Good teams make more positive comments or more positive comments make good teams? If I want to be taller, should I play basket ball? Only half serious :)
At the bottom of the article:
> *Authors’ Note: The journal that published this study has since expressed concern about the data. We first became aware of this research in Kim Cameron’s book, Positive Leadership. Like many others, we were distressed to learn of the incorrect data in the Heaphy and Losada research and we immediately ceased our citations upon learning that the study wasn’t correct. But we do believe the basic assumption and premise that leaders should provide more positive than negative feedback is correct.
> But we do believe the basic assumption and premise that leaders should provide more positive than negative feedback is correct
Typical social science research, come to the conclusion first and then find data to back it up. There needs to be a reproducibility challenge of the top 100 papers, preferably by scientists on the opposite side of the political spectrum of the authors. We solved this in the hard sciences, I don't get why it's so hard to do it in the social sciences.
Many social scientists lean left and tend to "find" results which coincidentally align with their political viewpoint. If the results are truly reproducible, then someone on the other side of the spectrum should also be able to reproduce it. On the other hand, if the work was politically motivated then it won't be reproducible.
Do you have a basis for this assertion that has been studied and reproduced by someone of the opposite political spectrum?
I’m sorry but as a scientist, your assertion that we must hear from someone with the opposite political view before we can determine the veracity of some work is just so foreign to me. Must we also hear from creationists on evolution research? Why can’t that stand alone? If some experiment is reproducible it shouldn’t matter the political bias of the person running the study.
Moreover how would this even be implemented? The idea of a “political spectrum” is just a rule of thumb at best, and a dangerous misleading heuristic at worst. According to you, how would we identify an author’s political bias? Force them to self identify or take some sort of certified test? Will we divide all of our departments between liberals and conservatives? Right now I don’t know the political affiliation of any of my colleagues, and they don’t know mine. Are you suggesting we should bring our politics explicitly into our research?
I mean… have you even thought any of this through?
> if the work was politically motivated then it won't be reproducible.
Why not? If indeed there is a bias ib social science then we could expect some conclusions to remain unpublished if they contradict the bias. But I don't see why the results that do get published wouldn't be reproducible.
> But I don't see why the results that do get published wouldn't be reproducible
The very article we are reading illustrates why published results can be irreproducible and indeed completely made up. The Losada research cited was invalid [1] yet nobody questioned it because it fit their views of how humans should interact (positivity ratio implies some form of constructive criticism, which is often taught in Western schools as the ideal way to give feedback to someone). Any attempt by a sceptic to reproduce it would have realized that the "math" used to model the positivity ratio was wrong. The authors themselves state in the article they still believe the positivity ratio idea even though the Losada research was shown to be egregiously wrong.
Most research isn’t reproduced because it’s not economically lucrative for researchers to reproduce research. It’s that simple. If you want scientists to reproduce research, make funding available for that purpose. It has nothing to do with political biases.
I mean, if you’re talking about completely made up research then that’s a matter of fraud, not political biases.
People with similar biases will overlook similar things, you need people with different biases to properly review scientific results, and it becomes more important the closer the topic is to politics.
Sure every person has all kinds of biases. The point of being a good researcher is to try and put those aside.
Should we also only accept reproducibility studies from women on papers by men? Should we need to hear from Chinese or European researchers before American research is considered valid? Must we also take into account the race, ethnicity, and religion of all authors as well? What if a conservative and liberal publish research together, is their research bias free by definition? What mixture of political biases get to reproduce such research in a way you consider free from bias?
> We submit that all leaders should be aware of the ratio of positive and negative comments made by their colleagues in leadership team meetings, and endeavor to move the proportion closer to the ideal of 5.6 to 1—by their own example.
What was that quote by Feynman about how you can tell that someone is full of it if they give a number that's absurdly precise?
Hire anyone you want and as long as you praise them for whatever they do no matter how badly, your team will thrive. It's just another push for removing self determination and individual hard work.
This article reminds me of one business student's criticism of the "critical positivity ratio" idea. This article by the Guardian [1] sums up the entire saga, and the actual rebuttal is titled "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio" [2].
I know too many people with the aforementioned approach. The line of reasoning goes like this:
* Only you are responsible for how you react to events in your life
* This implies that I'm not responsible for how you react to events in your life
* Therefore, I'm not responsible for how I interact in events in your life
* Consequently, I can speak to you unkindly or abusively and it's your responsibility to deal with your reactions.
It's my personal belief that this stems from a deranged form of stoicism because the same people exhibit toxic emotional detachment of their own subjective experience, but that's just a wild headcannon in order to rationalize what is a real collection of disturbing behaviors.
I wasn’t trying to be snarky or unkind. The key to the sentence is the first bit around absence of evidence. If we can’t evaluate whether some action has an effect, then quite possibly it has no effect. That’s all I meant.
With regards to evidence, in my lifetime experience to date (limited and what-not), there seems to be minimal correlation in this regard. Some people are mean even if I am nice to them and some people are nice even if I am mean to them. The correlation seems to be no better than a coin toss. Is that just my experience? Possibly. Anecdotal then? Absolutely. Is it equivalent to a social science experiment that assumes the conclusion? Certainly. I would say it’s better if I look objectively at data collected over the decades.
Good teams make more positive comments or more positive comments make good teams? If I want to be taller, should I play basket ball? Only half serious :)
At the bottom of the article:
> *Authors’ Note: The journal that published this study has since expressed concern about the data. We first became aware of this research in Kim Cameron’s book, Positive Leadership. Like many others, we were distressed to learn of the incorrect data in the Heaphy and Losada research and we immediately ceased our citations upon learning that the study wasn’t correct. But we do believe the basic assumption and premise that leaders should provide more positive than negative feedback is correct.
> But we do believe the basic assumption and premise that leaders should provide more positive than negative feedback is correct
Typical social science research, come to the conclusion first and then find data to back it up. There needs to be a reproducibility challenge of the top 100 papers, preferably by scientists on the opposite side of the political spectrum of the authors. We solved this in the hard sciences, I don't get why it's so hard to do it in the social sciences.
> preferably by scientists on the opposite side of the political spectrum of the authors
What does political affiliation have to do with the scientific method? Are you under the impression that this is done in other sciences?
Many social scientists lean left and tend to "find" results which coincidentally align with their political viewpoint. If the results are truly reproducible, then someone on the other side of the spectrum should also be able to reproduce it. On the other hand, if the work was politically motivated then it won't be reproducible.
Do you have a basis for this assertion that has been studied and reproduced by someone of the opposite political spectrum?
I’m sorry but as a scientist, your assertion that we must hear from someone with the opposite political view before we can determine the veracity of some work is just so foreign to me. Must we also hear from creationists on evolution research? Why can’t that stand alone? If some experiment is reproducible it shouldn’t matter the political bias of the person running the study.
Moreover how would this even be implemented? The idea of a “political spectrum” is just a rule of thumb at best, and a dangerous misleading heuristic at worst. According to you, how would we identify an author’s political bias? Force them to self identify or take some sort of certified test? Will we divide all of our departments between liberals and conservatives? Right now I don’t know the political affiliation of any of my colleagues, and they don’t know mine. Are you suggesting we should bring our politics explicitly into our research?
I mean… have you even thought any of this through?
> if the work was politically motivated then it won't be reproducible.
Why not? If indeed there is a bias ib social science then we could expect some conclusions to remain unpublished if they contradict the bias. But I don't see why the results that do get published wouldn't be reproducible.
> But I don't see why the results that do get published wouldn't be reproducible
The very article we are reading illustrates why published results can be irreproducible and indeed completely made up. The Losada research cited was invalid [1] yet nobody questioned it because it fit their views of how humans should interact (positivity ratio implies some form of constructive criticism, which is often taught in Western schools as the ideal way to give feedback to someone). Any attempt by a sceptic to reproduce it would have realized that the "math" used to model the positivity ratio was wrong. The authors themselves state in the article they still believe the positivity ratio idea even though the Losada research was shown to be egregiously wrong.
[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/29/positivity-ratio-rese...
Most research isn’t reproduced because it’s not economically lucrative for researchers to reproduce research. It’s that simple. If you want scientists to reproduce research, make funding available for that purpose. It has nothing to do with political biases.
I mean, if you’re talking about completely made up research then that’s a matter of fraud, not political biases.
People with similar biases will overlook similar things, you need people with different biases to properly review scientific results, and it becomes more important the closer the topic is to politics.
Sure every person has all kinds of biases. The point of being a good researcher is to try and put those aside.
Should we also only accept reproducibility studies from women on papers by men? Should we need to hear from Chinese or European researchers before American research is considered valid? Must we also take into account the race, ethnicity, and religion of all authors as well? What if a conservative and liberal publish research together, is their research bias free by definition? What mixture of political biases get to reproduce such research in a way you consider free from bias?
I’m sorry the entire idea just seems untenable.
> We submit that all leaders should be aware of the ratio of positive and negative comments made by their colleagues in leadership team meetings, and endeavor to move the proportion closer to the ideal of 5.6 to 1—by their own example.
What was that quote by Feynman about how you can tell that someone is full of it if they give a number that's absurdly precise?
It's funny that they think high performing teams are as a result of this high ratio of praise to correction instead of being a symptom.
Hire anyone you want and as long as you praise them for whatever they do no matter how badly, your team will thrive. It's just another push for removing self determination and individual hard work.
This article reminds me of one business student's criticism of the "critical positivity ratio" idea. This article by the Guardian [1] sums up the entire saga, and the actual rebuttal is titled "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio" [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-...
[2] https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clean.p...
Every time I read an HBR article it is a little like listening to a highly process oriented MBA wonder aloud about how to innovate.
the article is so bad because of the negative comments
0 to 7 is the positive:negative ratio of this comment section as of writing.
The note at the end of the article really is all you really need to read of it.
If speaking kindly to plants helps them grow, imagine what speaking kindly to humans does!
In the absence of evidence: Quite possibly nothing.
Speaking kindly to humans does nothing? Is this how you approach relationships with people in real life?
I know too many people with the aforementioned approach. The line of reasoning goes like this:
* Only you are responsible for how you react to events in your life
* This implies that I'm not responsible for how you react to events in your life
* Therefore, I'm not responsible for how I interact in events in your life
* Consequently, I can speak to you unkindly or abusively and it's your responsibility to deal with your reactions.
It's my personal belief that this stems from a deranged form of stoicism because the same people exhibit toxic emotional detachment of their own subjective experience, but that's just a wild headcannon in order to rationalize what is a real collection of disturbing behaviors.
I wasn’t trying to be snarky or unkind. The key to the sentence is the first bit around absence of evidence. If we can’t evaluate whether some action has an effect, then quite possibly it has no effect. That’s all I meant.
With regards to evidence, in my lifetime experience to date (limited and what-not), there seems to be minimal correlation in this regard. Some people are mean even if I am nice to them and some people are nice even if I am mean to them. The correlation seems to be no better than a coin toss. Is that just my experience? Possibly. Anecdotal then? Absolutely. Is it equivalent to a social science experiment that assumes the conclusion? Certainly. I would say it’s better if I look objectively at data collected over the decades.
tl;dr ~5.6 times, but the study had some problems. so maybe not.