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A critical job performance evaluation can have a negative effect on any employee, according to research. By studying how people view positive or negative feedback a researcher has determined that nobody -- even people who are motivated to learn -- likes negative performance reviews. She is therefore developing ways to help managers improve the process for reviewing employees, and provides some pointers in her newly published article. Suggested Reading Click on image Culbertson and collaborators at Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University surveyed more than 200 staffers who had just completed performance reviews at a large southern university. The research appears in the Journal of Personnel Psychology. The researchers first assessed employees' goal orientations: Learning goal-oriented people like to learn for the sake of learning. They often pursue challenges despite setbacks. Performance-prove goal-oriented people want to prove that they have competence to perform...

Original article written by Diamond Dixon S elf-employment can allow older workers to stay in the labor market longer and earn additional income, yet little research has addressed if reasons for self-employment vary across gender and culture. Now, University of Missouri researchers have studied factors that contribute to self-employment and found these factors differ for men and women in the United States and New Zealand. Suggested Reading "Gender is one of the most enduring social factors in the U.S. and New Zealand, a fact that is particularly evident in differing economic opportunities for men and women and their decisions to be self-employed," said Angela Curl, an assistant professor in the MU School of Social Work and the study's lead author. Men more likely to be self-employed Curl analyzed survey data from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study of U.S. adults and the New Zealand Longitudinal Study of Aging and found that men in each country were more likely than wome...

L ying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules, according to new research. Suggested Reading Click on image New research shows that lying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules. "The common saying that 'rules are meant to be broken' is at the root of both creative performance and dishonest behavior," says lead researcher Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School. "Both creativity and dishonesty, in fact, involve rule breaking." To examine the link between dishonesty and creativity, Gino and colleague Scott Wiltermuth of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California designed a series of experiments that allowed, and even sometimes encouraged, people to cheat. In the first experiment, for example, participants were presented with a series of number matrice...

Baseball great and world-renowned malapropist, Yogi Berra, and one of his best known comments. For so many small business people and self-employed entrepreneurs, their business is part of their self-expression.  So, they will dress in a way that fits their own mental picture of who they feel they are - without considering the first impression they give a prospective client or customer. In sales, it's standard practice for the salesperson to enter a room, greet the person they are meeting with, then to look away from the prospect and at their briefcase or other material for the count of ten before looking back at the prospect to start the meeting. Why?  Because most sales or client relationships are created in the first ten seconds based on the prospect's first impression of the salesperson.  Everything the salesperson says or proves from this point is pure window dressing. This is why it is so very important for you to project an image that fits in with your prospect's id...

Have you ever wondered where the mandatory retirement age of 65 came from?  Why 65?  Why not 60?  Or 72? From a European history class I took way back when, I learned that the age of 65 for retirement was essentially plucked from the air by Otto von Bismark, the chancellor of Prussia, in the 1840s as part of a compromise with European labor unions.  Bismark was trying to unite the many small Germanic states into a greater Germany, and was meeting resistance from the unions. Suggested Reading Click on image Bismark offered a state funded retirement to any worker once they reached the age of 65, which the majority of workers accepted and the unions agreed to.  The kicker in the plan was that the average age when most adult males died in the mid-19th century was 45, so the plan wasn't going to cost the government much money. Flash forward to today, and most Americans and Europeans are living well into their seventh and eighth decades, relatively healthy and often a...

R earchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts, have found that exposure to short wavelength blue light during the biological day directly and immediately improves alertness and performance. Blue Light has an "Alerting" Effect "Our previous research has shown that blue light is able to improve alertness during the night, but our new data demonstrates that these effects also extend to daytime light exposure," said Shadab Rahman, PhD, a researcher in BWH's Division of Sleep Medicine and lead author of this study. "These findings demonstrate that prolonged blue light exposure during the day has an an alerting effect." Suggested Reading Click on image In order to determine which wavelengths of light were most effective in warding off fatigue, the BWH researchers teamed with George Brainard, PhD, a professor of neurology at Thomas Jefferson University, who developed the specialized light equipment used in the study. Research...