BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGY
Everyone has been guilty of procrastination at one time or another,
but the habit is particularly thought to occur when a person perceives a
task to be beyond their capabilities. The character traits of extroversion
and perfectionism are also associated with an increased tendency to put
off arduous tasks.
There’s no easy fix for procrastination, although psychologists
recommend getting into the habit of starting your working day with
those tasks that seem most daunting. It’s also worth remembering that
procrastination isn’t always a bad thing – as mentioned in Chapter
12, an incubation period is vital to creativity. It’s likely that you’re
mulling over the solution to a problem even when you’re not directly
dealing with it. In fact, forgiving yourself could be the key. A team of
Canadian psychologists at Carleton University led by Michael Wohl
demonstrated this in a 2010 study. They found that those under-
graduates who forgave themselves for procrastinating before their first
mid-term exams subsequently procrastinated less prior to the second
round of mid-terms, and performed better – possibly as a result of not
pro crastinating so much.
Working together
Once the most capable people have been recruited and the right
working-conditions created, the next challenge for the psychologist
is how to get people to work together effectively. A hugely popular
group exercise in business is brainstorming, in which team members
sit around a table bouncing ideas off each other. Brainstorming can
be enjoyable, but unfortunately it doesn’t work as well as most people
think it does. Time and again research has shown that people think of
more new ideas on their own than they do in a group. Two weaknesses
of brainstorming are: social loafing, in which unforthcoming team
members keep quiet while others bandy ideas around, and evaluation
apprehension, in which people fear having their ideas shot down by
more dominant team members. Psychologists have dubbed the false
belief that people are more creative in groups the “illusion of group
productivity”.
Another reason that groups can work poorly is that team members
tend to spend most of the time talking about information that they
share with each other, rather than learning anything new. At its worst,
group decision-making can lead to the feared phenomenon known as
groupthink, which has been blamed for all manner of calamities, from