Research recently completed by Duguid and Goncalo will be useful to practitioners who have puzzled over middle management’s response to design options presented. This duo has learned that “the threat of status loss make[s] those with middle status more wary of advancing creative solutions in fear that they will be evaluated negatively. Using different manipulations of status and measures of creativity, we found that when being evaluated, middle-status individuals were less creative than either high-status or low-status individual…In addition, we found that anxiety at the prospect of status loss also caused individuals with middle status to narrow their focus of attention…the relationship between power and creativity is positive and linear.”
Michelle Duguid and Jack Goncalo. “Squeezed in the Middle: The Middle Status Trade Creativity for Focus.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in press.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.