Hayley H. Blunden is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. She studies workplace communication challenges like advice, feedback, voice, and virtual work. In her research, she adopts a mixed methods approach that draws from field and experimental evidence to investigate two related areas of focus. First, she examines workplace communication challenges from an interpersonal perspective, placing a spotlight on the role of social influences in driving communication outcomes. Second, she investigates factors that can improve the outcomes of these workplace challenges, identifying both naturally occurring features of the work environment and novel interventions that can improve employee and organizational effectiveness. Her research has been published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and has been featured by Harvard Business Review, The Economist, CNBC, and Forbes.
Hayley has also served as an Instructor of Management and Communication at the Harvard Extension School, where she taught The Art of Communication, a leadership communication class for working professionals.
Prior to pursuing her graduate studies, Hayley worked in a variety of organizational contexts. She has held positions in internal strategy, consulting, and finance, and has experience working in organizations ranging from a small startup to a Fortune 100 firm. Hayley earned her BA in Economics and Media Studies from The University of Virginia and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Hayley Blunden, Jennifer M. Logg, Alison Wood Brooks, Leslie John and Francesca Gino
Prior advice research has focused on why people rely on (or ignore) advice and its impact on judgment accuracy. We expand the consideration of advice-seeking outcomes by investigating the interpersonal consequences of advice seekers’ decisions. Across nine studies, we show that advisors interpersonally penalize seekers who disregard their advice, and that these reactions are especially strong among expert advisors. This penalty also drives advisor reactions to a widely-recommended advice-seeking strategy: soliciting multiple advisors to leverage the wisdom of crowds. Advisors denigrate and distance themselves from seekers who they learn consulted others, an effect mediated by perceptions that their own advice will be disregarded. Underlying these effects is an asymmetry between advisors’ and seekers’ beliefs about the purpose of the advice exchange: whereas advisors believe giving advice is more about narrowing the option set by providing direction, seekers believe soliciting advice is more about widening the option set by gathering information.
Email and text-based communication have become ubiquitous. Although recent findings indicate emotional equivalence between face-to-face and email communication, there is limited evidence of nonverbal behaviors in text-based communication, especially the kinds of unintentional displays central to emotion perception in face-to-face interactions. We investigate whether unintentional emotion cues occur in text-based communication by proposing that communication mistakes (e.g., typos) influence emotion perception. Across six studies, we show that communication errors amplify perceptions of email sender’s emotions—both negative (Studies 1A–2, 4, 5) and positive (Study 3). Furthermore, by contrasting perceptions of message senders who make mistakes in emotional versus unemotional contexts (Study 5), we show that people partially excuse message sender communication errors in emotional (versus unemotional) contexts, attributing such mistakes to the sender’s emotional state rather than solely their intelligence level. These studies suggest that nonverbal behavior in text-based and face-to-face communication may be more comparable than previously thought.
Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively unlikeable (Study 1). A second set of studies points to the specificity of the effect: Study 2A shows that it is unique to the (innocent) messenger and not mere bystanders. Study 2B shows that it is distinct from merely receiving information that one disagrees with. We suggest that people’s tendency to deem bearers of bad news as unlikeable stems in part from their desire to make sense of chance processes. Consistent with this account, receiving bad news activates the desire to sense-make (Study 3A), and in turn, activating this desire enhances the tendency to dislike bearers of bad news (Study 3B). Next, stemming from the idea that unexpected outcomes heighten the desire to sense-make, Study 4 shows that when bad news is unexpected, messenger dislike is pronounced. Finally, consistent with the notion that people fulfill the desire to sense-make by attributing agency to entities adjacent to chance events, messenger dislike is correlated with the belief that the messenger had malevolent motives (Studies 5A, 5B, & 5C). Studies 6A & 6B go further, manipulating messenger motives independently from news valence to suggest its causal role in our process account: the tendency to dislike bearers of bad news is mitigated when recipients are made aware of the benevolence of the messenger’s motives.
This chapter integrates research on advice interactions, motivations for advising, and the psychological consequences of serving in an advisor role to develop a more comprehensive perspective on the psychology of advising. By connecting this work, which spans various methodologies and theoretical foundations, it advances current thinking on advice giving in two primary ways. First, in examining the diversity of motivations for advice giving, it extends the set of advice-exchange outcomes to be considered beyond those previously emphasized. Second, it highlights previously unexplored aspects of the advisor role that are likely to impact the advice-giving experience. The chapter concludes by providing recommendations for advisors and identifying areas ripe for future research to illuminate the advisor side of the advice-exchange process.
Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Katherine L. Milkman, Luca Foschini, Francesca Gino and Bradford Tuckfield
Managers and policymakers regularly rely on incentives to encourage valued behaviors. While often successful, there are also notable and surprising examples of their ineffectiveness. Why? Perhaps they are not sufficiently conspicuous. In support of this account, in a large-scale field experiment and laboratory study, we show that even when incentives are transparently provided and easily trackable in real time, failing to make them conspicuous renders incentives ineffectual at shifting behavior. Further, we show that inconspicuous incentives are ineffective in part because people fail to seek information on how to improve their outcomes despite being informed that such information exists and even when it can be obtained at the mere click of button. Finally, we show that people fail to appreciate potential beneficiaries’ apparent lack of interest in obtaining incentive information, a result suggesting that purveyors of incentive programs may under-invest in promoting them.
Jaewon Yoon, Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal and A.V. Whillans
When looking to improve workplace performance, people often seek third-party input by asking for feedback. However, we propose that asking for feedback might not be the most effective way of soliciting critical and actionable input. We offer a simple yet powerful alternative: ask for advice instead. Across four experiments (N=1,438), including a field experiment, we show that people offer more critical and actionable input when they are asked to provide advice (versus feedback)—even when they are asked to provide comments on identical output. When asked to provide feedback (versus advice), givers focus too much on evaluating the recipient, which undermines their ability to generate constructive (i.e. critical and actionable) input. Our findings suggest that framing feedback provision as advice provision may be a promising way of soliciting constructive third-party input.
Ethan Bernstein, Hayley Blunden, Andrew Brodsky, Wonbin Sohn and Ben Waber
In early 2020, the world began what is undoubtedly the largest work-from-home experiment in history. Now, as countries reopen but COVID-19 remains a major threat, organizations are wrestling with whether and how to have workers return to their offices. Business leaders need to be able to answer a number of questions to make these decisions. Primary among them is “What impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?”
Bernstein, Ethan, Hayley Blunden, Andrew Brodsky, Wonbin Sohn, and Ben Waber. "The Implications of Working Without an Office."Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (July 15, 2020). (Part of a Seven-Part Series: The New Reality of WFH.)
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Jaewon Yoon, Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal and A.V. Whillans
Conventional wisdom says you should ask your colleagues for feedback. However, research suggests that feedback often has no (or even a negative) impact on our performance. This is because the feedback we receive is often too vague—it fails to highlight what we can improve on or how to improve. New research suggests a better approach. Across four experiments—including a field experiment conducted in an executive education classroom—researchers found that people received more effective input when they asked for advice rather than feedback.
Most jobs require us at some point to deliver bad news—whether it be a minor revelation such as a recruiter telling a prospective employee that there’s no wiggle room in salary, or something major, like when a manager must fire an employee. We dread such discussions even when the revelations aren’t at all our fault. It turns out that our aversion is for good reason. Our research shows that people are prone to derogating those who tell them things they don’t want to hear—we shoot the messenger.
