24/07/2011
Most of us drink tea or coffee, (caffeine is the most widely consumed drug in the world) but if a meeting becomes stressful, does it help, or make things worse, if team members drink lots of caffeine?
A study by Lindsay St. Claire and colleagues looked at men’s and women’s performance (memory tasks & problem solving) and confidence to find out the impact of caffine consumption.
Participants were asked to complete various construction puzzles, negotiation and collaborative memory tasks together, either in a stressful or non-stressful situation. They did this after drinking decaffeinated coffee, which either had or hadn’t been spiked covertly with caffeine (the equivalent of about three cups’ worth of coffee).
The results showed
- That men’s memory performance under stressful conditions with caffeine was ‘greatly impaired’ (as described by the researchers) whereas caffeine didn’t affect women in the same situation.
- For the construction puzzles, caffeine under high stress conditions led men to take an average of twenty seconds longer (compared with no caffeine) whereas it led women to solve the puzzles 100 seconds faster.
So why did caffeine effect men and women differently?
Well it is likely that women typically tend to respond to stress in a collaborative, mutually protective style (known as ‘tend and befriend’) whereas men usually exhibit a fight or flight response. These two responses will be amplified by the effects of caffeine even if the consumption is quite small.
Given that men’s effectiveness is particularly likely to be compromised by caffeine in stressful conditions and most executive teams are male dominated (think military, politics etc) these results should be investigated further.
In the mean time when working in groups/teams it is probably worth remembering that stressful situations, when mixed with a simple drink like tea and coffee, can very quickly activate or inhibit our performance, depending on whether we are a man or a woman or how we typically respond to stress.
Using your Business Emotional Intelligence to recognise how emotions impact on behaviour, especially when you are working outside your comfort zone, will go a long way to ensuring that the effects demonstrated by this research do not comprise the performance of the teams that you work in.
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St. Claire, L., Hayward, R., and Rogers, P. (2010). Interactive Effects of Caffeine Consumption and Stressful Circumstances on Components of Stress: Caffeine Makes Men Less, But Women More Effective as Partners Under Stress. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40 (12), 3106-3129
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