Good Science - Good Practice
Jamie Madigan
Ameren
Tom Giberson
Oakland University
One of the first things we should do this week is welcome a new co-author here on Good Science–Good Practice. Marcus Dickson has been contributing since the column’s inception, but recently he decided to write a new eduction-related column for TIP. Marcus is a tough guy to replace, but Tom Giberson from Oakland University should be up to the challenge. Tom is a recently promoted and tenured faculty member at Oakland University in Michigan, appointed to the School of Education’s Human Resource Development program. He came to academia with 6 years of full-time consulting experience and has been involved with or led small- and large-scale interventions with over 35 organizations over the past 13 years. Tom’s approach to practice and scholarship blends both the “I” and “O” aspects of our discipline because he feels that whether designing and implementing a selection system or launching new teams—or anything in between—there is a role for both measurement as well as the “soft” aspects of our field in most every intervention. What you will find in the work Tom reviews in this column will typically be efforts that have implications for “what” to do (often the “I” side) but also the “how” to do it (often the “O” side).
Speaking of which, one of the first articles we wanted to talk about deals with a very pragmatic issue that seems so simple that it may get overlooked in your average academic exercise: What do you put on your corporate recruiting Web site? Phillip Braddy, Adam Meade, Joan Michael, and John Fleenor (2009) took a bite out of this question by looking at how manipulating things like inclusions of testimonials, examples of corporate policies, and boasts about industry awards on corporate Web sites could affect applicants’ perceptions of nine aspects of organizational culture: innovation, emphasis on rewards, supportiveness, outcome orientation, attention to detail, team orientation, aggressiveness, decisiveness, and diversity. Pulling together a research plan from the relevant parts of signaling theory and the attraction–selection–attrition model, the researchers in this piece also explored a partial mediated-moderation model between culture perceptions, person–organization fit perceptions, and organizational attractiveness. The authors’ hypotheses were generally supported, revealing that yes your choice of pictures, testimonials, and other recruiting information on your corporate Web site really does matter, and you should think carefully about it. Furthermore, the support for the partial mediated-moderation model means that candidates with a thing for innovation or diversity (for example) will react all the more strongly to relevant content on a recruiting Web site. So if your aim is to attract those candidates, it’s even more important that you tailor your messages along the lines highlighted in this research.
What we liked about the Braddy et al. (2009) paper was that it looked at a very practical question in a scientific way and offered a few suggestions of value to anyone trying to do something I-O psychologists aren’t necessarily frequently called upon to do: fill all that blank space on the “Jobs” section of a corporate Web site. It’s also worth noting that this research relates in a way back to a paper by Van Hoy and Lievens (2009) that we highlighted in the last issue of Good Science–Good Practice. This paper found that word of mouth “advertising” in the recruitment process affected organizational attractiveness, particularly when presented early on. It’s not hard to see where the manipulation of testimonials in the Braddy et al. study overlaps with this concept, as testimonials were manipulated to affect perceptions of an organizational culture supporting things like innovation, outcome orientation, supportiveness, attention to detail, team orientation, and diversity. It’s always nice to see independent researchers covering some of the same ground in different ways and coming to some of the same conclusions.
The second article that we wanted to focus on this time around deals with the practical question of how to help employees learn from mistakes within the organization. This is of particular interest to “high-reliability” industries like aviation and health care where mistakes can not only cost but kill. There has been a fair amount of research done on the topic of learning from mistakes, both within the field of I-O psychology and outside of it, but Carmeli and Gittell (2009) looked specifically at how relationships between coworkers lead directly to feelings of psychological safety and indirectly to the act of learning from failures.
In two related studies the researchers specified a model where the expectation that you can express yourself without fear of retribution (i.e., psychological safety) mediates the impact of high-quality relationships (in terms of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect) on the act of learning from mistakes. In other words, people who get along well form relationships that facilitate speaking up about something unpleasant, which then leads to learning how not to repeat mistakes in the future. Although the role of psychological safety was dropped from a complete mediator to a partial moderator once all data analysis was done, it still did have an effect, and most of the model was supported.
What’s novel and practical about this research is that it focuses on the relationships in an organization. Managers have a bit of a road map if they are interested in fostering both psychological safety and learning from mistakes. High-quality relationships in this model are described as those where people share goals, share knowledge, and exhibit mutual respect. This can be particularly hard where status differences define boundaries between members’ roles (think about surgeons/nurses in an operating room or pilots/navigators a airplane cockpit), but it does highlight a few specific screws that can be turned to tighten up the interactions between them.
In a recent research report in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Colbert and Witt (2009) entice us with what is perhaps the question in leadership research, “What role does leadership play in influencing effective employee performance?” A tall order for any research program, much less a single study; however, the authors do a good job of bringing together several complimentary theories to provide us with some useful applications. We like this study in the context of practice because it focuses specifically on factors that we are fairly adept at measuring for selection purposes (personality; Conscientiousness) as well as leader behaviors, which we can also measure and select for and/or train incumbent leaders to engage in.
Trait activation theory (TAT; Tett & Guterman, 2000) suggests that behavioral expression of personality is more likely when situational cues are present sympathetic to their expression and when expression of those behaviors is valued by others (e.g., supervisors). The authors used TAT to suggest that leader behaviors that communicate organizational goals and suggest consequences for performance in comparison to these goals (“goal-focused leadership”) serve as situational moderators that help to explain the connection between worker Conscientiousness and performance. Conscientiousness has been consistently found to be the personality trait most related to performance. Workers high on this trait tend to persist longer to achieve goals and are typically more reliable and organized than those lower on Conscientiousness—behaviors any supervisor or organization values. Supervisory behavior was the “situational cue” of interest because supervisors are typically responsible for communicating, clarifying, and aligning individual and unit goals with larger organizational goals.
The authors found that goal-focused leadership behaviors moderate the Conscientiousness–performance relationship. Thus, the extent to which leaders (here, supervisors) provide goals and expectations tied to larger organizational objectives, higher Conscientiousness employees tend to express behaviors consistent with that trait. This study focused on very specific types of leadership behaviors—there are likely others that activate Conscientiousness-related behaviors—and utilized a relatively small sample in a single organization and industry. However, the author’s hypotheses followed from several complimentary and sound theories, suggesting the results would likely generalize—all things being equal.
As we mentioned above, this study provides several guides to practice. First, consistent with previous findings, employees higher in Conscientiousness tend to be better performers than employees lower on this trait. Second, hiring high-Conscientiousness employees is not enough; based upon the results of this study, organizations need to provide an environment that supports expression of behaviors consistent with Conscientiousness. Goal-oriented leadership behavior appears to be one situational cue that can trigger behaviors consistent with higher levels of Conscientiousness. A third notion is consistent with my own experience in the field. We have spent hours and hours with organizations who have worked with other consultants to implement goal-setting programs (such as MBO, or simply setting goals with or for employees). The typical program we’ve seen consists of the infamous SMART goals, wherein the consultant and organization spend months crafting the perfect goal statement with no effort spent on how to measure and provide feedback on goal progress. We have often had to “sell” the notion that the “goal effect” isn’t going to come from a perfect goal statement but rather from the behavioral system of setting goals, establishing consequences, and providing feedback. Colbert and Witt (2009) remind us of this important point throughout the piece and hopefully will encourage practitioners to design more complete goal-setting interventions, and also to help to “sell” our science and experience to improve performance.
The next article we’d like to briefly touch on is by Chiaburu and Byrne (2009) in the Journal of Business and Psychology. This piece addresses antecedents of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs)—or behaviors that are not role specific or part of a formal job description, but contribute to individual, unit, or organizational effectiveness. OCBs and similar/related concepts have received quite a bit of attention for several decades (at least since Barnard, 1938), and the definition, conceptualization, measurement, and so forth have been debated ever since. OCBs “matter” for a variety of reasons; to name a few, employees who engage in OCBs tend to demonstrate higher levels of altruism, Conscientiousness, and involvement—in short, they tend to be better employees.
Previous research has identified several attitudinal antecedents of OCBs, such as satisfaction, commitment, justice, and so forth. Chiaburu and Byrne (2009) were interested in examining not only attitudinal antecedents but also employee–organization relationship factors, such as trust and “employee exchange ideology” to better understand OCB behavior. One’s exchange ideology can be thought to exist along a continuum from “strong” to “weak.” To the extent an employee believes that there should be a clear quid-pro-quo payback from their efforts, we can say that employee has a “strong exchange ideology.” Such individuals will be less likely to freely provide OCBs than individuals possessing a “weak exchange ideology,” as such a belief system is more consistent with giving without expectation of clear payback. In short, the authors were interested in understanding the conditions under which employees view OCB-type behaviors as in role versus extra role. In other words, some employees don’t view OCBs as OCBs at all, rather, such employees view “above and beyond” as part of their job, and such factors as trust in the organization and employee’s exchange ideology were hypothesized to be related to OCB role definitions.
Based upon 204 participants at administrative, line, and supervisory levels in a single organization, the authors found that the more employees “trust” the organization, the more likely they were to view OCB-type behaviors as in role. The authors also found that the stronger an employee’s exchange ideology, the more likely they were to define OCBs as beyond their role; thus, weaker exchange ideologies were related to more expansive self-defined work roles. The authors addressed three additional hypotheses; however, we think these first two have some clear implications for practice. First, organizations—specifically the people in organizations, such as supervisors—should engage in behaviors that inspire trust in the organization, if the organization is interested in encouraging OCBs. In our experience, fairness and justice are keys to building trust with employees, as are open and honest communication—all of which good supervisors should be demonstrating and which can be hired for and/or trained and encouraged. Second, to the extent that an individual’s exchange ideology can be measured, perhaps it could become part of selection criteria. This, of course, begs the question: If we hire based for OCBs, aren’t we defining them as “in role” and therefore not above and beyond? Finally, this work provides additional arguments for upper management for supporting a healthy and positive relationship between organization and employee—it isn’t just a nice thing to do; developing trust and fairness in the workplace can contribute to a healthy bottom line.
References
Barnard, C. (1938). Functions of the executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Braddy, P. W., Meade, A. W., Michael, J. J., & Fleenor, J. W. (2009). Internet recruiting: Effects of website content features on viewers’ perceptions of organizational culture. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 17, 19–34.
Carmeli, A., & Gittel, J. H. (2009). High-quality relationships, psychological safety, and learning from failrues in work organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30, 709–729.
Chiaburu, D. S., & Byrne, Z. S. (2009). Predicting OCB role definitions: Exchanges with the organization and psychological attachment. Journal of Business Psychology, 24, 201–214.
Colbert, A. E., & Witt, L. A. (2009). The role of goal-focused leadership in enabling the expression of conscientiousness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 790–796.
Tett, R. P., & Guterman, H. A. (2000). Situation trait relevance, trait expression, and cross-situational consistency: Testing a principle of trait activation. Journal of Research in Personality, 34, 397–423.
Van Hoye, G., & Lievens, F. (2009). Tapping the grapevine: A closer look at word-of-mouth as a recruitment source. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 341–352.