How Teams Dress for Success

When Peter Orszag, President Obama's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, walked into the Oval Office on a sunny day last January, he might have realized that he had a big decision to make: Coat on or off?
(White House) As we can see in the photo at right, he went "coat off" and draped it over his left knee. Orszag is an economist's economist: he's got the training, he’s got the neatly parted hair, he’s got the four eyes, and he’s got natural vanilla flavoring (kind of like me). As such, he might have made a cost-benefit calculation based on optimal brain acuity and meeting performance relative to body temperature and sweat factor. (This classical economic approach might be the reason that chilly Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and polar Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary, were becoated. No danger of cerebral overheating there.) But I'm guessing that Orszag didn't think very much about it at all. He saw his boss in shirt sleeves and, next thing he knew, his coat was off. If this is so, then it's an example that physical proximity leads to imitation, and closeness to similarity. That Orszag was in sync with his boss's coatlessness may seem like a trivial matter, given the weightiness of Oval Office conversations. But some intriguing studies suggest that it's actually a very good sign for the future working effectiveness of Orszag and his boss.