a disadvantage according to McLeod (2015) is that it makes us not see the differences between individuals.

Our brains cannot deal with missing information – we will add what we are missing, from what we already know. And if what we already know is negative about a certain group of people, and we attach that to a recently met colleague, the trust will suffer as “you can never give a second first impression” is valid for virtual environments as well. (Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1998). Moreover, if what we already know about a group of people is not true about that particular person, productivity might suffer, as we will not be able to recognize the potential, and consequently motivate the team member to reach it.

Macrae and Bodenhausen (2001) discuss that at our encounter with a stranger, we tend to see the person as a stereotype, and not as a person that has a “unique constellation of characteristics”, and we tend to add the person to an already known category. Nielsen (2004) argues that the more material is presented to us, the less we need to draw on our previous experiences and encounters.

The effects of the stereotyping in (virtual) teams is two-folded. On the one hand, our expectations derived from our stereotyping end up becoming “self-fulfilling prophecies” explained via the well-known Pygmalion effect (Livingston, 2003). On the other hand, it can have an impact on our team members’ trust amongst each other. However, both factors have an impact on the team’s productivity.

Pygmalion effect and stereotyping

The Pygmalion effect has been widely researched by behavioral scientists, especially in school settings, and it is explained by Livingston, who coined the term Pygmalion, as: “The lucky child who strikes a teacher as bright also picks up on that expectation and will rise to fulfill it. This finding has been confirmed so many times, and in such varied settings, that it’s no longer even debated.” (2003)

The Pygmalion effect is valid in organizational settings as well: an experiment from 1961 on teams in organizational setting, explained in detail in this article in Harvard Business Review, concluded that the productivity of the team that was expected to perform well improved dramatically, while the productivity of the team who was considered as not having a chance to meet the quota, decreased dramatically. (Livingston, 2003)

The beliefs we have of others (either true or expected due to our stereotyping), will influence our communication with them. Livingston (2003) describes how managers are more effective in communicating their low expectations than they are at communicating their high expectations, even though we might believe differently. Passive behavior, indifference, and low frequency of communication could all be perceived as signs of the low expectations we have as leaders from our employees.

The risk we are running is having low expectations of certain groups of people due to stereotyping, and them lowering their performance to meet our expectations.

Trust and stereotyping

As discussed in a previous blog post, an important step in building trust is calculated trust, and a step in building calculated trust is the social introduction. Trust in virtual teams (and any types of teams) is important as from it derives the team’s motivation, which impacts team’s performance. (Zacarro and Bader, 2002)

Jarvenpaa and Leidner (1998) have discovered that a commonality amongst teams that start with low trust levels, is the lack of social introduction. We could conclude from here, that a poor or absent introduction of the team members could lead to stereotyping and low levels of trust.

Virtual teams and stereotyping

Stereotyping is true for teams that work together, but my hypothesis is that it is even more poignant in virtual teams. As layers of virtuality are added, we have less information about the persons we are interacting with: for example, we are not able to see their facial expressions or body language, which is crucial in interpreting sarcasm, humor, or irony. Research shows that: “In the absence of individuating cues about others, we build stereotypical impressions based on limited information.” (Lea and Spears 1992).

This made me wonder which “unique constellation of characteristics” do digital leaders need to encourage virtual team members to disclose about themselves in order to decrease the level of stereotyping and hence, increase the level of trust in virtual teams? Parallel, which information do leaders need to know about their employees in order to increase their expectations of their employees?

Engaging Persona

In I4L we have the honor to have Lene Nielsen as one of our team members – Lene has researched personas for over 15 years. When I told Lene what is my preoccupation in regards to stereotypes, she introduced me to the concepts of “rounded character” from filmography, and the concept of engaging personas.

In her Ph.D. (Nielsen, 2004), Lene has developed a model for engaging personas, based on various rounded character descriptions. The engaging personas model, inspired from rounded characters in filmography, was developed with the purpose of helping companies and designers understand their target audience better. The mechanism behind is to avoid “schematas”, which is the tendency to fill in the missing information with pre-learned models of the world – in other words, stereotyping.

I propose engaging personas as a model for digital leaders to introduce themselves and team members to each other.

According to Nielsen (2004), the characteristics of engaging personas, are:

1. Body: “bodily expression and a posture, a gender and an age” (p. 155).
2. Psyche: “the present state of mind, persistent self-perception, character traits, temper, abilities and attitudes” (p.155);
3. Background: “present knowledge, job and family relations, and persistent beliefs, education, and internalized values and norms” (p.156);
4. Emotions: “emotions, intentions, and attitudes including ambitions and frustrations, wishes and dreams” (p. 156);
5. Cacophony: “character traits in opposition as well as peculiarities” (p.156).

The “engaging persona” characteristics can be used by leaders as a framework for the type of questions they could ask employees to present themselves, but also as a guidance for leaders on how to introduce themselves to the team and act as a role model, which is a critical behaviour for effective team leadership, according to Wade, Mention, and Jolly (1996).

The above framework can be used in the first (virtual) team meeting, or for introducing a new team member – be it a virtual conference call, audio or video, or a message that is written on the enterprise social media or online community wall.

The “Body” characteristic can be compensated for in a virtual setting with a profile picture and a requirement for every new team member to have a profile picture – paralleled, if possible, with a video or audio conference, where team members can be introduced to multiple physical dimensions of each other: seeing, hearing, reading facial expressions, vocal inflections, verbal cues, gestures and body language. These communication dynamics are one of the challenges that virtual teams face, according to Kayworth and Leidner (2015), and in many instances, our profile pictures are the only physical dimension we can convey about ourselves in virtual settings.

“Psyche” can be conveyed through discussing someone’s relation to the technology used in a project for example, or their beliefs and use of technology. For example, I could say about myself that I do use social media, although I have privacy concerns and have a deep belief that social media can be a waste of time and cause dependencies. This shows contradiction and the lack of settlement in my view of social media, as well as openness and skepticism simultaneously towards it.

The “Background” dimension is important for leaders to emphasize on when introducing new team members to each other, pointing out special abilities, courses, experiences or success that team members have achieved previously, and therefore setting the stage for having high expectations of them and of each other. As seen previously, our expectations of each other and of our employees have a direct influence on the team’s productivity. As Livingston (2003) formulates it: “How can you get the best out of our employees? Expect the best.”

Kayworth and Leidner (2015) point out that one’s background might be distorted by the high levels of anonymity that virtual settings allow for, as we can change our username or not fill in information about our job title, location or even choose to set ourselves as “invisible” to the team if we wish to. It is important for digital leaders to set the stage of how employees should fill in the information required in their online profiles used for collaboration, as well as establish standards for collaboration.

“Emotions” can be conveyed by expressing what we feel in relation to the task, project, colleagues or by how we talk about the same. If I say: “I am really excited to start working on the project” – I will convey a high energy and enthusiasm. Similarly, if I say: “Let’s hope we manage to pull the deadline”, I might unwillingly convey skepticism towards my team’s capability to meet deadlines, as well as apathy.

“Cacophony” is described in a guideline for writers by Rukov (2003) as 1+1+1, where 1+1 refer to two oppositional character traits, while the last 1 is a peculiarity. For example, I could say about myself that I consider the cake that we bring to our workplace as a replacement of the social cigarette of the past decade, but I will still accept an invitation to eat cake with my colleagues – this would represent the two oppositional character traits. A peculiarity is that I own 25 plants and counting.

In summary, stereotyping can lead to low levels of trust in virtual teams, as well as set the stage for expectations lower than our employees could raise up to, which will impact a team’s productivity levels. A way to combat stereotyping is making sure to introduce ourselves and our team member’s to each other in a way that doesn’t leave space for stereotyping. A way to do so, is borrowing the framework of building rounded characters from filmography, which can help us build engaging personas around ourselves and virtual team members and use collaborative software to its full potential to create our online profile. 

Bibliography

1. Cardwell, M. (1996). Dictionary of Psychology. Chicago IL: Fitzroy Dearborn.
2. McLeod, S. A. (2015). Stereotypes. Retrieved from simplypsychology.org/katz-braly.html
3. Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Leidner, D. E. (1999). Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams. Organization Science,10(6), 791-815. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.6.791
4. Lea, M., & Spears, R. (1992). Paralanguage and social perception in computer-mediated communication. Journal of Organizational Computing, 2, 321-342.
5. Timothy R. Kayworth, Dorothy E. Leidner (2002) Leadership Effectiveness in Global Virtual Teams, Journal of Management Information Systems, 18:3, 7-40, DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2002.11045697
6. Livingston, S. (January, 2003). Pygmalion in Management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved July 4, 2017, from https://hbr.org/2003/01/pygmalion-in-management
7. Macrae, C. N. and Bodenhausen, G. V. (2001), Social cognition: Categorical person perception. British Journal of Psychology, 92: 239–255. doi:10.1348/000712601162059
8. Nielsen, L. (2004). Engaging Personas and Narrative Scenarios(Doctoral dissertation, Copenhagen Business School).
9. Rukov, M. (2003). “Persona workshop”. L. Nielsen. Copenhagen. Sigchi.dk
10. Wade, D.; Mention, C.; and Jolly, J. Teams: Who Needs Them and Why? Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing, 1996
11. Zaccaro, S. J., & Bader, P. (2003). E-Leadership and the Challenges of Leading E-Teams:. Organizational Dynamics, 31(4), 377-387. doi:10.1016/s0090-2616(02)00129-8

Some leaders use fairy tales to frame their communication if they want to engage and entertain their employees.  This article is a folkloric gathering of fairy tales, enriched by Big Data.

“Once upon a time, in a far far land, a poor peasant was in the tooth doctor hut – the blame was on the tobacco in snake oil which gave him a rotten stump. Helped by a mouth speculum, the tooth doctor pulled the stump to prevent decay from spreading to the other teeth. The scream of agony could be heard all the way to the neighbor village, where yet another peasant found himself in a similar situation. With every soul added in heaven, the tooth doctors were learning how to be better doctors, until retirement, when new inexperienced doctors will take their place and gain their knowledge from trials on more poor souls.

Fortunately, today, Big Data changes the way we share and utilize knowledge. Hospitals and medical research centers share their data with all the “villages” and doctors, in order to learn from their experience and nobody needs to die in the name of science.

Data changes our fairy tales – Think of how Hansel and Gretel could’ve checked Trip Advisor and the bad recommendations would’ve kept them away from the witches’ candy hut.”

These are the stories that Søren Pind – the Minister of Higher Education and Science in Denmark opened his presentation with, at the “Join the Data-Driven R(e)volution – Unlocking the Business Potential of Big Data” conference. Needless to say, the audience was engaged and amused.

His body language, voice, breathing, and pace contributed to the quality of his presentation and storytelling, but an advantage that digital leaders have is that they can focus only on the words they write.

The advantages of using storytelling

Stories are part of one’s upbringing, regardless of their interest in technology – or particularly Big Data in this case – thus, by using stories, leaders can create a bridge in communication and rapport with everyone. In this context, research has shown that a more authentic communication (openly sharing feelings and opinions) might make leaders feel more vulnerable, but that it is the vulnerability that makes employees feel more connected (Richter and Wagner 2014).

Using stories also makes it easier for people to remember a difficult concept, if that concept is drawn as a parallel to something already known.

Examples

Here are some more ready-made stories that you can adapt or be inspired by, based on industry and message, to assemble an engaging text. In a previous blog post, I have provided you with tools on how to assemble multiple types of text – in this blog post, we focus on Story Line and Anecdotes.

The stories below have an educative purpose as well, and that is to provide an overview of industries and businesses that were revolutionized by Big Data, all wrapped up in fairy tales.

E-commerce and market intelligence

Do you remember how The Snow White opened the door to the evil Step Mother and bought the poisonous apple that was recommended to her? Today, a product recommender system could’ve also predicted that she likes apples, based on her previous purchases, and the reviews would’ve kept her away from the poisonous recommendation of the evil Step Mother. (Chen et al., 2012, Adomavicius and Tuzhilin, 2005).

Package Delivery

The Little Red Riding Hood could’ve used UPS’ advanced package delivery system to deliver food to grandma. UPS is only one of the package delivery companies revolutionized by the use of Big Data. They are very well known for their use of statistics to anticipate the movement of the package, identify sources of problems (such as the Bad Wolf) and optimize delivery times. (Davenport, 2006).

Security and Public Safety

The 40 thieves from “Alibaba and the 40 Thieves” would’ve been discovered earlier with Big Data. Today, agencies appointed to secure public safety and security are able to gather and combine data from multiple sources, such as criminal records, cyber security threats, and multi-lingual intelligence. Crime and terrorism can be fought by applying models such as criminal network analysis, criminal association rule mining and clustering or cyber-attack analysis. (Chen et al., 2012)

Science and Technology

Once upon a time, Jack was surprised by the magic bean that grew into a Beanstalk all the way to the clouds – but with precision farming, we could’ve measured the right amount of magic spices and we would now all have magic beans that could grow to the clouds.

There are many scientific areas that benefit from the usage of Big Data and tracking of sensors and instruments, such as astrophysics, oceanography, genomics, environment research. To support the transparency and sharing of research, organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) mandate that the investigation projects need to provide data management plans. As an example, in biology, NSF founded iPlant, which enables biologists to track plant biology, learn, share and take decisions. (Chen et al., 2012). Would we all live on our Beanstalks today?

Image recognition and Deep Learning

I would imagine that the vane and mean stepsisters from Cinderella, would’ve posted a lot of selfies on Facebook, and there is also a high probability that Cinderella would’ve been captured in the pictures, sweeping the chimney in the background. With face recognition and deep learning, the Prince would’ve been able to find her faster. Today, the advancement in deep learning allow computers to recognize patterns and identify the objects or faces in unlabelled images. (Singh, 2017)

People matching algorithms

Do you ever wonder whom would’ve Belle chosen, if she was presented with more than two potential romantic partners: Gaston or The Beast? Big Data algorithms make it possible for us to find “The One” online through functions and algorithms that learn our preferences and prompt us with potential matches. Our romance is backed up by statistical discrimination and adverse selection.

The Frog Prince could’ve really needed a dating algorithm as well, then he wouldn’t have ended up with a princess that throws him against a wall – and maybe he could’ve met Belle instead.

Human Capital

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather were appointed to take care of the Sleeping Beauty and make sure that Aurora never pricks her finger in the spinning wheel – but unfortunately, the fairies got distracted and Aurora did prick her finger. With the use of Big Data, her parents could’ve chosen the best employees for this particular task (from the many working for them in the kingdom) at the right compensation level, through expert use of statistics and modeling. (Davenport, 2012)

Automotive

Although the rest of the fairy tales can be upgraded by the use of Big Data, I must say that Aladdin and the magic carpet is a bit ahead of us because it escaped the long debate on whether self-driving cars need a wheel or not, and it can freely navigate in the environment. Self-driving cars (and the magic carpet) depend on Big Data – “it’s really all about processing Big data, and the road is just another data set to be mined”.  (Vanderbilt, 2012) 

Construction building

The three little pigs would’ve had a better chance at predicting the risk of the Bad Wolf blowing their little house, with construction process risk analysis. Construction industry highly benefits from the use of Big Data, from analyzing team structure, budget, and schedule, to processing larger sets of data, such as drone footage. (McKinsey, 2017)

In I4L we focus on disseminating academic research through practical ideas and tools for digital leaders.

*I would like to thank my very good friend, Msc. Cand. In Digital Innovation and Management, Sonja Zell, and my good colleague, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Raffaele Ciriello, for contributing with fairy tales ideas.

Bibliography

1. Adomavicius, G., and Tuzhilin, A. 2005. “Toward the Next Generation of Recommender Systems: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art and Possible Extensions,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (17:6), pp. 734-749.
2. Chen, H., Chiang, R., & Storey, V. (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: from big data to a big impact. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), 1165–1188.
3. Davenport, T. (2006). Competing on analytics. Harvard Business Review
4. Reinventing Construction: A route to higher productivity(Rep.). (2017). McKinsey & Company.
5. Richter, A., & Wagner, D. (2014). Leadership 2.0: Engaging and Supporting Leaders in the Transition Towards a Networked Organisation. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,7
6. Singh, A. (2017). Deep Learning will radically change the ways we interact with technology. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/01/deep-learning-will-radically-change-the-ways-we-interact-with-technology
7. Vanderbilt, T., (2012). Let the robot drive: the autonomous car of the future is here. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_autonomouscars/

Literary technologies for Leadership

This article explains how leaders can use literary technologies, such as summarizing, persuading and storytelling, to lead through writing.

A quick google search on leadership behaviour reveals many products, services and advice tailored to leaders, on how to act and talk in order to inspire and influence. But what can leaders do when their communication is mediated by technology such as Skype, emails or Enterprise Social Networks?

New media technologies allow for modelling, in other words, we can use technology to emulate behaviours we would have in real life. One of them is authoring, described as “the act of generating content and putting it online for a broad audience”. (Richter and Wagner, 2014).  Computer-mediated communication allows leaders to reach more people, thus broadening their influence and turn the traditional one-way communication, in engaging and online conversations. It is also important to note that employees prefer authentic texts authored by their leaders, as opposed to texts that were edited or written by someone else in the name of the leader (Richter and Wagner, 2014).

There are multiple literary techniques that leaders can use to assemble a text. As Jack Hart, former writing coach at the Oregonian says, a fundamental question to ask in the process of writing, is: “Just what sort of narrative are we talking about here, and what tools will I need to build it?” (Hart, 2012). Depending on the purpose of the communication/text, leaders can use different types of literary techniques to ensemble unique and authentic texts, to inform, motivate or engage:

Persuading techniques – can be used for motivating, persuading and motivating people, for example when assembling a text about disclosing a new direction for the company, a major change – when it is important to bring the employees on board with the message:

• Consultancy discourse – employing a future state (desired or feared) to gain/justify/convince that what we do in the present is exactly what we should be doing. Example: “Because of the new economy, every organization risks irrelevance unless it can keep its technology, people and business processes synchronized with a moving target strategy” (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994).
• Dynamic words will create a sense of urgency, such as rapidly, dynamic, accelerating, explosive, boom, movement, action, progress. 
• Glossy expressions and clichés can be used to put some aspects in the light and other concepts (for which no glossiness will be used) in the shadow. Example: “first-of-its-kind”, “state-of-the-art”, “breakthrough”, “one-of-a-kind”.
• Multiplicity – bringing in multiple views (research, influencers, journals) can convince your reader of the validity of your sayings. “Research shows that a success factor for digital leadership is transparency. We must therefor be transparent in our work”
• Including the reader: “as our level of acquaintance with the reader rises, so our ability to write something highly personalized – and persuasive – increases” (Camp, 2007).
• Being personal – Camp (2007) thinks it is more persuasive to be personal: this can be achieved by using pronouns in the 1^st person (I, my, mine), sharing your emotions, feelings, views, or opinions.

Summarizing techniques – these techniques can be used when assembling short updates about the company, projects, and/or changes within the organization, meeting minutes and other texts where brevity is important.

• Titled paragraphs: giving titles to paragraphs signals the importance of its contents (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994).
• Bullet points – “important points are often described as bullet points – presumably emphasising the notion of going straight to the heart of the matter” (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994).
• Re-read and remove words: A sentence should not contain unnecessary words and a paragraph should not contain unnecessary sentences. Interrogate every word in a sentence for its meaning and utility to your reader.
• Replace vague words with powerful, specific words. For example, replace adjectives with numbers: “Our company has a lot of experience in….” with “Our company has 50 years’ experience in…”.
• Combine sentences: Re-read and pay attention to whether some sentences are unnecessary and the information they convey can be incorporated in another sentence.

Storytelling techniques – can be used for engaging, amusing, and/or conveying difficult concepts and ideas – when it is important that employees remember. “Storytelling has such wide application because, at its root, it serves universal human needs. Story makes sense out of a confusing universe by showing us how one action leads to another” (Hart, 2011).

• Storyline: Explosion, Rising Action, Crisis, Resolution, Denouncement (also known as storyline) are the building blocks of any story.
• Metaphors and figures of speech appeal to the reader’s imagination and are an essential part of Storytelling. Examples: “Our company is like an oak tree – No matter the storm, it will keep standing “.
• Anecdotes are short stories that can be used to capture your audience, or to draw a parallel to a more difficult concept.
• Hyperboles are exaggerated claims that can be used to emphasise arguments. Example: “Our CEO read a million papers about innovation and concluded that…”.
• Juxta positioning of time: using past, present and future alternatively – Example: “Our journey started in 2010, today we are challenged by many technologies, and by 2020 we want to be the best in our industry.”

The realm of literary techniques that can be used for leadership communication is vast. They are even more important when it comes to digital communication for leadership. In I4L we are working on methods and tools to apply them in practice.

Bibliography

1. Bloomfield, B., & Vurdubakis, T., (1994). Re-presenting Technology: IT Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions. Sociology 28(2): 455-477.
2. Camp, Lindsay (2007). Can I Change Your Mind? The Craft and Art of Persuasive Writing. AC Black, London.
3. Hart, Jack. (2012). Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction. University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London.
4. Richter, A., & Wagner, D. (2014). Leadership 2.0: Engaging and Supporting Leaders in the Transition Towards a Networked Organisation. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,7.