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Dairy is having a moment. Influencers on social media are drinking raw milk, consumers are going back to cows milk, and Republicans are pushing for whole milks return to school cafeterias. But, while the plant-based milk world might appear in the rearview mirror, Oatly is leaning into coffee cultureand making some truly bizarre ads in the process. As part of a recent campaign called Blind Love, Oatly invited consumers to blind test whole milk and Oatly in coffee in a bizarre how-to video. In the accompanying ad, voiced by SNL alum Chris Parnell, the brand spoofed typical American pharmaceutical commercials, and presents a made up condition dubbed DOMP (Dormant Oatmilk Preference), to help viewers to diagnose themselves and discover their oat milk preference in coffee. Oatly knows what it is doing. Studies show that Gen-Z is more responsive to absurd tactics, and 72% of Gen Zers and millennials prefer humorous ads. It comes to no surprise then that oddball advertising is becoming increasingly common for Oatly (and other brands, too). Nutter Butter fills its TikTok with obscure brain rot content; Duolingos owl faked his own death; and Wendys irreverent comments have started a feud with Katy Perry. Yes, advertising is stranger than ever, but it’s effective. We always do it in a strange way, executive creative director at Oatly Michael Lee says. Late last year, the brand hired 31 professional Santas for a taste test switching milk and cookies with oat milk and croquembouche. Before that, another campaign featured “auditions” for an Oatly cooking show (spoiler: the casting tapes were the show). Oatly is very much in on the joke: on its website, the advertisement tab reads brainwashing. The ad campaigns track with Oatlys marketing evolution. While the Swedish brand was born in 1994 targeting those with dairy allergies, it wasnt until 2013 when they shifted strategies to appeal to wider audiences, including a major redesign. The brand originally boasted muted packaging, but opted for a more rebellious rebrand as it entered the American market. Now Oatlys carton, covered with playful typography and quotes like wow no cow, and its like milk but made for humans, is a staple in grocery store aisles and coffee shops. We had a very solid mission to convert dairy drinkers to plant based. But we were also human about it, and we had fun with it, Lee says. We did a lot of stuff that was very provocative that other brands wouldn’t have done, and so we had this kind of fearless, kind of punk quality. [Photo: Oatly] The plant-based revolution is declining Just a few years ago, almond and oat lattes dominated orders, and recently more niche plant-based alternatives like pistachio milk have peaked consumers interest, yet there is no denying alt-milk is taking a hit. From 2023 to 2024, whole milk saw a 1.6% increase in sales, while plant-based milks sales declined by 4.4%. For Oatly, its first quarter financial report revealed a 0.8% revenue decline compared to the same period the year prior, although it still expects to meet its first full year of profitable growth. While consumers with dietary restrictions will remain loyal to nondairy products, most of the time, picking between whole milk and alt-milk is a choice. The plant based group is really kind of a story of overlap, Darren Seifer, executive director and industry advisor for consumer goods and food service at Circana, says. 90% of [alt-milk users] are also using traditional dairy items. Like the perfect storm that allowed alt-milks to boom in the first place, a similar one is brewing elevating whole milk to cult status. Buzzwords like high protein, low-sugar, and gut healthy can be naturally occurring features in dairy, making it an attractive choice for users. We’ve seen so far in the last year in traditional dairy, there’s been a strong emphasis around health claims, Seifer says. Aligning with the health trends that we see popping up, that’s been helping to drive some of its growth. And again, because there is an overlap among those who use plant based it feels like it’s drawing them away from it. Additionally, financial factors like the higher price of alt-milk at a time of economic uncertainty might also be driving consumers away, Seifer explained, and cultural trends are also at play. We started to see people tell us that they’re trying to get away from artificiality again, Seifer says. From the rise of tradwives, Make America Healthy Again, and a disdain for oils, many consumers are now opting away from ultra-processed foods, artificial colors and sweeteners, and more. Define that as you wish, but that’s just the terminology that was thrown out there, he adds. And they might look at something like almond milk and say, well, that doesn’t occur naturally, so it’s processed. [Photo: Oatly] Brewing culture In the midst of shifting trends, Oatly is doubling down on humor and culture. Specifically, it’s tapping into coffee culture and baristas’ expertise, going where consumers might first meet their product: in a coffee shop. We want it to be easy for people to engage with us. So it has to be fun, it has to be cool. It has to be part of culture. So, coffee kind of plays that role for us, Lee says. Traveling from New York and Chicago, to London and Berlin, the over 60 baristas on staff spend time at coffee shops around the world, informing Oatly not only where culture is going, but how coffee fits into the mix. Every barista is not just a barista. They are tattoo artists. They’re in a band, they’re artists, they’re designers. And so that was a perfect way for us to follow coffee into culture, Lee added. Coffee culture is moving into fashion. It’s moving into nightlife. It’s moving into music. And since we have such a strong relationship with coffee, there’s kind of a license for our brand to do that. Leveraging the intersection of fashion and coffee, the brand recently released a global lookbook, presenting various summer recipes like an Ube matcha latte and a cherry bakewell dirty soda recipe, both featuring colorful editorial visuals. The company has been around for 30 years, and from our perspective, trends come and go, Lee added. We’re staying the course.
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E-Commerce
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Theres a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many namesembodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadershipbut the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership. At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldnt prefer a leader whos self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air. But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideologyone that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation. The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectivenesswho believe that if they feel right, they must be right. Its not just anti-rational; its anti-leadership. From Competence to Vibes At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the “15 Commitments”a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence. But its not the principles that are the problem, its their embodiment conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life. Take the idea of the whole-body yes. It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it’s an epistemic disaster. The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesnt feel rightin your gutits probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldnt do it. Or worse, you shouldnt have to do it. On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say no. Every debate becomes an attack on your authentic self. In other words: if you dont want to do something, your subconscious probably knows its ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue. An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. Its confusing righteousness with rightness, and its a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts. Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms. Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulatingretroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. Thats the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation. Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circlesthose stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution. These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They dont carry payroll. They dont answer to shareholders. They dont navigate hostile markets. Theyre not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good. In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership. The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesnt evolve leadershipit regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal knowing. In ancient traditionsfrom Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicismtrue wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance. In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making. In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions. In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch. In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct. Intuitions may point to the source of whats most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts. Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your truth, and act accordingly. This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom. Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone: The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movements epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone. I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piecefinally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, theyll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: Maybe Conscious Leadership doesnt apply so well in a military context, where you cant pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier. Or: Maybe your whole-body yes should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence. But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to do the work. Hres the tone: If you dont resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, its not because the framework might be flawed. Its because you arent ready. You havent evolved enough. Youre still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns. This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance. What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. Its a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model. The Real Danger: Corporate Adoption Without Accountability Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn’t its spread in coaching circlesbut its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership. This trend is more than aesthetic. Its structural. We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of staying above the line. Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response. But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already made it. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model ambition, competency-building, and hard-work that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place. In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears. For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously led are happy to pay lip-service to their leaders fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization. The disconnectbetween leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of businesssimply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions. What Leadership Actually Requires Real leadership doesnt require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming run. And above all, it means holding power not as self-expressionbut as responsibility. Leadership isnt about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. Its about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system. That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds. Heres another unsexy fact of life and businessthe best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family membersand that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms. Thats why Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called conscious leaders dont realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they havent reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals. Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They dont want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss. Theyd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, youre in a crappy business situation. This isnt a revelation worthy of a book. Conscious Leadership isnt wrong. Its just incomplete. And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model. Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need themthe type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won. After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitmentsindividual responsibility, curiosity, integrityought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy havent been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatorynot because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there. Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesnt need to be declaredits lived. So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with in the spirit of conscious leadership, then I suggest you turn tail and run.
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If youve been in the workplace for a while, youve probably had your share of bad bosses. Maybe youve worked for someone who frequently went MIA, ignoring your emails or requests for information. Or perhaps youve had to report to someone who changed their mind on a dime and expected you to drop everything and follow along. If these scenarios sound familiar, its because bad management styles often fall into one of several archetypes, says Eric Charran, author of Have You Ever Had a Boss That . . .: Succeeding in a Dysfunctional Workplace. Sometimes the tools in a managers leadership toolbox make it difficultand almost impossibleto want to work for them, he says. The first thing to do is to try to overcome an overwhelming urge to say Why are they doing this to me? It must be that I’m deficient in some way. It’s not necessarily that individual’s personality is a mismatch [for yours] or that they don’t like you. It’s just that they’re using a hammer when they really need a screwdriver. Whether you have a difficult boss right now or one lurking in your future, its possible to thrive under their leadership by understanding their motivations. Here are four of the common boss archetypes that Charran identifies in his book, and how you can deal with their behavior. The Attack Sub An Attack Sub manager is someone who operates stealthily for an extended period with minimal interaction or feedback. Suddenly, they surface with a flood of information and demands, launching figurative bombs and missiles. They catch employees off guard, shifting priorities and directives and leaving everyone wondering what just happened as they return beneath the water The Attack Sub Manager can be extremely difficult to deal with, Charran says. They run silent and deep. You’re trying to send them Slacks, or emails, or texts, and it just bounces off them. On the surface, they appear to have a poor capability to manage communication and to give guidance. If you are comfortable with putting out fires, you may work well with this type of boss. But if youre someone who is detail-oriented, a manager who shoots from the hip will be frustrating. To best work with an Attack Sub manager, Charran recommends reaching out to them first thing in the morning, before they become distracted. Keep messages concise and focused on short, tactical items. It can also help to switch your channels of communication; breaking everyday patterns can draw their attention. The Order Taker The Order Taker boss values harmony, hierarchy, and compliance. Their goal is to prove their value to the organization, and the best way to do that is to get you to do what they ask. While this sounds reasonable, demands can quickly turn into commands that put current workloads at jeopardy. If youre constantly switching from one thing to the other, you’re never going to finish anything, says Charran. Your results at the end of the year from a performance perspective will look abysmal. You will have failed the organization because you are not working on important thingsyou keep stopping them to follow new commands. The way to work with the Order Taker boss is by managing up, says Charran. Their expectation is that youll say yes to everything, adding, Do you want fries with that? he says. They need to be educated and not saluted. They’re looking for somebody to say, Hey, if we do this, here’s what we could jeopardize. They’re looking for more of a partner, rather than somebody that says, Got it, boss. The Raw Nerve The Raw Nerve boss is highly emotional, often reacting in the moment. This archetype often develops in an environment where quick decision-making is valued, says Charran. They equate immediate action with effectiveness. However, it can come at the expense of thoroughness or the well-being of team members if they ignore or dont explore possible consequences. Their decisions are not entirely relationship based and not entirely data based, Charran says. Theyre a confluence of all those things. They utilize their cred for quick decision making unilaterally, which can be harmful in many situations. The best way to thrive with this type of boss is to turn to your support networks that extend beyond your team before any final decisions are made. Leverage the power of a group by talking to customers, higher management, and peers. The key, though, is that you dont do it behind your bosss back. It has to be done completely above board, Charran says. If done correctly, you can make the communication innocuous enough that it will seen by your manager as stakeholder management. The Complainer As the name implies, the Complainer is the boss who is constantly complaining. For example, their team isnt big enough, they dont have the correct resources, or theyve been giving unrealistic goals by their superiors. What they don’t realize is that their venting is bringing down the team and poisoning the well. Off-the-cuff remarks have a cognitive impact on team morale, Charran says. The things may be true, but it ends up coming off negative. What the team sees is a person in a downward spiral of jadedness. This archetype usually results from a deep-seated insecurity. The human brain is wired to look for threats, and, whether theyre a danger or not, the brain will find them. To work for a Complainer, Charran says you need the intellect and drive to make positive mental choices instead of getting dragged into their storm. Coexisting with the Complainer begins with empathy, he says. This doesnt mean condoning endless negativity but rather recognizing it as a cry for help or a sign of deeper issues. Empathy must be balanced with the establishment of positive boundaries to protect your own mental and emotional well-being. While it can be frustrating to work for someone with an outlook and behavior that clashes with your own, Charran says youre ultimately responsible for your own happiness and have tools within your own reach. A fundmental principle in maintaining a positive mental attitude is understanding the emotions of others and how they express them, Charran says. Their attitudes and reactions are not contagious and do not have to be internalized. Empathize with others and understand their emotions, but dont be sucked into a collective negative spiral. Knowing your worth is important and so is choice.
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Over the past several years, electric vehicles have garnered something of a reputation for their unusual sounds on the road. Otherworldly EV warning sounds have been compared to a celestial choir, a flying saucer hum, and, in one TikTok with 23.5 million views, the song that might play just before ascending to heaven. But the angelic warble thats come to characterize EV acoustics might have a few drawbacks for pedestrians. A new study conducted by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and published in March examined how well the average person could locate three common types of warning sounds from hybrid and electric vehicles at low speeds. It found that all three of the sounds were significantly harder for pedestrians to locate than the sound of a standard internal combustion engine. Given that they have no combustion engine, EVs are naturally almost silent. That can be a benefit when it comes to urban noise pollution, but its not ideal for pedestrian safety. For the past six years, all EVs in the U.S. have been legally required to emit some kind of low-level noisea prompt that automakers have chosen to interpret in a range of creative ways. But it might be time for some automakers to take another crack at their proprietary EV acoustics. What do Hanz Zimmer, a didgeridoo, and fighter jets have in common? Starting in 2019, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ruled that all hybrid and electric cars have to be fitted with an external speaker that must make audible noise when traveling in reverse or forward at speeds up to 30 kilometers per hour (about 19 miles per hour). While the law sets expectations for when these noises need to play, it largely leaves the contents of the noise itself up to automakers. Thats resulted in a variety of EV sounds on the road, from a Cadillac alert made using a didgeridoo to the Hyundai Ioniq 5 Ns fighter-jet-inspired sound and BMWs portfolio of i4 electric sedan noises by composer Hans Zimmer. This unusual symphony hitting the roads has inspired quippy commentary on social media. Under a TikTok sharing the BMX iX 50s reverse sound, one user wrote, is this ribs by lorde? And in a video poking fun at Teslas reverse audio, another commenter joked, Every time our neighbour pulls onto the drive with their electric car my husband says the spaceship has landed. Beyond sounding a bit silly, though, there are a few key shortcomings to the sounds that many automakers are selecting for their EVs. Why are EVs so hard (and annoying) to hear? Chalmers researchers examined three of the main categories of EV sounds, also known as acoustic vehicle alerting systems (AVAS): two-tone, multitone, and narrowband noise (a noise concentrated within a small band of audible frequencies, often perceived as a hissing sound). To compare these sounds to that of an internal combustion engine, researchers studied the reactions of 52 test subjects inside a soundproof chamber. Each subject was surrounded by 24 loudspeakers and given a laser pointer fashioned out of a toy gun. When one of the speakers played a simulated vehicle sound designed to mimic the noise of an EV at a low speed, the subjects were to point the laser toward the sound as quickly as possible. The tests demonstrated that all the AVAS categories were harder for subjects to locate than the sound of an internal combustion engine. And, according to Leon Müller, a PhD student at Chalmers and one of the papers authors, one of the sounds was more problematic than the others. [The two-tone AVAS] is significantly harder to localize than other types of warning sounds, as well as combustion noise, Müller says, noting that in a situation with just one vehicle present, these localization errors are relatively small and not particularly concerning for traffic safety. When there are two or three EVs present, though, the situation can get a bit stickier. In that case, the participants had much more [difficulty] localizing the cars, up to a point where most participants failed to even detect all presented EVs within an appropriate time, Müller says. There are a few reasons why pedestrians might have trouble locating EV sounds. First, Müller explains, combustion noise is a very broadband signalmeaning it contains a lot of frequencies, and hence more information for our hearing system to work with. Second, humans have had substantially more time to acclimate to combustion sounds than artificial EV sounds. We humans have learned over the last 100 years or so that cars sound in a particular way and how driving behavior, such as acceleration, is reflected in this combustion noise, Müller says. This potential learning effect might also contribute to differences in localization, especially when we need to decode multiple sounds at the same time. One could expect that we would then also get used to EV sounds within a few years. The only problem is that they currently all sound different. A new sound In the meantime, Müller believes there are two potential avenues to make EV sounds safer. Currently, U.S. and EU regulations are limited to minimum sound levels in a specified number of frequency bands, which he argues allows the warning signals to be anything between a futuristic spaceship sound or a racing car engine. In the U.S., he adds, regulations dont require a velocity pitch shift, meaning that a car might sound the same going 60 mph as it does at 25 mph. To address these problems, Müller says the regulations should make more clear demands on the sound characteristics. On the automaker side of the equation, the Chalmers study indicates that a more broadband AVAS signal, similar to the noise radiated by tires when driving faster, is preferable to a two-tone or multitone AVAS. [This sound] is potentially less annoying than tonal sounds and has the advantage that we already have learned to interpret this noise since we hear it every day, Müller says. In the long term, he adds that adaptive AVAS solutionslike pedestrian detection technologycould help EVs radiate a more advanced warning sound directly in the direction of the pedestrian, thus improving safety and reducing noise pollution. One important bottom line here is that we are no saying EVs are bad or dangerous. With the right type of warning signal, they are not, Müller says. On the contrary, they have the potential of reduced noise pollution since the warning sound can be controlled, while the combustion noise in [internal combustion engine vehicles] is always there.
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E-Commerce
Picture this: On your way out of the office, you notice a manager berating an employee. You assume the worker made some sort of mistake, but the managers behavior seems unprofessional. Later, as youre preparing dinner, is the scene still weighing on youor is it out of sight, out of mind? If you think youd still be bothered, youre not alone. It turns out that simply observing mistreatment at work can have a surprisingly strong impact on people, even for those not directly involved. Thats according to new research led by Edwyna Hill, coauthored by Rachel Burgess, Manuela Priesemuth, Jefferson McClain, and me, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Using a method called meta-analysiswhich takes results from many different studies and combines them to produce an overall set of findingswe reviewed the growing body of research on what management professors like me call third-party perceptions of mistreatment. In this context, third parties are people who observe mistreatment between a perpetrator and the victim, who are the first and second parties. We looked at 158 studies published in 105 journal articles involving thousands of participants. Those studies explored a number of different forms of workplace mistreatment ranging from incivility to abusive supervision and sexual harassment. Some of those studies took part in actual workplaces, while others examined mistreatment in tightly controlled laboratory settings. The results were striking: We found that observing a coworker being mistreated on the job has significant effects on the observers emotions. In fact, we found that observers of mistreatment may be as affected by what happened as the people actually involved in the event. These reactions fall along a spectrumsome helpful, others less so. On the encouraging side, we found that observers tend to judge perpetrators and feel empathy for victims. These reactions discourage mistreatment by creating a climate that favors the victim. On the other hand, we found that observers may also enjoy seeing their coworkers sufferan emotion called schadenfreudeor blame the victim. These sorts of reactions damage team dynamics and discourage people from reporting mistreatment. Why it matters These findings matter because mistreatment in the workplace is disturbingly common, and even more frequently observed than experienced. One recent study found that 34% of employees have experienced workplace mistreatment firsthand, but 44% have observed it happening to someone else. In other words, nearly half of workers have likely seen a scenario like the one described at the start of this article. Unfortunately, the human resources playbook on workplace mistreatment rarely takes third parties into account. Some investigation occurs, potentially resulting in some punishment for the perpetrator and some support for the victim. A more effective response to workplace mistreatment would recognize that the harm often extends beyond the victim, and that observers may need support too. What still isnt known Whats needed now is a better understanding of the nuances involved in observing mistreatment. Why do some observers react with empathy, while others derive pleasure from the suffering of others? And why might observers feel empathy for the victim but still respond by judging or blaming them? Answering these questions is a crucial next step for researchers and leaders seeking to design more effective workplace policies. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Jason Colquitt is a professor of management at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
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