Wise interventions in organizations

Abstract

The subjective meanings employees assign to their understandings of themselves, others, and their environments influence an array of important work attitudes and behaviors. We review theory and research on wise interventions that illustrate three fundamental motives that underlie this subjective meaning-making process: the need to understand, the need for self-integrity, and the need to belong. Understanding how employees respond to organizational contexts that call into question or threaten these fundamental motives can potentially enable both organizations and their employees to achieve their goals better. Prior research has shown that wise interventions can bring about long-term beneficial outcomes in the domains of academic performance, stress and health, relationship satisfaction, and conflict reduction. We seek to integrate wise interventions and organizational behavior to explore where, when, and how addressing the fundamental needs of understanding, self-integrity, and belonging can lead to behaviors and attitudes that are beneficial for employees and employers alike. We examine when employees’ subjective meanings are likely to be amenable to influence by wise interventions, such as during key transition points that may be person-centered (e.g., when employees take a new job) or organization-centered (e.g., the introduction of organizational change). We review interventions that have occurred within organizational settings and consider how interventions tested in other contexts (e.g., education) may be applied to organizations. A potentially fruitful liaison awaits organizational behavior researchers interested in the application of wise interventions.

Introduction

Organizations are likely to be effective when employees are willing and able to contribute to organizational interests, as reflected in their work behaviors (e.g., in-role and extra-role performance) and attitudes (e.g., commitment). Challenges for employees arise during times of transition, such as when they are onboarded or promoted to a new position, or when the organization is undergoing significant change such as layoffs. Approaches to enhancing employees’ contributions include: (1) creating work environments that motivate and enable them to perform, and (2) bringing about lasting changes in employees that better position them to fulfill their responsibilities. For example, if authorities have decided that the key to organizational success is better teamwork, they may change the reward system (e.g., to group- rather than individually-based incentives) or physical architecture (e.g., to have more common spaces in which employees can easily come together). Furthermore, employees may receive training in how to work better in teams.

As worthwhile as these approaches are, they are incomplete when they are not attuned to the subjective ways in which people perceive their environments and themselves. Consequently, they may overlook the critical role that psychological construal plays in fostering adaptive work behaviors and attitudes. The emerging literature on wise interventions (Walton & Crum, 2021; Walton & Wilson, 2018), when applied in organizational contexts, has potential to redress this “error of omission”.

Wise interventions refer to theory-based alterations that are attuned to the ways that people construe themselves and the world around them. Whereas they are objectively small in certain ways, they can change the subjective meaning that people assign to themselves, to other people, and to situations, and in so doing can engender more constructive ways for people to function (Walton, 2014). It is important to clarify the meaning of the word wise. We build on Steele (1997) who used the term “wise schooling” to refer to educational programs that are sensitive to the way that students from diverse backgrounds construe their environments. Wise refers to psychological processes and not to the positive outcomes they can engender. As Walton and Wilson (2018) put it, “wise interventions … focus on (are ‘wise to’) the meanings and inferences people draw about themselves, other people, or a situation they are in” (p. 618).

By targeting psychological processes, wise interventions foster changes in how people construe themselves, others, and their environments, which have been shown to produce lasting positive effects on important beliefs and behaviors. For example, Walton and Cohen (2011) found that a one-hour intervention delivered to African-American college students during their freshman year designed to address their concerns about whether they belonged in college led them to perform significantly better throughout their college careers. Moreover, three to five years after completing college, they were shown to have greater life and career satisfaction relative to their counterparts who were in the control condition a full seven to nine years earlier (Brady, Cohen, Jarvis, & Walton, 2020).

Research on wise interventions is guided by three important principles. As Walton and Wilson (2018) suggested, people have multiple fundamental needs: the need to understand (themselves, other people, and social situations; Heider, 1958), the need for self-integrity (Steele, 1988; see also Cohen & Sherman, 2014) and the need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Second, ways of thinking emanating from these needs influence functioning and important life outcomes. For example, a new manager feeling insecure about being promoted to the role may perceive her direct report's poor performance to indicate that she was a bad boss versus being something normal and workable. Replacing the former understanding with the latter is likely to lead to more constructive reactions on the part of the new boss. Or, when certain needs are threatened, such as the need for self-integrity or the need to belong, the ensuing construals also may lead to reactions, such as being resistant, defensive, or withdrawing from social interactions that can set off negative feedback loops that inhibit learning or other adaptive responses. Third, wise interventions can help shape how people understand themselves, others, and their environments, or foster other ways to think about threats to their needs for self-integrity and to belong. By interacting with ongoing personal and social forces, wise interventions can bring about lasting positive changes in attitude and behavior. We next discuss examples which, while not drawn from the workplace, have implications for improving employees’ organizational life.

People's needs to understand are manifested in their tendencies to draw inferences about themselves and their social world which are ultimately in the service of guiding their behavior. Sometimes, the substance of these inferences leads to maladaptive behavior that may unfortunately be self-reinforcing. Wise interventions can lead people to make alternative inferences that may not only lead to a more adaptive response in the near term, but also set in motion a positive chain of events that leads to the sustainability of the adaptive response. Consider the plight of being low in self-esteem. Although the phenomenology of low self-esteem is unpleasant, low self-esteem people (low SEs) tend to think and act in ways that make it more likely for them to continue to think badly of themselves (e.g., Brockner, 1988; Murray, Holmes, & Collins, 2006; Swann, 1999). For example, in response to perceived slights from their relationship partners they tend to be overly sensitive and off-putting, thereby inviting additional rejections from their partners.

Promisingly, however, Marigold, Holmes, and Ross (2007) and Marigold, Holmes, and Ross (2010) found that it is possible to break the vicious cycle of low self-esteem by merely asking low SEs to “think of a time when your partner told you how much s/he liked something about you… Explain why your partner admired you. Describe what it meant to you and its significance for your relationship” (2010; p. 626). Relative to the control condition, this brief “abstract reframing” induction caused people with low self-esteem to feel more secure in their relationships and to evaluate them more positively. Moreover, they were perceived by their partners to have behaved more positively for weeks after the intervention.

Just as low self-esteem people think and act in ways that perpetuate their low self-esteem, a similar dynamic applies to groups in conflict with each other. Each side tends to see the worst in the other, such that seemingly innocuous acts may be taken as additional “evidence” of the other group's untrustworthiness. Research conducted with groups with a long history of mistrust (Israelis and Palestinians) showed that perceptions of the other side may be improved by a relatively brief wise intervention (Goldenberg et al., 2018). As part of a leadership development workshop conducted in Israel, participants in the experimental condition were informed that groups in general can change, and that what makes a leader great is the ability to recognize that groups need not be rigid or unchanging in their beliefs and behaviors, but that they are malleable. A full six months after this “group malleability” induction, participants (all Israeli) expressed less negative attitudes toward the Palestinians, were more hopeful regarding future relations with the Palestinians, and behaved more positively toward Palestinians (e.g., they allocated more money to them in the dictator game).

Whereas people seek to understand themselves and their social worlds to guide their behavior, they have an additional motivation to see themselves as moral and adaptive, or, as Steele (1988) put it, as having global self-integrity (i.e., “good, competent, unitary, stable, coherent, capable of free choice and capable of controlling important outcomes,” p. 262). This motive can be threatened by a myriad of events in everyday life, from negative feedback from one's boss, to an argument with one's child, to the suggestion that behaviors that were freely engaged in may have put one at risk for disease (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Wise interventions can shape the inferences that people make in response to these potential threats to how they see themselves.

For example, one such type of external challenge that may instantiate concerns about global self-integrity is stereotype threat (Steele, 1997). Stereotype threat refers to being in a situation in which one is aware that a negative stereotype about one's group is relevant. When this occurs, the knowledge that one can be judged as a member of a negatively stereotyped group can serve as an extra cognitive burden, a “threat in the air” that can lead to stress and interfere with performance on the stereotype-relevant task. Examples of stereotypes that have led to the experience of associated threat include: (1) African-Americans and Latino Americans are less intellectually capable than their White and Asian American counterparts, and (2) women have less capability in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) topics than men. For useful discussions of stereotype threat in work organizations, see Roberson and Kulik (2007) and Walton, Murphy, and Ryan (2015).

The wise intervention of self-affirmation (Cohen and Sherman, 2014, Steele, 1988) has been shown to influence the self-narrative of those experiencing stereotype threat in the domains of race and gender within educational settings. The exercise consists of having people reflect on values of personal importance, and how such values have played a meaningful role in their lives. Cohen, Sherman and their colleagues found that the racial performance gap in which middle school black students did worse than their white counterparts was reduced for months and even years when they engaged in self-affirmation activities administered by their teachers (relative to a control condition) at the beginning of the school year (Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006; Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009; Sherman et al., 2013; for a review see Sherman, Lokhande, Müller, & Cohen, 2021). Other research has found that the tendency for women to perform worse than men in an MBA program was eliminated for the entire first term when students completed the self-affirmation exercise shortly after their entry into the program (Kinias & Sim, 2016), and this was particularly true when the type of self-affirmation was congruent with students’ self-construals (Kim, Brockner, & Block, 2020).

The need to belong reflects the fact that we are social animals (Aronson & Aronson, 2008); we want to feel connected with others. In the organizational justice literature, for instance, the need to feel valued, included and respected is a key premise of relational explanations (e.g., Tyler & Lind, 1992) of why employees respond more positively when they have been treated more fairly by their employers. Particularly when people's need to belong has been threatened (whether through unfair treatment or other instigators), an array of wise interventions has been shown to yield long-lasting positive effects on their beliefs and behaviors. For instance, the aforementioned study by Walton and Cohen (2011) offered African-American college students who were prone to feel out of place at an elite academic institution an alternative, non-race-based, way to understand why they felt as if they did not belong. This intervention has been successfully scaled to address achievement gaps in diverse university settings (Walton & Yeager, 2020; Yeager et al., 2016).

Other studies have used different wise interventions on people drawing on their need to belong. For instance, Cialdini's (1984) principle of “social proof” in which people's behavior may be altered by giving them information about how others behave is predicated on people's need to belong. Studies have shown that behaviors as disparate as paying taxes, re-using towels when staying as guests in hotels, and consuming less home energy shift in the direction of information provided about what others have done (Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2018; see Miller & Prentice, 2016 for review). People conform to group norms, in part, because they want to be perceived as good group members, which is a core aspect of how they see themselves (Binning, Brick, Cohen, & Sherman, 2015). As further evidence that the need to belong underlies these results, researchers found that the tendency to conform was even more pronounced when information about how others had behaved was accompanied by requests to “join in” and “do it together” (Carr & Walton, 2014).