HIGHLIGHTS
According to a new study from researchers at Rice
University, conscientious people are more likely to provide good customer
service.
The study, published in the Journal of
Applied Social Psychology, examined the link between personality
traits and effective behavior in customer service situations. It found
that individuals who are identified through tests as highly conscientious are
more likely to be aware of how good interpersonal interactions positively
impact customer service and are more likely to behave this way.
While technical knowledge of a position is an
important factor in successful job performance, it is only one part of the
performance equation.
Much as intelligence impacts knowledge acquisition,
personality traits impact how interpersonal skills are learned and used.
People who know more about what kinds of actions are successful in dealing with
interpersonal service encounters — such as listening carefully, engaging
warmly, and responding to questions effectively — handle them more effectively,
and their understanding of successful customer service is shaped by underlying
personality characteristics.
The research was conducted in two parts:
·
Part one included
a group of 99 undergraduates enrolled in a psychology course at a small,
private Southwestern university.
·
Part two
included a group of approximately 80 employees at a community service volunteer
agency.
In both parts of the study, participants completed
a questionnaire ranking 50 customer-service encounters as effective or
ineffective. Both parts of the study revealed that people who were
accurate in judging the effectiveness of customer-service activities behaved
more effectively, and displayed higher levels of conscientiousness.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, August 21, 2013, "Relations Between
Personality, Knowledge, and Behavior in Professional Service Encounters,"
by Stephan J. Motowidlo, et al. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved.
A team of Michigan State
University neuroscientists has created a quick, but reliable test that can
measure a person's creativity from single spoken words. The research,
published in the journal Behavior Research Methods, confirms
that there is a lot of hard work going on in the brain even when the proverbial
"light bulb" turning on feels effortless.
The team members wanted to
understand what makes creativity tick; that is, what the specific processes
associated with creativity in the brain are. Innovation doesn't just come
for free — nobody learns their ABCs in kindergarten and suddenly writes a great
novel or poem. People need to master their craft before they can start to
be creative in interesting ways.
For this research, 193
participants were shown a series of nouns and instructed to respond creatively
with a verb in each case. The test took about two minutes. The
"noun-verb" test is so simple it can be done by virtually anyone,
anywhere.
For example, for the noun
"chair," instead of answering with the standard verb "sit,"
a participant might answer "stand," as in to stand on a chair to
change a light bulb.
The participants also were
measured for creativity through a series of more in-depth methods, including
story writing, drawing, and listing their creative achievements in real life.
The result: Those
who gave creative answers on the noun-verb test were indeed the most creative
as measured by the more in-depth methods. This suggests the noun-verb
test, or a future variation, could be successful by itself in measuring
creativity.
Currently, the MSU team is
having participants complete the noun-verb test in an MRI machine while their
brain activity is recorded, in hopes of identifying the parts of the brain
responsible for creativity.
Although much more
research is needed, the findings eventually could help students, entrepreneurs,
scientists, and others who depend on innovative thinking. Ultimately,
this work could allow researchers to create better educational and training programs
to help people foster their creativity. It also could be helpful in
settings where selecting creative people is important, such as the human
resources office.
Behavior Research Methods, October 2013, "Thin Slices of
Creativity: Using Single-Word Utterances to Assess Creative
Cognition," by Ranjani Prabhakaran, et al. © 2013 Springer, Part of
Springer Science+Business Media. All rights reserved.
To view this article, please visit:
Americans consume an
enormous amount of media daily via television, radio, phone, and
computer. This massive U.S. media consumption is the topic of an in-depth
study titled, "How Much Media? 2013 Report on American
Consumers,"produced by the Institute for Communication Technology
Management at the USC Marshall School of Business.
The report looks at media
consumption by individuals in and out of the home, excluding the workplace,
between 2008 and 2015. It breaks "media" down into 30
categories of media type and delivery, such as television, social media, and
computer gaming.
Information reported in
the study was canvassed from several hundred data sources, including media
measurement firms such as Nielsen, Arbitron, and ComScore; investor and analyst
firms; government sources; various think tanks; and research publications.
Consider some of the specifics:
· In 2008,
U.S. media consumption totaled 3.5 zettabytes; that's an average of 33 gigabytes
per consumer per day. One byte is one character of text. A gigabyte
is one trillion bytes. And a zettabyte is 10 raised to the 21st power
bytes (a million million gigabytes.)
· By 2012,
total U.S. consumption had increased to 6.9 zettabytes, an average of 63
gigabytes per person per day.
· In 2008,
Americans talked, viewed, and listened to media for 1.3 trillion hours, an
average of 11 hours per person per day.
· By 2012,
total consumption had increased to 1.46 trillion hours, an average of 13.6
hours per person per day, representing a year-over-year compounded growth rate
of 5 percent.
· By 2015,
the data indicate that Americans will consume media for more than 1.7 trillion
hours, an average of approximately 15.5 hours per person per day. The
amount of media delivered will exceed 8.75 zettabytes annually. That's
equal to 74 gigabytes, or 9 DVDs worth of data sent to the average consumer on
an average day.
· By 2015,
mobile messaging hours, which in 2012 accounted for approximately 9 percent of
voice call hours, are expected to double; that's a year-over-year growth rate
of more than 27 percent.
· Viewing
video on the Internet averaged less than three hours a month in 2008; by 2012,
viewing time increased to almost six hours a month; and by 2015, the report
projects that Americans will be watching video for almost eleven hours a month,
a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent a year.
·
From 2008
to 2015, total annual hours for users of Facebook and YouTube will grow from
6.3 billion hours to 35.2 billion hours, a year-over-year growth rate of 28
percent.
Looking across different
sources of media, the report makes a surprising discovery: "Despite
the popular belief that the ubiquitous computer and smartphone dominate modern
media life, traditional media, including TV, radio, and voice calls, still
account for two-thirds of total U.S. household media time."
The report also includes
data on Americans' use of media dating back to the 1960s. Over those
decades, the supply of digital media measured in bytes has been growing at
compounded rates ranging between 6 and 30 percent each year.
Media consumption, on the
other hand — what we actually pay attention to — has been growing at compounded
rates ranging between 3 and 5 percent each year.
USC Marshall School of
Business, October 29, 2013, "How
Much Media? 2013," by James E. Short. © 2013 University of Southern
California Marshall School of Business. All rights reserved.
To view this article, please visit:
No comments:
Post a Comment