Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Subordinates feel obliged to respond with excitement when a boss shares good news, five studies find
Emily Poulton's team found in five studies that a boss sharing good news gains energy while subordinates feel obliged to respond with enthusiasm. Poulton ties the strain to rank and tells managers to keep sharing wins while staying aware of it.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The team paired controlled experiments with a real-world workplace study of supervisor-subordinate pairs.
- In a fictional bookstore scenario, telling a story about a customer's tip also made supervisors more willing to help their employee.
- Subordinates who felt more pressure to respond positively were more likely to stick pins in a virtual voodoo doll representing their supervisor.
- Poulton co-wrote the paper with Emma L. Frank of Ohio State's Fisher College and Szu-Han (Joanna) Lin of the University of Georgia's Terry College.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost The energy a manager gets from telling a win comes with a demand on the listener, who is expected to supply excitement on cue whether or not they feel it.
- constraint Because the pin-sticking link is an association between two measures taken from the same people, it cannot yet support the claim that performed enthusiasm causes resentment of the boss.
- contradiction Earlier work treats sharing good news as a relationship builder; these studies suggest the benefit holds for the teller and gets more complicated when the listener reports to them.
- decision Under Poulton's advice managers keep sharing wins, but the listener's rank now becomes something to weigh when deciding who hears the news.
The bookstore experiment is the strongest evidence, because there the researchers controlled what people heard. For the subordinates in that experiment, "simply hearing the supervisor's tip story increased their sense of obligation to respond with interest and excitement," Poulton said [8]. In a controlled design, a rise like that can be attributed to the story itself. The bookstore and its boss were fictional, though, so the study measures how people react to an imagined supervisor [7].
The pin-sticking result [9] is harder to read. Felt pressure and the urge to stick pins were both measured in the same people, so the link between them is an association. It fits the idea that performed enthusiasm leaves resentment behind. It cannot rule out that people who already disliked their supervisor felt the pressure more and also reached for the pins.
The field study of real supervisor-subordinate pairs [5] is the check that the effect holds up outside a staged scenario. The phys.org account of the paper, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes [3], does not give participant numbers, effect sizes or the measures used in that study [13].
Earlier research found that sharing good news strengthens relationships and extends positive emotions [6]. Poulton, an assistant professor of management at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business Indianapolis [1], asked what changes when the listener reports to the teller. The idea began in graduate school, when she became curious how such news felt to employees whose supervisors were sharing their own successes [12]. "As a subordinate, you can't really say, 'I don't care.' You feel a certain pressure to smile, engage and be supportive, even if you're not in the mood for that conversation," Poulton said [10].
The thing this doesn't tell you is what the pressure costs in work. The outcomes described are felt obligation and a symbolic act of hostility [8][9]. A manager is more likely to notice disengagement or a resignation, and linking the pressure to either would take a separate test. I think the obligation effect is credible in direction, since it comes from a controlled experiment and was examined alongside real working pairs [5][8]. Its size is the open part.
Poulton's own advice is narrow. "I don't think the takeaway is that managers should stop sharing good news. The takeaway is to be aware of the social pressure those conversations can create," she said [11].
What to watch
- Sample sizes and effect sizes in the Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes paper, which would show how large the obligation effect is.
- Whether the field study of real supervisor-subordinate pairs tracked outcomes such as engagement or turnover, or only felt pressure.
- Independent replications that test whether the pressure eases when good news flows both ways or rank differences are small.