One + February 2011 - (Page 24)

THE Express Your Negative Self MANAGERS WHO WANT TO IMPROVE THEIR TEAM performance should let employees express negative emotions, according to findings by Dutch researcher Annefloor Klep. In fact, teams that share bad feelings solve complex problems better, share more information and have a greater sense of belonging. Many organizations require workers to regulate negative emotions and show only positive emotions. Klep’s experiments reveal that this is not always the right strategy. It was found that teams who share positive emotions are better at creative tasks, but more analytical tasks were accomplished as a team through the sharing of negative emotions. Klep let her subjects view happy or sad movies and watched to see how her fictitious employees worked and how successful they were completing creative or analytical tasks. Groups that watched sad films and talked about them performed better at completing complex decision-making tasks as compared to groups that had seen a sad movie, but could not talk about it. In other words, it helps to share negativity. DO YOU LIKE WEBSITES? ALL YOUR HOME BASE ARE BELONG TO US vel Traxo.com serves as a travel gle home base, offering a single location for managing travel. Trips are seamlessly brought into a user’s Traxo account, wherever they are h l from the hassles of merging h h l f i booked, adding efﬁciency that frees the traveler f all the details. With Traxo, users are connected to their Facebook streams via the website’s Facebook application if they want to share trips directly with those contacts in addition to contacts selected on Traxo. Conceived by Andres Fabris, Andy Chen and Richard Pendergast, Traxo’s executive team is comprised of individuals with decades of travel industry experience from companies such as Sabre and Travelocity. CULTURAL LEARNINGS Increased mobility exposes millions of travelers every day to new cultures, customs and languages. Without education, dialogue can be difﬁcult, and misunderstandings can arise. You can get yourself into all sorts of trouble in other countries if you don’t have an understanding of the cultural language. Much of our behavior can mean other things in other countries, some of it amusing, some of it extremely offensive. Fastenseatbelts.eu aims to demystify these cultural differences and encourage visitors to embrace them. Fasten Seat Belts 1 features 35 video clips for different European countries, as well as language programs for 20 European languages. Fasten Seat Belts 2 is designed for travelers going to Asia. COME ON GET HAPPY TrackYourHappiness.org is a new scientiﬁc research project that investigates what makes life worth living. Using this site, you’ll be able to track your happiness and ﬁnd out what factors—for you personally—are associated with greater happiness. Using your iPhone, you’ll be notiﬁed by e-mail or text message and asked to report how you are feeling and what you are doing. You decide when and how often you want to be notiﬁed. Your Happiness Report will show how your happiness varies depending on what you are doing, who you are with, where you are, what time of day it is and a variety of other factors. 24 Negative emotions worked out positively in some conflict situations. Klep gave the impression to some team members that there was a problem with their relationships, which can make working together difficult. But by sharing negative feelings, the group puts aside its problems more easily. They paid no attention to the conflict and concentrated fully on the job they had to do as a team. Also, teams that work together for a long time can experience greater rewards by sharing emotions, according to Klep. If teams are expected to meet together later, the effect of sharing negative emotions is greater than sharing positive ones. Analytical tasks are performed better; however, the creative process can come under strong pressure. —JASON HENSEL Read more stories at www.mpiweb.org/Magazine/pluspoint one+ 02.11 http://www.Traxo.com http://www.Fastenseatbelts.eu http://www.TrackYourHappiness.org http://www.mpiweb.org/Magazine/pluspoint

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of One + February 2011

One + February 2011
Contents
Energy of Many
Impressions
The Productivity Cloud
Overheard
Agenda
MPIWeb Connect
Thoughts+Leaders
Events for Life
Gateway to the Future
Top Spots
It Was Not Interesting
Irrelevant
The Wrong Words
Up to Snuff
That’s Enough Facebook
Super Foods to the Rescue
Shoring Resources
Jack and Smoke
Accidentally on Purpose
Staying on Top of Tech
The Joy of Work
Plan to Run
Productivity on the Go
Angel of the Favelas
Your Community
Making a Difference
Until We Meet Again
MPI’s 2011 Meeting Guide to Canada
Contents
Banff Centre
Ottawa Tourism
Tourisme Montréal
The Buzz
InterContinental Canada
Caesars Windsor
Vintage Hotels
The Great Green North
Whistler, British Columbia
Meetings and Conventions Calgary
Scotiabank Convention Centre

One + February 2011