Featured faculty: Dora Lau
Written by Pan Jingyi

Diversity in the workplace is widely celebrated as the engine of innovation. Bringing together people with different backgrounds, perspectives, experiences, and sparks of creativity is bound to fly – or so the ideal scenario goes.

In reality, team managers and employees know that diversity can be a double-edged sword. When teams split along demographic lines—such as age, gender, race, or tenure—they often form invisible barriers known as demographic faultlines.

Left unmanaged, these faultlines can divide a team into distinct subgroups. Instead of sparking innovative ideas, diversity can devolve into “us versus them” dynamics, personal friction, and interpersonal conflict that paralyse team creativity.

So, how can organisations harness the undeniable benefits of a diverse workforce while preventing demographic divisions from turning into destructive conflict? A new study titled Team iungens practice: A behavioural perspective to bridge demographic faultlines and relationship conflicts for team creativity offers a practical answer.

The study was conducted by Dora Lau, Associate Professor (Teaching) in the Department of Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School, in collaboration with Su Qin of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Lynn Shore of Colorado State University, Cai Yahua of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Li Ran of Beijing Normal University.

“Compared to similar concepts like social integration focusing on results, TIP emphasises specific, actionable behaviours to achieve those outcomes.”

Professor Dora Lau

The team proposes a new approach called team iungens practice (TIP) to bridge these workplace divides. Derived from the Latin word iungens, TIP refers to purposeful actions taken by leaders and team members to build ties, such as seeking cross-team collaboration or highlighting shared goals.

“An easier way to understand TIP is to think of it as ways to ‘connect and build good relationships’ among team members,” says Professor Lau. “Compared to similar concepts like social integration focusing on results, TIP emphasises specific, actionable behaviours to achieve those outcomes.”

Measuring connecting behaviours

Through a series of experiments, the researchers first developed a list of nine behaviours that help team members connect, such as involving everyone in important decisions and actively listening to diverse ideas.

They then surveyed more than 300 employees from three companies in Chinese Mainland to test whether these behaviours reduce interpersonal conflict and increase team creativity in demographically divided teams. In this step, team members describe any interpersonal conflicts they experienced internally and rate how well their leaders promote the nine behaviours, while team leaders also rate their members. Two months later, the leaders assess team creativity.

The results show that, teams with stronger demographic faultlines are more likely to experience interpersonal conflicts. When team members split into cliques or subgroups, they stop exchanging ideas, which crushes creativity. This negative result is particularly pronounced among teams that score low on these nine behaviours.

However, when both team members and leaders engaged more in these nine behaviours, the negative impacts of faultlines and conflict nearly disappeared. This confirms that these behaviours can connect team members across demographic divides, smooth out conflicts, and boost creativity, further validating them as effective behaviours.

Nine TIP Behaviours

• Seeing opportunities for collaboration within the group
• Pointing out common grounds among members with different perspectives
• Forging connections within the team when dealing with a particular issue
• Involving all members in important decision-making, even if it may delay the decision
• Able to work successfully even when someone’s ideas are not retained by the group
• Staying connected to accomplish group goals, even under time constraints
• Synthesising ideas and contributions from different members
• Carefully keeping strong ties among members to facilitate work
• Listening to and appreciating all members’ ideas

Leader’s vs. team member’s TIP

While TIP involves actions that anyone on a team can practice, a key distinction persists between the leader and the team members. Leader’s TIP is effective at preventing interpersonal conflict from emerging in the first place. When leaders actively practice connecting behaviours, they can successfully dismantle the adverse effects of demographic faultlines before friction turns into tension.

Interestingly, while leaders are great at preventing conflicts, they are less effective at salvaging creativity once conflict has broken out. When conflicts arise, team members’ TIP turns out to be more effective at safeguarding creativity. Being closer to the day-to-day operations, team members’ immediate efforts to bridge differences effectively neutralised the damaging effect of conflict on idea generation.

“When members engage in more TIP behaviours, they are more likely to resolve disputes with colleagues immediately, thereby focusing on information processing and preventing them from escalating into relational friction,” says Professor Lau.

“In general, TIPs can create opportunities for subgroups to meet and strengthen connections with each other. It also helps teams build a culture where feedback is accepted gracefully and less time is wasted on personal frictions.”

Building bridges in the workplace

TIP is effective because it focuses on concrete practices that can be observed, measured, and trained. Companies can incorporate it into leadership development programmes, team coaching sessions, and even performance reviews. For example, the human resource department can design training programmes for all staff to learn the core ideas of TIPs and train them on how to engage in these behaviours through different scenarios.

Leaders and managers should act as connectors, actively bridging diverse colleagues across demographic boundaries and highlighting common ground during disagreements.

“Team members, especially those who are previously disconnected, will feel more likely to connect when they find similarities,” Professor Lau says. “Team members also usually treat the leader as a role model and expect the leader to help them resolve their problems. If leaders engage in TIPs, members are more likely to learn and mimic.”

Anyone can build a bridge

Crucially, building bridges isn’t just a management responsibility. Team members who actively forge connections across subgroups, such as pulling colleagues from different camps into collaborative projects, can be as effective as managers in protecting team creativity.

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“Anyone can be a bridge-builder,” Professor Lau emphasises, adding that if members can learn and engage in TIPs spontaneously, they will be able to self-manage whenever needed.

As modern workplaces become increasingly diverse, converting diverse perspectives into creative output has become a strategic priority. “Companies don’t always need to restructure teams to fix relationship dynamics. Cultivating a culture where team members regularly seek out collaborations and synthesise diverse ideas can also be effective,” she adds.

 

The post How to turn friction into creativity first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

Featured faculty: Li Wendong
Written by Gigi Wong

Those who have worked long enough may still recall the feelings of receiving their first paycheques. After years passed, many would have realised how far they had come, and more importantly, how their personalities or the people they know had evolved over the years. At some quiet hour, a random thought may pop up: Do we shape our income, or does our income shape who we are?

A new study suggests our personalities and our paycheques may be more intertwined than we realise, each influencing the other over time in a reciprocal dance. “When income increases, it signals that the current career progress is significant and the status in society is improving,” says Li Wendong, Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School.

Professor Li’s latest study challenges the assumption that our personalities are relatively fixed and set in stone, that a person is always either an introvert or an extrovert, agreeable or argumentative, cautious or reckless. Furthermore, his paper titled A continuous time meta-analyses of reciprocal relationships between personality traits and income suggests that some personality traits can also predict future income changes.

His study also found an overlooked drawback of pay rises. Positive reinforcement that comes with income increases may lead employees to stick to routines and conventional ways of doing work, eventually limiting them from exploring new approaches to improve their performance.

“Such a positive reinforcement likely prompts employees to exploit the current effective work methods and strategies further. Over time, changes in such behaviours, thoughts and feelings likely foster personality change.”

“Thus, after a pay rise, organisations may also consider using incentives to motivate employees to come up with novel strategies to complete their work responsibilities and think out of the box to spur creativity and innovation,” he adds.

Which came first: pay rise or personality change?

Along with his PhD students, as well as Zhang Zhen of Southern Methodist University, Zhang Xin of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Christian Dormann of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Professor Li analysed data from 11 large national and regional longitudinal studies in the world involving 134,551 participants in total.

Studies were included if they measured at least one of the Big Five personality traits and individual income at three or more time points. These personality traits refer to five broad dimensions of personality that make each person unique, including emotional stability, conscientiousness (e.g., being dependable and hardworking), agreeableness (e.g., friendliness), extraversion (e.g., being outgoing), and openness (e.g., being curious and open to new experiences).

The team integrated findings across all the studies, which followed participants over periods ranging from four to nineteen years. The researchers also examined patterns of personality change and income shifts within the same individuals over time, painting a much richer picture than a simple snapshot study.

They found that conscientiousness and emotional stability tended to increase following a boost in income. The results also demonstrated significant effects of income changes on subsequent changes in both traits.

“While an income increase can make employees more stable and reliable, it may also reduce their tendency to seek novel strategies and goals — that is, their exploratory, creative and risk-taking behaviours may decline.”

Professor Li Wendong

In other words, a fatter paycheque seems to make employees more disciplined, dependable, poised, and unflappable over time. On the other side, as expected, people who became more conscientious and emotionally stable went on to see larger income increases over the next several years.

On the contrary, there was a negative reciprocal relationship between extraversion and income: being more extroverted seems to make people less likely to earn more money later on and earning more salary appears to make people more introverted at a later point in time. The effects of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and extraversion on income fluctuate over time, with the strongest impact occurring around one year after personality traits were assessed and tend to weaken afterwards.

Other personality traits have a negative relationship with the pay rise. The effect of income on changes in agreeableness is negative and the relationship between agreeableness and change in income is unclear.

“Increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability are positively related to subsequent increases in the employee’s income over time,” says Professor Li. “Our analyses also revealed that the reciprocal effect between extraversion and income was negative and significant across different time points.”

Success rewires our inner traits

Income-personality link cuts both ways, but what explains these intriguing connections between who we are and what ends up in our bank accounts? The researchers propose a few rationales, drawing on the cybernetic Big Five theory.

As mentioned above, pay rises reinforce our current strategies and behaviours at work, and in turn, motivate us to hone and further exploit those strategies. This results in deepening the motivational stability or conscientiousness quality, as well as emotional stability and social stability.

However, the cybernetic Big Five theory suggests that income increases are less likely to provide incentives for employees’ exploration and risk-taking behaviours, which may further enhance extraversion and openness traits. Based on empirical findings, the researchers posit that all five traits above correspond to one of the two broad dimensions of the Big Five that are associated with career strategies: stability and plasticity traits.

Extraversion and openness are included in plasticity traits, which encourage exploration by generating novel strategies when old plans prove insufficient, or when environmental changes occur, allowing for adaptation in uncertain environments. Stability traits comprise conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness, which primarily serve to maintain stability and prevent disruption to ongoing strategies for achieving long-term goals.

When experiencing a career setback, employees are likely to adjust their strategies and explore novel approaches or acquire new strategies to advance their careers —a characteristic of openness. They may also become more extroverted and enhance their social capital for career development or for exploring other alternatives. These changes over time may get habitualised across various life domains.

“The idea that income increases confidence and exploration remains a theoretical possibility, but our empirical evidence suggests that, over time, higher income may instead lead to more stability and less exploratory behaviour or lower extraversion, likely because employees settle into effective, established work strategies rather than seeking novelty,” Professor Li says.

Career development and pay incentives

The upshot is that our personalities are not entirely fixed to our job descriptions. As we progress through our careers, our personality inevitably gets imprinted by our professional successes and stumbles, but those experiences also get funnelled back into further shaping our future fortunes, for better or worse.

According to Professor Li, the findings have important practical implications for employees and organisations. Earning a higher income may make us more conscientious and emotionally stable over time, but also diminish our extroverted and explorative tendencies to find novel strategies.

Employees should be mindful of these potential shifts, he advises, to better navigate their career development. Organisations, too, should take note that the common workplace practice of using pay rises to motivate staff may have some unintended consequences on employees’ personality development.

“Given that many organisations tend to employ pay rises as an important incentive scheme to motivate their employees, the findings suggest that organisations should also be aware of positive and perhaps, unintended consequences of pay rises,” he adds.

“While an income increase can make employees more stable and reliable, it may also reduce their tendency to seek novel strategies and goals — that is, their exploratory, creative and risk-taking behaviours may decline. This may lead to adverse consequences for organisations in adapting to new and uncertain environments.”

To mitigate the adverse effects of pay rises, Professor Li emphasises the importance of acknowledging the benefits and risks, and find a way to balance stability and creativity. Companies need to adopt practices that encourage employees to explore new ideas, such as supportive management and more job autonomy, to foster intrinsic motivation and creativity.

The post Your paycheque may change your personality, and vice versa first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

By Raymond Ma, Managing Editor, China Business Knowledge @ CUHK

The post The dark side of employee engagement first appeared on China Business Knowledge.