Session 1: Course introduction
Pfeller
Focus:
- Evidence based management/approach
Key words:
- Rank and yank approach: when employers fire employees that fall below a certain
ballpark
- Organizational culture: the shared values/norms, expectations, and practice of a
team
- Benchmarking: when you compare your performance against a competitor in the
same field
- Obsolete knowledge: which is knowledge that has become outdated due to new and
more relevant knowledge.
Evidence based management is an approach in which decisions are made based on the
latest, most knowledgeable, and supported evidence of what works.
- Systematically demanding evidence, critically examining the knowledge, embracing
what you don’t know
Things that are considered as evidence are:
- Facts and figures
- Personal experience and reflection
- Research findings
- Benchmarking
The challenges with EBM:
- Too much information: there are many journals, articles, book written regarding
management & business however the issues is they are not integrated in a way that
makes them memorable or accessible.
- Weak evidence: not only is there too much information, but there is also not enough
support to say that one solution is generalizable/effective elsewhere. Because business
differ is sizes, forms age etc.
- Neglecting to seek out new evidence: some managers have a dogmatic mindset
and therefore rely on what they already know and on obsolete knowledge.
- Specialist skills: when managers/clinicals make decisions that capitalize on their
strengths, so they end up using strategies/treatments in which they are most
experienced in when there could be better ones.
To become a company of evidence-based managers:
- By putting aside conventional wisdom: managers need show/have a willingness to
seek out new information that could help provided more superior solutions
- By treating the company as an unfinished prototype: this is by consciously
provided training, and work practices and teaching staff how to critically analyze
information,
- By asking for evidence: when managers make it a habit to ask their staff for
evidence when an idea is proposed it is more likely that there will be a snowball effect
on the team, and they too will start critically analyzing information. à the attitude of
wisdom
- By encouraging inquiring and observation
Extra:
Rank and yank approach:
Pros:
- Extrinsic motivation e.g., bonuses
- Identify underperformersà good for accurately reporting employee’s performance
- Establishes a standard for all employees
Cons:
, - Discourage collaboration and organization culture
- Decrease employee engagement
- Creates inequality
- Affects intrinsic motivation
- Unhealthy competition
Session 2: Foundation of behavior in organizations
Focus:
- Person-situation perspective/debate
- Situational strength
Fleeson
The person situation debate: a debate on whether the
person perspective/Trait approach which states that
people will behave similarly across situations is right or the
Situation perspective/Social cognitive approach which
says that people will act different across different situations is right.
Density distribution approach:
- Use to measure how different a person acts on different occasions & to assess similarity
between people
- Task: to follow different people as they go through their daily lives, the observer will
note on a 7point Likert scale how often a person showed these traits:
conscientiousness, extraversions, intellect, emotional stability &
agreeableness
Figure 1: Left supports person perspective (Narrower),
Right supports Situation perspective (Broader)
1. The person perspective:
à Trait are valuable for describing how people act in everyday life, and trait psychology is
needed to understand these behavioral differences between individuals.
- Believes in traits
- Similarly, across situations = High cross situation consistency
- Helpful when needed to look at stable/average differences between people
- Management/Leadership focus: firing, selecting process, recruit - focused on finding
people who have the right/stable characteristics to help them succeed in any
environment
- Tries to explain between person variances
2. The situation perspective:
à Can explain the large amount of within person variability.
- Does not believe in trait
- Behave differently across situations= Low cross situation
consistency
- Good when looking at immediate behavior
- Management/Leadership: job design/ systems, reward & promote-
creating situations in the job that people find motivating, satisfying
etc. and thereby increasing their effort e.g., the sig. of the task,
degree of autonomy, compensation etc.
Interactionist: agree situation is primary, but also hypothesize that personality exist consist
of individual differences between people in how they react to situations.
Evidence for the Person perspective:
- Studying Central points & stability: by testing whether people have different central
points and whether those points are stable.
- Central point: the average of a person’s behavior in each time
- Task: look at people behavior in different periods e.g., week 1, week 2 you need
calculate the average for each PS on that trait for that time period.
, Results implications:
a. People central points are similar in week 1 and week 2
b. The position of a person’s central point relative to the central point of someone else is
similar across time (R=.9)
Evidence for the situation perspective:
- A study was conducted, and they fund that the typical inviduals more often differ from
him/herself more compared to how much they differ from others. And this can be seen
in graph in which all the black bars are higher than the grey. Only intellect has a larger
variance between people, so it different more between people than between an
individual. So, the right side of the density distribution approach Is right.
- However, it is still possible for a person to adapt that they can maintain their position
compared with others in the same situation. E.g., although an extraverted person may
talk less in a seminar than at a party, they may at least remain talkative in comparison
to others in the seminar. - but a study by Mischel found that that the correlation for this
is quite low .3/.4 so people can only maintain their relative position only to a limited
degree. = support for the situation.
Their similarities: Both try to predict behavior and aim to minimize variability in behavior.
Whole trait approach combines the perspectives
Key principles:
- Behavior is determined by both the situation and the stable individual differences
- People routinely experience the full range of personality
- People can be readily identified by their average levels of personality
- People can also be identified by the variability of their personality across situations
Conclusion: Can conclude that both sides of the Person-Situation debate are correct and that
an individual’s personality may usefully be conceived as a distribution of behaviors rather
than as one level of behavior. Therefore, both the process and trait approach are needed to
explain personality.
- Need to describe/predict a person’s behavior on average? = Trait/person
- Need to describe/predict a person’s behavior at any given moment = investigate
psychological processes involving responses to situations.
Question
What are the most important person-related aspects that shape behavior in
organizations?
= intelligence, conscientiousness
What are the most important situational aspect?
= The 4C’s, Job design, Compensation (situational HR practices)
Meyer
Focus:
- Situational strength (+ -)
- The facets/constructs of situational strength (4Cs)
Personality: dynamic organization (active system) within the individual psychophysiological
systems that determine his/her characteristic pattern of
behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
Situational strength: Implicit or explicit psychological
pressure on an individual to engage in or refrain from
behaviors. A consequence of this is that it for forces
employees to act in a certain way regardless of their
personality
- Strong situation: Narrow range, perform in a
similar range of outcomes
