Planning to negotiate a raise? Don't discuss it with your boss in his or her office. So says a new study by an organizational behavior expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Parties who negotiate on their home fields can be expected to claim between 60 percent and 160 percent more value than the visiting party,” says Markus Baer, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Olin Business School. Baer’s latest study, “Location in Negotiation: Is There a Home-Field Advantage?” is among the first to empirically demonstrate that there is indeed a home-field advantage in negotiation. It appears in the March edition of the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Baer and his research partner, Graham Brown of the University of British Columbia, set out to test the generally accepted theory that a home-field advantage exists, not only in sports but also in business negotiations. They found that it does, but visiting-player confidence can go a long way in evening the playing field.

“There was surprisingly little systemic research examining whether location matters in negotiation,” Baer says. “And no study explains why it would matter. Do people in their own environments perform better, or do visitors to their offices perform worse? As a result, home-field advantage remains one of the least understood phenomena in negotiation.”

Baer and Graham set up a series of three experiments. In the first, students assumed the status of “resident” and were taken to a private office. They were given 20 minutes to make the office their own by choosing a chair, putting their name outside the office, choosing posters to put up, writing their schedule on a board and logging into a computer to check their email. They were also given a key to the office. They were then told they would be negotiating with a fellow student over the price of a pound of coffee.

Participants assuming the role of a “visitor” were told that they would be negotiating with a fellow student who had an office because he or she was entering data for a professor in the department thus leading them to believe that the “resident” party had a permanent claim to the office. The experiment showed that residents clearly outperformed visitors. 

By creating a third condition—a “neutral party” who was led to believe that the resident party did not have a permanent claim to the office but just happened to have arrived a little earlier—the authors were able to also show that the home-field advantage may be due both to a resident advantage and a visitor disadvantage. That is, residents did better than a neutral party, who, in turn, outperformed visitors.

The second experiment examined the role of confidence in explaining exactly why the home-turf advantage arises. It was designed exactly as the first, however before the negotiation, participants took a questionnaire designed to measure confidence. This experiment showed that the advantage of residents over visitors in distributive negotiations can at least partly be explained by the different levels of confidence residents and visitors are likely to have from knowing that they will be negotiating on their home fields or on someone else’s territory.

In the final experiment, visitors’ confidence levels were manipulated by having students provide answers to a fake assessment. They were told that based on the assessment, their negotiating skills were quite high and they should do well in the negotiation.The results of the experiment showed that boosting visitor’s confidence levels before the negotiation can help to eliminate the home field advantage.

“Our findings suggest that location is an important factor to consider when examining the forces shaping outcomes of distributive negotiations and, therefore, should be incorporated into existing approaches to negotiation,” Baer writes in the paper. 

However, Baer’s research also suggests one way of overcoming home-field advantage if the location of a negotiation cannot be changed. “Confidence plays a critical role in any negotiation, regardless of where it takes place,” Baer says. “Anything a person entering a negotiation can do to boost his or her confidence is a good thing. Something as simple as participating in negotiation training may work to minimize the disadvantage of negotiating on someone else’s home turf.”

The more honesty and humility employees may have, the higher their job performance, as rated by the employees' supervisor. That's the new finding from a Baylor University study that found the honesty-humility personality trait was a unique predictor of job performance.

"Researchers already know that integrity can predict job performance, and what we are saying here is that humility and honesty are also major components in that," said Dr. Wade Rowatt, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor, who helped lead the study. "This study shows that those who possess the combination of honesty and humility have better job performance. In fact, we found that humility and honesty not only correspond with job performance, but it predicted job performance above and beyond any of the other five personality traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness."

The Baylor researchers—along with a business consultant—surveyed 269 employees in 25 different companies across 20 different states who work in positions that provide health care for challenging clients. Supervisors of the employees in the study then rated the job performance of each employee on 35 different job skills and described the kind of customer with whom the employee worked. The ratings were included in order to inform higher management how employees were performing and for the Baylor researchers to examine which personality variables were associated with job performance ratings.

The Baylor researchers found that those who self-reported more honesty and humility were scored significantly higher by their supervisors for their job performance. The researchers defined honesty and humility as those who exhibit high levels of fairness, greed-avoidance, sincerity and modesty.

"This study has implications for hiring personnel in that we suggest more attention should be paid to honesty and humility in applicants and employees, particularly those in care-giving roles," said Megan Johnson, a Baylor doctoral candidate who conducted the study. "Honest and humble people could be a good fit for occupations and organizations that require special attention and care for products or clients. Narcissists, on the other hand, who generally lack humility and are exploitative and selfish, would probably be better at jobs that require self-promotion."

(Story material provided by Baylor University.)

It's no secret that I'm a fan of telecommuting (also known as flexible work arrangements or work shifting). It makes good business sense, it's environmentally friendly and it can be a great motivator. Check out this graphic to learn more about how great it could be if everyone was able to telecommute. 

New findings from a series of business think tanks involving CEOs, senior HR professionals and workplace decision makers from across the U.S., the U.K. and other countries reveal that bosses anticipate 50 percent to 80 percent of employees will  move to time or location flexible work within five years, driven largely by the need to attract and retain superior talent. This is up from a reported 25 percent today.

The findings from the FlexPaths-LinkedIn Virtual Think Tanks offer a point of view rarely communicated in an industry dominated largely by human resource professionals—that of the C-level executive. Through the peer knowledge exchange that unfolded, the participants, across industries and from around the globe, were able to share challenges and glean insights and best practices in a collaborative environment. At the same time, they acknowledged that their organizations have a long way to go to overcome the cultural barriers around flexible workforce practices.

"It's fascinating that the corporate world can see flexible working to become the standard in the near future, but is currently still struggling to overcome cultural obstacles and therefore to benefit from the ROI that has been proven in all the research," said Clare Flynn Levy, managing director of FlexPath. "The key to getting from A to B is to treat every worker as a flexible worker—to make flexible work a strategic business imperative."

Today's economy is a talent economy, says Kevin Eyres, EMEA managing director for LinkedIn. 

"Companies will rise and fall on based their ability to attract and retain the best talent," Eyres said. "Combined with that is the increase in Generation Y workers entering the workforce who expect a flexible working life as standard. Organizations failing to adapt will lose out in the battle for the best people."

Ultimately, all of the think tank groups came to the conclusion that there is a need to develop manager capability in managing flexible workers, along with a need for infrastructure and systems to support this new normal—including infrastructure to confidently measure performance in a virtual and oftentimes asynchronous environment.

The following are findings from the report.

You're not alone. Even with unemployment in the U.S. hovering around 10%, more workers are quitting their jobs than are getting fired...for the third consecutive month. And when you consider that the cost to replace an employee can excede 250% of their annual salary...well, you can see there's some nasty badness playing out in the work world sufficient for so many workers to just give up.

While some of these workers are quitting without jobs waiting for them (the current employer just being too toxic an environment), others are surely moving on to better prospects: a company with better pay, benefits, work-life balance or greater honor and respect for employees.

Note: 12% of "high-potential" employees are looking for jobs right now. How does your company plan on keeping them?

The HBR blog that exposed most of this info goes on to provide some rather vanilla ways to maintain your top talent (personalize the position and the rewards). Think outside of this box, though. Start treating your invaluable employees better. Most are over-worked and have little incentive to stay--other than just being employed during such hard times. Your task: Make all of your valued employees feel truly valued, make sure they're as happy and successful as you can help them be and give them an offer they can't refuse.

If you neglect to heed this timely warning then don't be surprised when you get a rear-view point-of-view of your best talent walking away--if not now then as soon as the job market picks up.