How Employees Assess Climate: Benjamin Schneider Receives Michael R. Losey Human Resource Research Award
Stephany Schings
Communications Specialist
Want to find out about your organization’s customer service quality? According to SIOP Fellow Benjamin Schneider, you should try asking your employees.
Schneider, whose research led the way in linking employee data with service quality, was recently honored by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) with the $50,000 Michael R. Losey Human Resource Research Award. The award was presented June 30 during SHRM’s 61st Annual Conference and Exposition in New Orleans.
The Losey award recognizes human resource researchers whose contributions significantly advance the field of human resource management, acknowledging major research accomplishments and aiming to help fund and facilitate future individual contributions to the field.
“Dr. Schneider is in a league of his own,” said SHRM President and CEO Laurence G. O’Neil in a press release from SHRM. “He is a master of explaining complex topics to management teams and showing them how research findings can make substantial improvements in their operations.”
Schneider was selected for the award by a panel of seven experts, chaired by SHRM’s chief knowledge officer and SIOP Member Debra Cohen. He was nominated for the honor by various SIOP members, including Fellows Michael Beer, Milton D. Hakel, Nancy Tippins, Edward Lawler, Leaetta Hough, and Past President Gary Latham.
Schneider is known as one of the world’s leading experts on service quality, beginning with his research in the 1980s in which he studied the link between employee experiences and service quality. He was one of the first in the field to show how employee attitudes and data are vital to organizational strategy.
“Management gurus have preached about the customer service value chain for years, but Ben Schneider has gathered the data and shown us the links,” said Milt Hakel in SHRM’s press release. Hakel is a psychology professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University and Schneider’s primary nominator. “He was the first mover in service quality research, and that put him at the head of the line for the Losey Award.”
Using his definition of climate, which includes “policies, practices, and procedures” as well as behaviors that get “rewarded, supported, and expected,” Schneider discovered that the customer service experience correlated with employees’ views of the organization’s climate.
“I was one of the first, if not the first, to show that if you collect data on employees about how they experience the thrust of customer service in their organization, you will get a good idea from that data about what the customer’s experience will be,” Schneider said.
Before he did this research, Schneider explained that companies, specifically banks, would simply ask customers about their experience to determine how the organization was performing in that area.
“So when they got the information, they only had information from a customer perspective,” he said. “The customers were reporting to them what happened to them, but they weren’t reporting why it happened.”
For example, Schneider added, the previous way of surveying customers about marketing of new products would simply involve asking the customer whether or not they were informed of or offered new products by employees. Using Schneider’s method, employees are asked detailed questions from their perspective, such as answering yes or no to the statement “we are well prepared by marketing for the introduction of new products.”
Schneider’s linkage of employee data with customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and business revenues has shown how important employees can be to organizational strategy.
“Up until the time I did this work, employee attitude data were thought not to be very useful and not related to strategy,” Schneider said. “It was thought that they were good to get an idea of the morale of employees but not much else. From an I-O standpoint, we knew that the information was valuable. It can change your whole frame of reference about how important employees are. That has a lot of implications for the way you think about employees and employee attitude. They are strategically important to organizations.”
Schneider said his research has expanded to other fields as well.
“This whole line of research on service and service quality has been extended now,” he said. “It has been extended to safety, for example. You can predict accident rates in work units based on what employees tell you about the safety environment in which they work.”
Schneider is currently a senior research fellow at Valtera Corporation in La Jolla, California (headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois). He is also professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Maryland, where he served as head of the industrial and organizational psychology program.
Schneider received his MBA in industrial psychology from City University of New York (Baruch College) and his PhD in organizational and social psychology from University of Maryland.