Yell!

July 11th, 2020| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Coaching. Halftime. Pep talks. And the team, down in the first half, comes back to win the game! What a dream, as in Gene Hackman in Hoosiers (1986), Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans (2000), Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Night Lights (2004), etc. Apparently, that’s all it is—a dream.

The reality is that getting angry, yelling, and bringing down the hammer is what works. Or so say researchers from Berkeley in “Leadership in the Locker Room: How the Intensity of Leaders’ Unpleasant Affective Displays Shapes Team Performance,” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Those enterprising folks analyzed 304 halftime locker room speeches from 23 high school and college basketball games and discovered that there was a significant positive correlation between the coaches’ negativity at halftime and the players’ intensity in the second half.

Said Prof. Staw, first author on the paper:

That was even true if the team was already ahead at halftime. Rather than saying, ‘You’re doing great, keep it up,’ it’s better to say, ‘I don’t care if you’re up by 10 points, you can play better than this.’”

The more negativity, the more the team outscored the opposition.

Wow, that’s great. I now know what to do as I coach preachers: Yell and scream!

[In fact, for anyone interested in hearing (and seeing) me yell and scream, check out a Dallas Seminary-organized “Preaching Refresher” featuring yours truly. This is next Monday, July 20, in the afternoon. On Zoom. Some yelling and screaming is being planned by your humble blogger, with lots of questions from participants. If you sign up, you get a free book (A Vision for Preaching) and the DTS bookstore is also offering 50% off all my books. (There goes my hopes of retiring soon!) More info here.]

In sum, it’s not just what we say things that matter, how we say it does too. Staw again:

We sometimes strip content from emotion, treating it as simply positive or negative expression, but emotion often has a message carried along with it that causes people to listen and pay attention, as leaders try to correct or redirect behavior.”

Oh, wait, I spoke too soon—there’s more to the study.

Our results show support for the prediction and suggest that the curvilinear effect of leaders’ unpleasant affective displays may be explained by team members’ redirection of attention and approach, which is positively associated with team members’ effort at moderate levels of leader unpleasantness but leads to lower effort at high and low levels of leader unpleasantness.”

That last part! Apparently, the positive effect of coaches’ negativity goes only so far. At higher levels of such adversarial blowouts, the reverse happens. If you do a Bobby Knight kinda chair-throwing performance, you ain’t gonna get much from your pupils, it seems.

Declared Staw:

Our results do not give leaders a license to be a jerk.”

Oh, well, there goes my hopes of yelling and screaming next week!

Staw is right.

I solemnly charge [you] before God and Christ Jesus
who is going to judge the living and the dead,
and by His appearing and His kingdom:
preach the word; be ready in favorable time, in unfavorable time;
reprove, rebuke, exhort,
with all patience and teaching.
2 Timothy 4:1–2

And I can guess why Paul was quick to urge “all patience.”

I was shown mercy, so that in me as the foremost,
Christ Jesus may demonstrate His utmost patience
as an example for those who were to believe in Him for eternal life.
1 Timothy 1:16

We who were first shown patience, show patience to others.

SOURCES:
BerkeleyHaas; Journal of Applied Psychology; Study Finds