Working from home vs. in the office has been a major part of corporate wellness debate recently, as Yahoo revoked its flexible working policy. The memo announcing Yahoo’s change in work policy stated, ‘Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.’
It seems like a well-thought out plan, but anyone who’s ever worked in a group – or seen an episode of The Apprentice – will tell you that, sometimes, collaborations aren’t possible with different office personalities. Extroverts are often considered to be good workers, as they come across as go-getters with charismatic leadership skills. However, a new study published in the April issue of the Academy of Management Journal has found that these big personalities also tend to be poor listeners an unreceptive to input from others, which can send you running for your home office.
Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and Neha Parikh Shah, a professor at Rutgers Business School, completed a series of experiments looking into how extroverts and neurotics worked in various team projects. According to evaluations by team members, the extroverts didn’t fare well. Bendersky explained, ‘The extroverts are probably going to contribute less to the team and the contributions they make will be undervalued by the team. They will do less and what they do will be under-appreciated.’
Neurotics, on the other hand, performed better over time at their jobs. ‘Our intuition about anxious, neurotic employees and colleagues is that their volatility and negativity is going to make them a drag on the team,’ Bendersky noted. ‘What we don’t appreciate is that an aspect of that neurotic personality is really an anxiety of not wanting to disappoint our peers and our colleagues. Neurotics can actually be motivated to work really hard especially in collaborative situations.’
Kellogg School of Management’s Leigh Thompson adds that, yes, you do need to create either physical or virtual spaces in which your workers can collaborate and bounce ideas off each other, but what she calls “caves” are necessary as well. Thompson asserts that a quiet, private spot — perhaps a home office — is needed so that you can truly get down to business without the interruptions of chatty extrovert colleagues.