(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Frank Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (Stanford GSB), teaches in the executive education program. Many of his students are undergoing 360-degree evaluation from managers, direct reports, and peers between classes. While running leadership assessments in his classroom, Flynn noticed that people tended to receive harsher criticism for their communication than for any other skills they relied on as leaders. He also realized that while the quality of communication has generated scholarly discussion and debate, the quantity of communication—what employees perceive as too much or too little—hasn’t received the same scrutiny.
Flynn teamed up with Chelsea Lide, a doctoral candidate at the Stanford GSB, to investigate the quantitative dimensions of communication—its depth, detail, and frequency—in evaluations of leadership. Now, in a new paper, Flynn and Lide provide evidence from four studies showing that across industries and roles, the quantity of communication matters, and in the eyes of employees, most managers fail to communicate sufficiently, with damaging consequences for evaluations of their performance.
In their first two studies, Flynn and Lide delved into archival data from direct reports discussing their leaders’ weaknesses. These employees cited insufficient communication from managers and expressed strong criticism when they communicated too little, rather than too much. The researchers determined that their initial observations were likely applicable in a variety of contexts and turned to a nationally representative sample. In a third study, they were able to replicate their findings and show the greater extent to which employees penalized managers for undercommunication. “In theory, undercommunicating is bad, but so is overcommunicating,” Lide says, “but the penalties are asymmetrical. We wanted to understand why.”
Other research suggests that managers often communicate less than they should, because they fear negative reactions, such as the appearance of micromanaging, or because they assume, erroneously, that their communication is effective enough. Using experimental evidence, the two Stanford researchers discovered that employees interpreted undercommunication as a sign that their leaders lacked empathy, or care and concern, for them. Moreover, when employees viewed their managers as undercommunicative and therefore lacking empathy, Flynn and Lide found that confidence in their leadership skills dwindled.
Following their lab findings, the researchers set out to assess real-world contexts in a fourth study. Working with a sample of MBA graduates, they surveyed them, asking specifically how much they expected their managers to communicate with them and how they characterized the quantity of communication they received.
“What caught my attention in this study is the meaning of the effect that Flynn and Lide report,” Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, says. “Leaders who were seen not to communicate enough were considered less empathetic, and hence less capable to lead. Communication was a conduit for connection.”
The challenge of studying communication is its subjectivity—its sufficiency and effectiveness is in the eye of the beholder. So the researchers recognized a need to measure both how much employees preferred that their managers communicate and their perceptions of their managers’ communication with them. “We ended up seeing that when those two things match—the perception and the preference—employees view their leader as more empathetic and effective,” Lide says. “The further you get from that match, the more harshly penalized leaders are, but specifically when it comes to undercommunication.”
Cognizant of the many ways that gender contributes to expectations of successful communication, Flynn and Lide used robustness checks in their data to assess whether perceived empathy was affected by whether the manager was female or male. They found that the role of perceived empathy, or the extent to which a leader undercommunicated according to the employee, transcended the effects of gender. The same held true for other demographic characteristics, such as age and race. The researchers acknowledge, however, that their studies covered US subjects and may not apply to non-US cultural contexts.
Despite employees’ idiosyncratic preferences for communication, the paper shows that most managers share too little. Since the researchers construe communication broadly, without specifying a particular industry or role, their findings suggest that all leaders would benefit from soliciting feedback regarding their communication and how effective it is.
“Like in all relationships, no matter how much we hope to hear, too much silence hurts a lot more than too many words,” Petriglieri says. “Silence signals lack of attention, lack of interest, and ultimately, lack of care—the thing that, I believe, we most expect from leaders.”
Francis J. Flynn and Chelsea Lide, “Communication Miscalibration: The Price Leaders Pay for Not Sharing Enough,” Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.