When the Boss Feels Inadequate

ABSTRACT

When and why do power holders seek to harm other people? The present research examined the idea that aggression among the powerful is often the result of a threatened ego. Four studies demonstrated that individuals with power become aggressive when they feel incompetent in the domain of power. Regardless of whether power was measured in the workplace (Studies 1 and 4), manipulated via role recall (Study 2), or assigned in the laboratory (Study 3), it was associated with heightened aggression when paired with a lack of self-perceived competence. As hypothesized, this aggression appeared to be driven by ego threat: Aggressiveness was eliminated among participants whose sense of self-worth was boosted (Studies 3 and 4). Taken together, these findings suggest that (a) power paired with self-perceived incompetence leads to aggression, and (b) this aggressive response is driven by feelings of ego defensiveness. Implications for research on power, competence, and aggression are discussed...

CONCLUSION

The present findings highlight the importance of perceiving personal competence when holding a position of power. Power holders who do not feel personally competent are more likely than those who feel competent to lash out against other people. Additionally, the finding that self-worth boosts assuage the aggressive tendencies of such power holders implies the effectiveness of a strategy commonly employed by underlings: excessive flattery. It is both interesting and ironic to note that such flattery, although perhaps affirming to the ego, may contribute to the incompetent power holder’s ultimate demise—by causing the power holder to lose touch with reality.

Full paper at: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~nathanaf/power_incompetence_and_aggresssion.pdf

It's official: Your bullying boss really is an idiot

Got a bullying boss? Take solace in new research showing that leaders who feel incompetent really do lash out at others to temper their own inferiority.

"Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they don't feel they can show that legitimately, they'll show it by taking people down a notch or two," says Nathanael Fast, a social psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led a series of experiments to explore this effect.

In one, Fast and his colleague Serena Chen, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, asked 90 men and women who had jobs to complete online questionnaires about their aggressive tendencies and perceived competence. The most aggressive of the lot tended to have both high-power jobs and a chip on their shoulder, Fast and Chen found.

To see if a bruised ego can actually cause aggression, the researchers manipulated people's sense of power and self-worth by asking them to write about occasions when they felt either empowered or impotent and then either competent or incompetent. Previous research has suggested that such essays cause a short-term bump or drop in feelings of power and capability, Fast says.

Feel-bad factor

Next, Fast and Chen asked their volunteers to select a punishment to be given to university students for wrong answers in a hypothetical test of learning. Volunteers chose between horn sounds that ranged from 10 decibels to a deafening 130 decibels.

The volunteers who felt the most incompetent and empowered picked the loudest punishments – 71 decibels on average. Workers who felt up to their jobs, selected far quieter punishments, between 55 and 62 decibels, as did those primed to feel incompetent yet powerless.

Flattery seems to temper the aggressive urges of insecure leaders. When Fast and Chen coaxed the egos of these volunteers by praising their leadership skills, their aggressive tendencies all but disappeared. This is proof that leaders are aggressive because of a hurt ego, not simply a threat to their power, Fast says.

This might also explain why leaders of organisations both big and small surround themselves with yes-men and women, he says.

Blind flattery may not be the best solution for the 54 million US citizens estimated to have experienced workplace bullying. But easing leaders into new positions of power, or telling them that it's natural to feel daunted, could prevent future outbursts, says Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois.

From: http://www.newscientist.com/

Llama Love Spit

right before we got in trouble for taking pictures in the VAG

right after I wiped the air-spit from my cheek. I miss you even before I leave, Elle Bow!

Football porn

This month's VF features World Cup players nearly naked. Made me immediately put down my Vogue at YVR, and prance up to the counter to find a very unimpressed middle-aged man at the cash. He kept his eyes on my chocolate covered pretzels, but I'm sure he's been reading VF under the counter. How could he not?

And there is a video of the shoot here.

You are supposed to like it because it's Hitchcock

Is it a testament to the amount of literary theory that I have read that I can't enjoy my *first ever* Hitchcock film without referencing Zizek? A sad state of affairs, probably. It's great though. The leads are so smooth and hard to write off: psychologically flat but also deep; repetitiously compulsive and also funny. Let's do it again sometime, Mr. Hitchcock.

Bye, bye, baby bye, bye...

Sir Peter Scott is stepping down as vice-chancellor of Kingston University to take up a post at another institution, it was announced... More info at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

Check also: http://www.sirpeterscott.com/

Legal costs of university in St Andrews v Quigley

Dear Mr Quigley,

I refer to your request dated 3 May, 2010 under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 for "How much money did the University of St Andrews spend on legal representation in the case of Dr D Quigley v The University of St Andrews during 2002/3/4/5? I can confirm that the total cost inclusive of VAT was £204,192.36.

Yours sincerely,

June Weir
Freedom of Information Officer
University of St Andrews

------------------

For legal costs involving different universities, check: http://www.academicfoi.com/untoldstories/

One hopes that the new government will try to put an end to this waste of public money.

Egads! Feathertale Contest

The following has been cut and pasted from various places...


Feathertale invites writers and poets to pen one of Shakespeare's plays as if it were originally conceived on a Twitter feed. Winning submissions will be published on Feathertale.com and in The Feathertale Review. Deadline May 31, 2010.

not much time, eh? see here, now:

SHORT FICTION CONTEST:
Feathertale presents: the Twittering Bard Contest

The old oaks who claim ownership over the English language have condemned Twitter for being akin to some German blitzkrieg on the English language. We’re not entirely convinced by their fears that the current trend of linguistic bastardization is a detriment to our literary heritage. As such, we’re asking writers to help us prove to our elders that a rose by any other name is still a rose, even if it is misspelled and grammatically incorrect. But we need your help. We’re asking writers and poets of every ilk to pen for us one of Shakespeare’s plays as if it were originally conceived on a Twitter feed. Sound complicated? It isn’t. Here’s an example of how a scene fromRomeo and Juliet might have played out if it were written entirely on Twitter:

Romeo and Juliet
Act 3, Scene 5:

Jules @Romeo: pls dont go! it was a nightingale. see pic http://tinyurl.com/yjkql9s
Romeo @Jules: That’s no nightingale. Must hop. Popped your cuz ystrday. Prince on my ass. I call later. Promises.
Jules @Romeo: methinks you gonna die
Romeo @Jules: I h8 when u 4shadow
Jules @Romeo: be gone, away!

Guidelines:
Send your submissions to submissions@feathertale.com with Twittering Bard Contest in the subject line. Submissions should be conceived with attention to the rules of Twitter (no lines can be longer than 140 characters; proper spelling will be frowned upon). The more creative and original, the better. Writers are free to pick any Shakespeare play they wish to mess with. Winning submissions will be published online and will most definitely be considered for publication in The Feathertale Review.

Deadline: May 31, 2010

Does this constitute a breach of freedom of expression?

Having had to issue a formal complaint against several members of staff at the University of Ulster for bullying and harassment I had accusations of bullying leveled against me for highlight the clear inefficiencies and inadequacies in the delivery of a final year module on my blog.

I have been instructed by the University that if I do not remove the comments then I will be suspended.

Does this constitute a breach of freedom of expression? I think so!

Check out my blog:
http://jay-bsccomputerscience.blogspot.com/

Minority Taste

okay that's impossible to read, so here is what is says, c/o Ruskin:

"The opinion of a majority is right only when it is more probable with each individual that he should be right than that he should be wrong, as in the case of a jury. Where is is more probable, with respect to each individual, that he should be wrong than right, the opinion of the minority it the true one. Thus it is in art"

we are presupposing a little hierarchy of taste, hmm?

in which case, it is time to invoke Fake Karl, and also for a little joke:

Q: Why did the formerly rich bourgeois person cross the road?

A: Because TIME magazine did an article on it, and the New Yorker also did an article on it, and their neighbors were doing it, so they wanted to see what it was all about and they heard it'd won an Oscar too...and one of those Nobel prizes, whatever they are. It seemed pretty reputable and they have a greatest hits album coming out.

Rainbow Hair, Winged Shoes

My flatmate brought home this new issue of Flare, and then I realized it is ALMOST JUNE.

That is all.

Harold Bloom, to the rescue!

"Modern poetry, in English, is the invention of Blake and of Wordsworth, and I do not know of a long poem written in English since which is either as legitimately difficult or as rewardingly profound as Jerusalem or The Prelude. Nor can I find a modern lyric, however happily ignorant its writer, which develops beyond or surmounts it debt to Wordsworth's great trinity of Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence and the Imitations of Immortality ode. The dreadful paradox of Wordsworth's greatness is that his uncanny originality, still the most astonishing break with tradition in the language, has been so influential that we have lost sight  of its audacity and arbitrariness" (7).


From Harold Bloom's The Internalization of Quest-Romance.

Another Love, Indeed.

Meet my new frienemy, Thomas Love Peacock. First of all, can we pause and appreciate the amazingness of his name. Oh to be a Love Peacock. He looks a bit too boyish in this portrait for the name, don't you agree? Accordingly, the boy moved to London when he was 16, has no formal education after the age of 13, and writes things like this (! see below !) about my BFF, Wordsworth.

Let's review: the Lake Poets (mostly Wordsworth) are ignorant of every "high" form of knowledge (like history, society, and human nature) because they prefer to write about nature.*

But what happened, according to Mr. Love Peacock (yes! that name!), was that instead of truly writing nature, the Lake Poets actually obscured it with their "mysticisms and chimaeras." They made nature UNNATURAL.

Wordsworth in particular is guilty of importing ghosts and spectres of other writers into what are ostensibly realistic poems. Love Peacock describes these spectres as "phantastical parturition[s]." Ghost Babies. In other words, he accuses Wordsworth of letting his imagination run away with him... And in the terrible poetry of the Lake-Poets-generation (gen LP), this is only natural! (Like the process of parturition, in fact). For, "we know...there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Niads in the Regent's-canal. But barbaric manners and SUPERNATURAL interventions are ESSENTIAL TO POETRY" (The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 334 ..emphasis mine, right). He goes on to say "while the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is WALLOWING IN THE RUBBISH OF DEPARTED IGNORANCE AND RAKING UP THE ASHES OF DEAD SAVAGES TO FIND GEWGAWS AND RATTLES FOR THE GROWN BABIES OF THE AGE" (334).

Well, Mr. Love Peacock, we are fighting.

*pause to enjoy "Rhymesters." Probably the best insult ever leveled at anyone, ever.

Feeling Summer

The Sartorialist often puts up vintage photos, intended as inspiration for fashion of the present moment. This bikini, for example. Amazing.

More than simple fashion shots, these photos are so poignant and arresting, however, because they depict youth and beauty that is necessarily past.

In Defense of Poetry, P.B. Shelley writes

"The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its

elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human

beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed".

I know, right.

I Wish Byron Were Around: to appreciate these STATEments

Romantic aesthetic? This editorial (Lydia Hearst by Elias Wessel for Vixen Magazine 2010) is neither picturesque nor sublime, but it strikes me that Bryon would have loved it. Maybe it's the rainbow hair. Reminds me of the extreme luxuriousness of Byron's Sardanapalus; so much writhing in so many sparkles. If everyone was wearing a turban, all the better.

I love this painting, La Mort de Sardanapale, by Delacroix (1827).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I read it, I read it!

So far three friends, each of whom I feel to be extraordinarily intelligent and of cultivated taste (see Ish's book reviews, i.e., proof!), asked me about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Well, yes, I read it. Also I read the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire and third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Make no mistake, these are not great works of literary genius. My lovely friend Brittany, who has been living in Sweden for like, forever, (1 1/2 years?) says that the Swedish title is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, or, the man who hates women. (Britt is going to read it in Swedish! Of this I am impressed.) But anyway, here is a brief summary of my thoughts, which are in no way academic in nature, mostly they are feelings and intuitings:

1) A new translator, with a literary background or at least a more imaginative approach, needs to look at in the original Swedish and decide if the writing is REALLY ACTUALLY that cliched. And repetitive. The number of times "leveled her/his gaze at her/him" was used makes me want to die. I could almost call it before it happened. Now is the time for some gaze leveling. Sunglasses on.

2) A new editor, with brevity in mind, needs to chop a significant portion of the repetitive plot-summaries. (More noticeable in the second and third books).

3) I don't know. The rape/violence against women scenes are *this close* to being titillating and not instructive of violence against women. Also the repetitions of the events of the scenes, again and again, deaden their effects (affect!) on the reader. Uh.. "I don't have a definition of porn but I know it when I see it".. well, I don't have a definition of sado-masochistic softcore pornography (is that even possible?! a contradiction in terms?) but I feel like it might be happening before my readerly eyes.

4) I'm pretty sure lil' Stieg does not hate, in fact probably loves, women, but he is also very interested in what it would be like, imaginatively at least, to be involved in sexually charged violent behavior.

5) THE IMPLANTS*

*will have to wait until I know how far you've read.

Too Blue? Seriously, Wordsworth.

There seems to be a notion of a balanced palette here, that feels very picturesque (Lauren connected WW to Gilpin's ideas of the picturesque in her post for class). In 1794, William Gilpin makes this dinstinction:

between such objects as are beautiful, and

such as are picturesque – between those, which please the eye in their natural state;

and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting.

What is this violence, then, that Wordsworth does to the inherent beauty of nature by making such a statement! "The chief DEFECT in the colouring of the Country of the Lakes is an over-prevalence of a BLUISH TINGE" ?!

Stressed staff can't get no satisfaction

People working in higher education are "dissatisfied with their jobs and careers" and are "stressed at work", according to new research.

Academics from The Open University, the University of Portsmouth and the University of Bedfordshire quizzed more than 2,500 people from four universities for the paper, "The work-related quality of life scale for higher education employees", published by the journal Quality in Higher Education.

Staff were asked questions about job satisfaction, well-being, work-life balance, stress at work, control at work and working conditions using a Work-related Quality of Life (WrQoL) scale devised by Darren Van Laar, a Portsmouth psychologist.

"Overall, higher education employees in the sample are dissatisfied with their jobs and careers, are generally dissatisfied with working conditions and control at work, and report that they are stressed at work," the authors write.

The paper says the WrQoL scale has "psychometric properties" that would be useful to institutions "throughout the UK to evaluate employees' quality of working life".

The authors argue that issues such as career satisfaction, stress and work-life balance must be looked at as a whole.

Increasing well-being would "enhance the delivery of education to students and improve working relationships among work colleagues", they write.

Simon Easton, senior lecturer in psychology at Portsmouth and one of the authors, said: "Studies around the world show work-related stress is widespread in higher education.

"University staff in the UK tend to report that demands are increasing, while support and a sense of having control at work have fallen. Many complain about the rushed pace of work, the lack of respect and esteem, having too much administrative work to do, inadequate support and lack of opportunity for promotion. The psychological stress among university employees appears to be much higher than in other professional groups and the general population."

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

Wordsworth v. Kant

The beginning of a series of pairings, from Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) and Kant's Critique of Judgment (1802). The leading question: Did Wordsworth read Kant?

Wordsworth: "Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man."

& Wordsworth again: "What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."

Kant: "Poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and is least willing to be led by precepts or example) holds the first rank among all the arts” (SS 53).

Sanguine Dispositions: Parson Adams, Covered in Blood Pudding

As the final blow, the Wife, “in her Fury,” (Henry Fielding 115) throws a pan of hog’s blood over Adams, leaving him “all over covered in Blood” and looking “no longer for this world” (116).

from The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams.

Henry Fielding: I just want to kiss his little face

just look at the cocked eyebrow, the sultry lips, that crooked nose.

and the hair. You are never going to find a guy like that on Plenty of Fish. Luscious locks.

he looks a little hot under the collar, circa the 18th C.

Poverty: The First Step To Genius

By Isaac Disraeli, 1863.

...In addition, the word "melancholy" appears in the book 41 times.