Idea Watch: Coworkers, Bosses, and Cubicles

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green.

Are MBA students really all jerks? What’s the best way to arrange your office? And what do teddy bears have to do with ethics?

I’m here today with senior editors Dan McGinn and Scott Berinato, who bring you the Idea Watch section of the magazine. Every now and then, we check in with them for the latest in surprising management research. And this week, we’ll touch on all those questions and more.

Scott, thanks so much joining us.

SCOTT BERINATO: Thank you.

SARAH GREEN: And, Dan, I’m glad to have you.

DAN MCGINN: Thanks.

SARAH GREEN: Let’s start with that study on MBA students. Dan, how self-centered are MBA students, really?

DAN MCGINN: They’re definitely more self-centered than psychology students, according to research from James Westerman at Appalachian State University. He had the two groups of students take something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, and the business students scored significantly higher. Narcissism often means to be self-absorbed, self-centered, and entitled, and Westerman wonders what this narcissistic generation of business leaders might mean for our future.

SARAH GREEN: But let’s compare this with another bit of research. Because I think other research you’ve run across, Dan, questions the value managers being fair. So tell us about that.

DAN MCGINN: Sure. This is some research by Batia Wiesenfeld of NYU and some colleagues. They looked at how people perceive power versus fairness. And in a perfect world, I think most of us would want a boss who’s both powerful and fair. But the reality is it can be hard for people to really manifest both of those attitudes. People see them as mutually exclusive. You’re either fair or you’re powerful. And their research suggests that it’s one or the other.

SARAH GREEN: So maybe seeming slightly narcissistic would actually help?

DAN MCGINN: Well, their research found that powerful people were much more likely to be able to control resources, to drive decisions through, to reward and punish. And that being fair, there was a little bit of being wishy-washy about it, and that it wasn’t necessarily the trait that was likely to get somebody promoted.

SARAH GREEN: Now, Scott, you’ve done some research that may relate here, tangentially, at least. This is about ethics. Tell me what teddy bears have to do with ethics.

SCOTT BERINATO: Sure. We interviewed Professor Sreedhari Desai, who’s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but was also a visiting fellow at the Edmond Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. She did some really innovative studies with teddy bears and what the researchers call childhood cues– crayons, cartoons.

And what she did was she put these artifacts, or puts the video, in a room with people and then asks them to do something. And what she found was the people who had these childhood cues present were far less likely to lie and cheat and far more likely to engage in what she called pro-social behavior, which is treating others fairly or giving them more money when she has a chance to dole out more money.

And what she thinks is happening here is these childhood cues trigger something in us, something very primal, frankly, which makes us want to be good.

SARAH GREEN: So how do you see that working out in the real world? Are we just going to have teddy bears in meeting rooms now?

SCOTT BERINATO: She doesn’t dismiss that possibility. And that may be an extreme case, but she doesn’t dismiss the possibility of childhood cues actually improving, say, boardroom behavior.

She did take the research into one real-world scenario. And when she looked at charitable giving of companies and the number of daycares and nurseries and other childhood centers around corporate headquarters, and she actually surprisingly did find a correlation between a certain number of child-care facilities within two miles of a headquarters and increased charitable giving. So any place where there were more than five of these facilities within two miles of the headquarters, those companies tended to be more charitable.

SARAH GREEN: So we’ve been talking a lot about ethics and honesty, about fairness. There’s a surprising application, I think, of some research on honesty, which we published in our July-August issue.

Dan, the article I’m referencing caught a lot of attention. It’s about the value of gay and lesbian employees coming out of the closet. Tell us about this research.

DAN MCGINN: Sure. This is some research by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Karen Sumberg from the Center for Work-Life Policy. They studied within Fortune 500 companies how workers who were gay and in the closet versus gay and out of the closet perceived their likelihood of success, whether their career was stalled out. And the results were surprising.

First of all, 48% of LGBT workers remained in the closet at work. For many of us, that seemed like a pretty high number. We all work with people who are out, and we see it as a pretty normal state of being. So the fact that so many people were in the closet was surprising. Number two, they found that, of the people that were in the closet, they were much more likely to see their career as stalled out. They were expending a lot of energy keeping this secret life. They didn’t feel like they were able to bond as personally with other employees. So we found there are real disadvantages to being in the closet.

SARAH GREEN: So that is a surprisingly high number, the 40% you mentioned who are still in the closet. Of course, there is still discrimination out there, so perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. But it is depressing.

So what are the implications of staying in the closet on someone’s work performance or their ability to succeed at their company?

DAN MCGINN: Well, one thing that this has an implication for is retention rates. If you look at closeted workers versus out workers, closeted workers are much more likely to feel isolated at work. And among those closeted workers, they’re 73% more likely to leave their job within three years than someone that’s out. So every business wants to reduce turnover and keep good employees. And if you have workers who are in the closet, it’s more likely that they’re going to be tempted to leave because of feeling social isolation.

SARAH GREEN: We’ve been talking a lot so far about people-y stuff, bizarre quirks of successful people. I’d like to wrap up by talking a little bit about office design. Because I have this mental image of all these different kinds of people bouncing around in a big office.

What’s the best way, Scott, to design an office so that it gets the best out of all of us?

SCOTT BERINATO: Well, we’ve all been through the dreaded office redesign, and oftentimes they’re foisted on employees that this is going to increase collaboration or make the office more creative.

And what we did is we talked with a design firm that worked with the pharmaceutical company Lilly to actually redesign about half a million square feet of office space. But what they did was they collected a ton of data both before and after the redesign. So you have these baseline numbers of things like how much time people were losing per year just looking for spaces to meet or the drop-by by colleagues. And in some cases, just distractions alone were costing companies 100 hours per year per employee.

And so they took all of these measurements and then they redesigned the space. And they essentially tore away a lot of the cubicles, made a lot more open space that allowed people to communicate more freely and more quickly. And also designed space to task, rather than just building generic spaces that then you filled with marketing or sales. So you’d have quiet space, you’d have a collaborative space for the creative folks.

And what they found was, overall, they reduced time lost by about 16%. Probably even more important to a lot of our listeners is they cut capital costs per employee by almost half, from $34,000 per employee to $18,000 per employee. They also reduced square footage per employee, which means they could put more people in the same amount of space. And they considered it a real success, and now they’re rolling it out to the entire company.

SARAH GREEN: Scott, that sounds great, but I’m a little skeptical of your squishing people in there like super-productive sardines. Do people like this, are they happy with this?

SCOTT BERINATO: It turns out, Sarah, that they don’t actually realize it. Because one of the numbers that I found was surprising that the researchers discovered was that people spend only about 35% of their time during the day at their desks. So 2/3 of the day, they’re not even at their desks. So the size of the desk actually isn’t that important to getting all of their work done.

And in terms of satisfaction with the new space, what they found was satisfaction with the workspace increased dramatically, from about 21% to almost 60%. And people considered it a source of pride. They were actually recruiting better because of this new space was really a draw for new employees. And they also just found that people considered it a more stimulating and creative atmosphere to work. So it seems to have really worked out.

SARAH GREEN: Any sign of any teddy bears on these desks?

SCOTT BERINATO: No. If there were teddy bears on the desks, I’m sure those people were behaving very well at work.

SARAH GREEN: Well, Scott, thanks for coming in.

SCOTT BERINATO: Thank you.

SARAH GREEN: Dan, thanks for coming in.

DAN MCGINN: Thanks.

SARAH GREEN: That was senior editors Scott Berinato and Dan McGinn. For more, visit hbr.org. And for more random research you can use to impress your friends, sign up for our Daily Stat newsletter, or find it on Twitter @TheDailyStat.