Grumpy People Better at Their Jobs: Study

Grumpy People Better at Their Jobs: Study

By Vishakha Sonawane | Jun 21, 2014 10:06 AM EDT



Grumpy or hateful people are good at their jobs, a new study shows. Researchers said that this might be because these people engage in fewer activities.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania found that disposition motivates behavior.

According to study researcher Justin Hepler and Dolores Albarracin, people who are involved in multiple things (those with positive dispositional attitudes) do more number of things during the course of a week. Similarly, people with low dispositional attitudes do few things with their time.

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Researchers conducted two studies. Participants were told to give a detailed report of their activities over a one-week period and also completed a measure of dispositional attitudes. The team noted that those with low and high dispositional attitude did not differ in the types of activities they did. But the previous section of people did fewer activities throughout the week. Nearly 15 percent of the differences in how many activities people conducted during a typical week was associated with being a hater versus a liker.

The team explained that just the number of activities that people with low and high dispositional attitude determined whether or not they were good at their work. According to the researchers, those with low dispositional attitude could be characterized as more focused because they spend more time on the small number of things they do.

"The present results demonstrate that patterns of general action may occur for reasons other than the desire to be active versus inactive," the researchers wrote in a press release. "Indeed, some people may be more active than others not because they want to be active per se, but because they identify a large number of specific behaviors in which they want to engage."

Researchers said that the findings were important as they have implications for understanding the development of skills and expertise. And they noted that the similar pattern could also be relevant to attention control. For instance, those who like doing more activities may have difficulty concentrating on particular task as they are distracted by the various opportunities and vice versa.

The study was published in journal 'Social Psychology'.


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