Good Science - Good Practice

Jamie Madigan
Ameren Services

Marcus W. Dickson
Wayne State University

With so many articles to choose from when tackling this column each issue, sometimes it helps to pick a theme for at least part of the way. This time around we thought we’d start by focusing on studies that examine practical problems about what makes employees happy and better at their jobs, with a particular eye towards innovation and emerging technology.

Up first is a more general piece from the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology about leveraging a culture for innovation to alleviating the negative consequences of a demanding workload and stressful environment (King, de Chermont, West, Dawson, and Hebl, 2007). The authors surveyed over 22,000 employees from healthcare organizations in the U.K. Although employees have many tools to chose from when dealing with a stressor like high workload, King et al. argued for having the freedom to innovate through the use of new ideas, adoption of technology, changes in how labor is divided, new solutions to old problems, or other novel approaches to work.

Indeed, the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention seems to be held out by scientific research, in that innovation is often a reaction to increased work demands. It seems like the kind of idea that makes intuitive sense and that many managers have probably adopted (when possible; some jobs aren’t exactly suited for innovation). But here we have a group of researchers tackling the issue scientifically and bridging the gap between the two groups. Furthermore, they examined their constructs of interest at an organizational level instead of the individual one, which they note is something that the research in this area has generally avoided.

King et al.’s findings were that, as one might expect, high work demands are negatively related to organizational performance (curiously, they didn’t even find a curvilinear relationship here).  More interestingly, though, they found that the strength of an organization’s culture for innovation—that is, how much it values and rewards innovation in general—is positively related to organizational performance. Practical implications for this research should be obvious: When things get tough, let your people experiment with different ways of doing things, solving problems, and getting their work done. It seems to help.

Turning next to a more specific type of innovation, there was an excellent meta-analysis by Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison in a recent Journal of Applied Psychology that deals with the “good, the bad, and the unknown of telecommuting” (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007).  Working from one’s home or a remote office has been studied for 20 years, but it is becoming more and more popular with the increasing availability of affordable technology to support it. The ubiquity of e-mail and cell phones has made it feasible to detach one’s self from the office, and emerging technologies like videoconferencing are only making it easier. Yet, the authors argue, there still remain three fundamental questions for which there are not clear answers. First, what are the positive and negative outcomes of telecommuting? Second, what psychological mechanisms cause those outcomes? Third, under what circumstances do those outcomes occur?

Given these questions and findings from related research, the authors built a fairly straight forward model. Telecommuting affects perceived autonomy, work–family conflict, and the quality of one’s relationship with supervisors and co-workers. The strengths of these relationships are moderated by the intensity (i.e., frequency) with which one telecommutes. Autonomy, work–family conflict, and relationship quality, in turn, directly drive individual outcomes like job satisfaction, performance, turnover intention, role stress, and perceived career prospects.

Through a meta-analysis of 46 studies, the researchers came up with both some unsurprising and some surprising results. The bottom line is that telecommuting can safely be considered by practitioners as “a good thing.” It increases perceived autonomy and reduces work–family conflict, yet contrary to their expectations, it does not appear to harm the quality of employees’ relationships with supervisors. Furthermore, these mediating variables affected job satisfaction, turnover intent, role stress, job performance (as measured by supervisor ratings), and perceived career aspects in beneficial ways. Perceived autonomy had the largest mediating role here, but the other two factors—work–family conflict and relationship quality—had small effects, too.

So it’s coming up all roses for telecommuting, right? Almost. Remember intensity, which the researchers basically operationalized as how often one telecommutes? The study found that high-intensity telecommuters reap benefits in the area of work–family conflict, but it didn’t affect perceived autonomy much and actually had a negative effect on the quality of one’s relationship with co-workers (but, surprisingly, not supervisors). So when you work from home all the time, the loss of “face time” with co-workers does inhibit the development of good relationships.

Still, taken as a whole, the results of the study are almost universally flattering to telecommuting, which should be good news to practitioners who want to implemented such an arrangement or who have already taken the plunge. Employees seem to like it, or at least having the option when needed, and the research suggests that it doesn’t hurt. One question I think remains unanswered by the research, however, is the role of performance as a moderator itself. I suspect that employees who are poor performers often aren’t invited to telecommute in the first place, and if they are the arrangement could exacerbate their performance problems. You don’t want someone who can’t manage his own time to be completely unsupervised, and there may be a kind of selection effect involved with telecommuting studies in that those who telecommute may be skewed towards the high end of the performance scale. This may actually explain why telecommuting intensity had no mediating effect on the quality of relationship with one’s supervisor. It’s a great opportunity for future research.

Continuing on with the technology jag, Jurgen Wegge, Joachim Vogt, and Christiane Wecking also had an article in Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology that dealt with novel uses of new telecommunication tools. Their study, however, examined how videoconferencing (as opposed to just audio) affected customer-induced stress in call center employees. Using a lab simulation, they had a sample of actual call center agents pretend to take calls from mean or nice customers using either just audio or audio plus video. The researchers also manipulated time pressure. This study also wins the award for the most interesting research I read this month that involves spittle because among their dependant variables were immunoglobulin A (an antibody that forms in response to stress) in the subjects’ saliva. Also measured were self-reports of how much of subjects’ emotional façades were fake, how tired they were, and some observational ratings from video tapes.

Contrary to expectations of a more face-to-face interaction brought about by videoconferencing technology, seeing the customer did not increase strain in the agents. So that’s one negative expectation of videoconferencing that’s not supported. Also, the research found that agents were more engaged in the videoconference conversations when the customers were friendly, as opposed to audio calls with equally friendly customers. The authors also note that videoconferencing can also counteract boredom, though I suspect that the same was also true of the new and wonderful world of the telephone when it was first introduced. Still, the study does provide information that is encouraging for this kind of technology, which should only become more common in the future.

Switching gears a little bit, we’ve often said in this column that we want to hear from readers about their ideas for the column and suggestions about things to include. Well, those requests yielded some interesting ideas, and we want to touch on one of them in this issue.

One of the issues that arose for us was that we primarily focus on journal articles in this column—that’s what we were originally asked to do, and we’re always coming across excellent research that both advances theory and provides information that is directly useful to organizations. But a lot of organizations are doing solid research of their own that never appears in journals, and perhaps we should highlight some of that from time to time. Of course, much of that work is proprietary, but sometimes it comes out in a format we can highlight. Such is the case with a pair of books published by Lominger Limited, Inc. The two-volume set—100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers & HR (Eichinger, Lombardo, & Ulrich, 2004) and 50 More Things You Need to Know: The Science Behind Best People Practices for Managers & HR Professionals (Ulrich, Eichinger, Kulas, & De Meuse, 2007) begins with a description of the authors’ goals. They say:

Over the past 10 years or so, there been an explosion of research and commentary concerning the return on investment in people. The general form of the inquiry is: What is the return on the money we spend on people (HR) initiatives? If people are really our most important asset, do we really get a payoff for the money we spend on them?

The answer is yes. If we do things right. (Eichinger et al., 2004, Introduction)

The authors then take a lot of topics (100, and 50, in fact) that matter to I-O and HR folks and summarize the empirical research evidence in support of a conclusion, including how strong a conclusion can be reached. They rely on the information sources with which most readers of TIP would be comfortable—JAP, Personnel Psychology, AMJ, ASQ, and so forth—along with other sources that perhaps fewer of us read, like Psychopharmacology and the British Medical Journal.
The best way to convey the structure is with an example:

Which of the following best describes the relationship between accuracy of people’s ratings (e.g., on a 360-degree questionnaire) and how public the ratings are?

A: The more public the data, the less accurate the ratings.
B: People’s ratings don’t change because they will be made public.
C: People’s ratings get more accurate when they know others will see the ratings.
D: When raters know that their individual ratings can be identified by the person being rated, their ratings get more accurate.
E: Accuracy of ratings decreases when there are a lot of raters.
Answer: A.

How sure are we at this time (based on the research evidence)? Trending (on a scale of Hint, Suggestive, Trending, Substantial, Solid)

There then follows 3 1/2 pages of bullet-point summaries of evidence to support the conclusion, and also why the evidence is only “trending” to this point.  So although this isn’t our usual journal article on a single topic that we summarize here, we did want to highlight these volumes as being useful in providing summaries of theoretically sound literature in a way that is easily digestible and useful to those in practice. I’ve enjoyed reading the chapters, and I’ve found a couple where I might read the literature slightly differently than do the authors here, but all in all, it’s a useful summary of solid empirical literature on topics that can have direct bottom-line impact.

We’ll close this time around by looking at the October 2007 issue of The Academy of Management Journal. This issue of AMJ contains an Editor’s Forum on the Research–Practice Gap in Human Resource Management—the sort of topic that this column is all about. Sara Rynes, AMJ editor, and her colleagues Tamara Giluk and Ken Brown opened the forum with a lead article in which they examined three research findings that are generally well-established in the research community: (a) the link between intelligence and job performance, (b) the link between personality and job performance, and (c) the effectiveness of goal setting as a motivational technique. Specifically, they were interested in the extent to which these findings (all of which have clear performance implications) were conveyed to HR practitioners in three major practitioner-oriented publications (HR Magazine, Human Resource Management, and Harvard Business Review) over the last 6 years. They found little coverage of these research findings, and what coverage there was was often inconsistent with the research literature.

Rynes invited a wide range of people to respond to whatever aspect of the lead article they wished. From the several responses, the picture for evidence-based management practice doesn’t look good. David Guest (2007) re-did Rynes’ et al.’s analyses on a UK sample of publications and found even less coverage of the research findings and highlighted the fact that “Academics love evidence-based reviews…We should avoid believing that managers feel the same” (p. 1024). He concludes his response by suggesting that, at best, the current goals for researchers should be to “achieve an increase in evidence-informed HR and more general management practice” (p. 1025), but that “For now, at least, given the available evidence, evidence-based practice in HR Management may be a step too ambitious” (p. 1025).

We would agree with the position that Lisa Saari of IBM took in her response. She says “I believe a wealth of relevant research is available for those who practice HRM. The key is to get that research from research journals and into the hands of those who can most gain from it: HR practitioners and their organizations. This is our difficult but attainable goal” (p. 1045). There are lots of strategies identified in the various replies (especially in the responses by Gary Latham, in which he identifies 10 speculative solutions, and by Debra Cohen, chief knowledge officer of SHRM, in which she focuses on what publications like those by SHRM can do and on a specific action plan). Several of the respondents note that those who do research in I-O and HR/OB are rewarded for articles published in journals targeted at other academics and are not rewarded or are even punished when their work appears in more practitioner-oriented outlets. Saari advocates that our professional societies highlight the importance of producing research that has an impact on actual people doing actual work by creating awards for the best research translations, and/or for research with the greatest potential to make a difference in organizational practice.

Clearly, there remains a gap (or, as Denise Rousseau [2007] argues, a chasm) between much academic research on the workplace and I-O and HR practitioners’ day-to-day decision making and managers’ daily activities. That’s why this column was created, and we never have a hard time finding plenty of articles and books to write about—articles and books that simultaneously advance theory and provide direct benefit and guidance to organizational practice. We’ve highlighted some articles on the things that make workers happy, suggested a set of resources that summarize and evaluate important workplace research findings on I-O and HR topics, and taken a moment to recognize that there’s still a long way to go before there is wide-spread reliance on research evidence to guide practice, and before there is wide-spread research, focus on the organizational problems that matter most to managers and I-O and HR professionals in organizations. We’ll be back next issue, and if there’s a topic, an article, a book, or a company practice that you’d like us to focus on, let us know. Jamie’s at HMadigan@ameren.com, and Marcus is at marcus.dickson@wayne.edu.

References

Cohen, D. J. (2007). The very separate worlds of academic and practitioner publications in human resource management: Reasons for the divide and concrete solutions for bridging the gap. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1013–1019.

Eichinger, R.W., Lombardo, M. M., & Ulrich, D. (2004). 100 things you need to know: Best people practices for managers & HR. Minneapolis, MN: Lominger Limited.

Gajendran, R. S., & Harrison, D. A. (2007). The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: Meta analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 1524–1541.

Guest, D. E. (2007). Don’t shoot the messenger: A wake-up call for academics. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1020–1026.

King, E. B., de Chermont, K., West, M., Dawson, J. F., & Hebl, M. R. (2007). How innovation can alleviate negative consequences of demanding work contexts: The influence of climate for innovation on organizational outcomes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 80, 631–645.

Latham, G. P. (2007). A speculative perspective on the transfer of behavioral science findings to the workplace: “The times they are a-changin’.” Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1027–1032.

Rousseau, D. M. (2007). A sticky, leveraging, and scalable strategy for high-quality connections between organizational practice and science. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1037–1042.

Rynes, S. L., Giluk, T. L., & Brown, K. G. (2007). The very separate worlds of academic and practitioner periodicals in human resource management: Implications for evidence-based management. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 987–1008.

Saari, L. (2007). Bridging the worlds. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1043–1045.

Ulrich, D., Eichinger, R., Kulas, J., & De Meuse, K. (2007). 50 more things you need to know: The science behind best people practices for managers & HR professionals. Minneapolis, MN: Lominger Limited.

Wegge, J., Vogt, J., & Wecking, C. (2007). Customer-induced stress in call center work: A comparison of audio- and videoconference. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 80, 693–712.