Are You a Certified Asshole? Take the ARSE Test on Monday at Guy's Blog

Guy Kawasaki posted a funny and detailed early review of The No Asshole Rule last Fall.  Now, with the book just a few weeks away, Guy and I been working with the great people at Electric Pulp to develop an online version of the "self-test" that appears in the book. So if you want to answer the question "Are You a Certified Asshole," drop by Guy's rollicking blog How to Change the World on Monday. I just took it myself -- I won't tell how I did, but I well confess that I am not following the principles in The Power of Nice as often as I should.

Update: Guy. my wife, and the folks at Electric Pulp thought it would be fun to come-up with a catchy title for the test. We had a lot of fun barnstorming different titles, including:

Test of Asshole-iness Online (TAO)
Online Asshole Test (OAT)
Sutton's Asshole Test (SAT)
Bob Sutton's Asshole Test (BS-AT)
Robert's Asshole Test (RAT)
'Hole-in-oscopy
The Eclectic Coolaid Asshole Test
RU1?
Asshole Status Survey (ASS)
Asshole Status Self-Test  (ASS-T)
Certified Asshole Test  (CAT
Sutton's Certified  Asshole Test (SCAT)

These all have their charms, but the winner (in a nod to our friends in the UK) was:

Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE)

Comments

[Jack Lail]

Thanks for your insights. That was great! Ms. Fong's research is interesting.

[Bob Sutton]

P.S. Here is a description of Fong's research from
http://psychcentral.com/news/2006/10/06/mixed-emotions-tied-to-workplace-creativity/

In the past, worker’s who experience a mixture of positive and negative emotions were believed to be workplace liabilities. A new study refutes this perception as individuals who simultaneously feel positive and negative emotions were found to be more creative than those who feel just happy or sad, or lack emotion at all.

That’s because people who feel mixed emotions interpret the experience as a signal that they are in an unusual environment and thus respond to it by drawing upon their creative thinking abilities, said Christina Ting Fong, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Business School. This increased sensitivity for recognizing unusual associations, which happy or sad workers probably couldn’t detect, is what leads to creativity in the workplace, she added.

“Due to the complexity of many organizations, workplace experiences often elicit mixed emotions from employees, and it’s often assumed that mixed emotions are bad for workers and companies,” said Fong, whose study appears in the October issue of the Academy of Management Journal. “Rather than assuming ambivalence will lead to negative results for the organization, managers should recognize that emotional ambivalence can have positive consequences that can be leveraged for organizational success.”

For her research, Fong conducted two studies. In the first, she asked 102 college students to write about certain emotional experiences in their lives with the goal of invoking in them feelings of happiness, sadness, neutrality or ambivalence. She then had them complete a commonly used measure of creativity called the Remote Associates Test that explored their ability to recognize common themes among seemingly unrelated words. The results demonstrated that while there were no differences among happy, sad and neutral individuals, people who were feeling emotionally ambivalent performed significantly better on this creativity task.

For the second study, she showed the 138 students either a film clip of the comedy “Father of the Bride” or a dull screen saver. In the film clip, a young woman, on the eve of her wedding day, discussed with her father the joy associated with her upcoming wedding and the sadness involved with growing up and entering adulthood. The screensaver and the clip were chosen to make people feel either neutral or ambivalent, respectively. Then the students took the Remote Associates Test.

She found that the emotionally ambivalent people who saw the clip showed increased creativity in comparison to those who watched the screensaver, but only when they believed their emotional ambivalence was unusual. Surprisingly, she said, no relationship was found between positive emotions and creativity or negative emotions and creativity.

According to Fong, one implication of this research is that when people feel mixed emotions, they see this as a signal that they are in a situation that might contain lots of unusual associations, and thus will need to respond by using more creative thinking.

“Managers who want to increase the creative output of their employees might benefit from following in the footsteps of companies like design firm IDEO or Walt Disney, which pride themselves on maintaining odd working environments. On some level, the bicycles that hang from the ceiling at IDEO and the colorful, casual environment at Disney probably help their employees sharpen their abilities to come up with novel and innovative ideas.”

Fong said that in previous studies she found women who are in supervisory positions are more likely to be emotionally ambivalent than women in lower status positions. Combining her previous research with this study, Fong said, suggests that women in high-status positions will be more creative managers.

[Bob Sutton]

Jack,

There is a difference between grumpy people and assholes. I talk about this in weird ideas that work, and indeed I agree with Professor Zhou that negative people are likely better at seeing flaws and risks than upbeat people, and you need some grumps for that purpose. I was also on a very interesting dissertation committee a few years back on this question. The student, Christina Fong -- now a professor at the University of Washington -- did some great studies that demonstrate that the moist creative people and groups have high levels of both positive emotion (optimism and energy) and of negative emotion (worry and anxiety). This research implies that people and groups that are "Happy Worriers" might combine the best of both worlds -- one explanation is that you need the grumpiness to see flaws and the optimism to keep going. But there are also some other recent studies that suggest the more positive emotion and optimism, the better, but this is a problem where the answers aren't quite clear -- my provisional take is that either you need all upbeat people or a lot of upbeat people and a few grumps -- but all grumps are bad.

[Jack Lail]

Bob:

Love your blog.

What's your take on this story that says "negative, pessimistic people can be good for the workplace."

http://www.shns.com/shns/scrippsnews/index.cfm?action=detail&pk=MOODYWORKERS-02-01-07

It's about the work of Jing Zhou, an associate professor at Rice University.

[Jack Lail]

Bob:

Love your blog.

What's your take on this story that says "negative, pessimistic people can be good for the workplace."

It's about the work of Jing Zhou, an associate professor at Rice University.