Negative People May Have a Positive Impact
That’s the main point of a study for the Academy of Management Journal (PDF ) by Ronald Bledow of Ghent University, Belgium; Kathrin Rosing of Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany; and, Michael Frese, National University of Singapore and Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany. The three said, “High creativity results if a person experiences an episode of negative affect that is followed by a decrease in negative affect and an increase in positive affect, a process referred to as an affective shift.”
The trio did an experience-sampling study with 102 full-time employees and 80 students to test their hypothesis. The results were first published in the spring of 2013.
According to an article at The British Psychology Society’s Occupational Digest website, “[The] narrow, alert focus on issues can be useful by focusing on things that are in need of a solution and spurring motivation to act on these; previous research does suggest that negative emotion can lead to more persistence in problem solving.”
The article also states, “The paper … does not contest the idea that positive emotions crucially support creativity: what they propose is that positivity rising over time while negativity descends over time may offer better conditions than high positivity coupled with an absence of negative affect.” In other words, as stated above, focusing on the negative does lead to the positive.
The 80 students were asked to complete a brainstorming task after writing an autobiographical essay about a positive event. The article said, “[T]hose who were tasked with articulating an unpleasant instead of a neutral experience ultimately performed better [on] the brainstorming task, producing more varied and unique ideas. This happened even though the negative state had no function in focusing their attention on anything related to the creative task, which suggests the better performance was due to entering a more suitable cognitive mode.”
In their study, the three researchers add, “Negative affect regulates whether attention is narrow and focused on isolated elements (high negative affect) or broad and inclusive of the context (low negative affect). If negative affect is high, situations or events that threaten a person’s goals are examined in detail and incongruent information is processed in a sequential-analytical manner. If negative affect decreases, information processing moves away from isolated elements and becomes more inclusive of the larger context.”
So, does that mean employers should seek out people with negative attitudes? It could, especially in a creative environment because these folks might be good problem solvers (as long as they aren’t perpetually negative).
Mark Murphy, interviewed at Forbes.com, said, “Every company has to discover the attitudes that make their organization unique and special. And even if the company’s attitudes change over the years, those attitudes will always be an organic reflection of their most successful people.” Murphy is the author of Hiring for Attitude.
Murphy added, “When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.”
It’s all worth considering the next time a job candidate displays a negative attitude. He or she, depending on the severity of the negativity, might just be the problem solver your organization needs.