By: Jared Sandberg, The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Associate Professor Ed Chang in the Wall Street Journal

From the article:

Operations manager Diane Alter once worked for such a committed optimist that despite a litany of daily workplace crises, he'd say, "It's all good."

It only made Ms. Alter want to protect her momentary miseries. "Let me enjoy my bad mood for a minute," she felt like saying. "Let me wallow in it."

Faced with pressing problems, his involvement was limited to a phone call. All the while, she was huffing and puffing to resolve the problem herself. In the end, she says, "Everything ends up OK because responsibility to fix it falls on everyone else."

As management literature often notes, optimists drive employees to exceptional levels of achievement. But, man, those Pollyannas can be annoying, exhausting and sometimes maddening because they can get away with so much.

In offices, where blind optimism is more forgivable than even mild pessimism, staffers wait for the time when their head hopers won't know what hit them -- but it usually ends up being a promotion.

Optimists think they delegate; their staffers think they deny work's unpleasant realities. Optimists raise possibilities; staffers are told they're raising obstacles. Optimists think more can be done with less; their staffers are pretty sure less gets done with less....

But pessimists aren't given the benefit of their doubts. Research shows that relative pessimists are more accurate at gauging success and failure rates at a simple laboratory task than optimists, who undercounted failures and overcounted successes, says Edward Chang, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Also, evidence shows that pessimism can be highly motivational, as what's called "defensive pessimism" drives people to achieve their goals.

Arguably, adds Prof. Chang, investment banks suffering from the subprime-lending crisis were too optimistic while Goldman Sachs, which plotted out disaster scenarios, has thrived. "Optimism associated with inaction is useless," he says. "But pessimism associated with movement, motivation and energy is exactly what people are talking about in terms of the best of optimism."...

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To read the entire article, visit the Wall Street Journal Online website at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119611464665204347.html.