Those informal minutes spent on extended coffee breaks with a co-worker or occasional trips to the water cooler may not be a waste of time after all, says research by Ivey professor Charlice Hurst.
“We tend to look at conversations among co-workers as wasted time if they’re not task-oriented,” said Hurst. “But time spent in this way can boost people’s happiness with their job, and benefit the organization.”
In her research, Hurst studies the career effects of “core self-evaluations,” a measure of how people see their fundamental worth and competence.
She examined core self-evaluations in the context of social interactions in the workplace, wanting to know how sharing good news with co-workers affected organizational behaviour and job performance.
In her study, which involved 130 people in a wide range of careers across the United States, she initially measured participant’s levels of core self-evaluations. She then surveyed them each day to see whether they had shared a good news story with their co-workers.
Hurst found, perhaps counter-intuitively, that good news in itself did not lead to improved job performance, but a positive response from co-workers did.
“When you receive an enthusiastic or encouraging response from your co-workers, you will be happier with your job, and this will lead you to act in a way that is beneficial to the organization,” she says.
In fact, Hurst found encouraging feedback boosted job performance the most in those who have low core self-evaluations – a valuable insight for performance development. She also contends that core self-evaluation can be valuable for predicting an employee’s future job performance. These findings indicate the importance of cultivating a work environment where people have the opportunity to show their personal sides.
“People with high self-confidence are more likely to share a good news story with a co-worker,” she says. “But when people with low self-confidence share good news and receive a positive response, it boosts their performance more.”
Details of the research were released in the November edition of Impact, an online monthly publication featuring research from faculty at the Richard Ivey School of Business. Read the full article.
