••• employee research
The perils of the passionate employee
When plotting their career trajectories, young professionals are often encouraged to follow their passion. After all, passion is seen as a key ingredient for success. But this drive is not without its dangers – including what researchers call “performance overconfidence.”
When it comes to managing for passion, it’s important to consider the employee’s role, says Erica Bailey, assistant professor in the management of organizations group at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and co-author of the study “A potential pitfall of passion: Passion is associated with performance overconfidence,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. For example, entrepreneurs, consultants and salespeople may benefit from passion overconfidence. But it must be tempered in roles that require people to have an accurate view of their abilities, like surgeons, pilots or insights professionals.
The challenge is that many managers encourage and even cultivate fervor in their team members. “There are lots of benefits to having passionate employees. They’re going to bring energy to the meetings. They’re going to move things forward,” Bailey says. “But you have to think carefully about how to manage the risks that could come from your own biases towards passionate employees.”
Managers need to also consider the biases of their passionate employees, who are less likely to delegate, see blind spots or be team players. “Managers have to think about how the passionate person is perceived by their horizontal coworkers and how to help them manage that reputation so that these groups can work together effectively.”
••• ai
Study: Putting guardrails on AI can actually spur innovation
Corporate efforts to use AI in a more socially responsible way have a surprising benefit – they can often improve product quality, according to a national survey of company officials. The officials surveyed ranked product quality as the area of their businesses that received the most value from implementing responsible AI management (RAIM) practices – even above more obvious choices, such as reducing regulatory and legal risk.
This survey didn’t ask how RAIM improved product quality and this finding will need more study, says one of the leaders of the survey, Dennis Hirsch, faculty director of The Ohio State University’s Program on Data Governance, but the preliminary take is that it improves product quality by promoting AI innovation and better meeting customer expectations, Hirsch says. A separate 2018 study by the Program on Data and Governance may explain how this works. People think of data governance as inhibiting innovation, because it restricts what people can do. But it may be the opposite, according to those interviewed for the 2018 study. “If employees have standards and policies and guidelines about how they can use AI, they can innovate with a lot more confidence. It can actually unleash innovation, rather than dampen it,” Hirsch says.