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04 / 12 personalquarterly
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Prof. Sara Rynes
Universität Iowa
e-mail:
Sara Rynes ist Professorin für Management und Organisation an
der Universität von Iowa und gilt als eine der Begründerinnen des
evidenzbasierten Managements in den USA. Ausgangspunkt ist
ihre viel zitierte Untersuchung aus dem Jahr 2002, in der sie den
Kenntnisstand erfahrener Personalpraktiker bezüglich wissen-
schaftlich abgesicherter Fakten überprüfte.
via reduced satisfaction and health, and for customers via poor
product quality or customer service.
PERSONALquarterly:
Do you have an example where practitioners’
views clearly contradict scientific evidence?
Sara Rynes:
There are several examples that have been well-docu-
mented in multiple studies. One very unpopular finding is that
human judgments are less accurate than actuarial models in
making decisions such as whom to hire or whether or not a cri-
minal will return to crime. In fact, research shows that adding
human judgment to decisions made on the basis of equations
actually reduces decision accuracy (Highhouse, 2008). Not sur-
prisingly, this is a finding that people really don’t like! Another
unpopular finding is that intelligence predicts job performance
better than either conscientiousness or values (Rynes/Colbert/
Brown, 2002; Schmidt/Hunter, 1998). Yet another disbelieved
finding is that on average, goal-setting produces larger produc-
tivity returns than employee empowerment. Studies on how
juries make decisions also show that people are more likely
to believe anecdotes involving a single person than statistical
evidence based on thousands of people.
PERSONALquarterly:
Why do practitioners resist research findings?
Sara Rynes:
When you look at the types of findings that people
tend not to believe, you can almost always see some reason
why the finding might be disliked. For example, findings about
the importance of intelligence might be threatening to people
who don’t consider themselves to be particularly smart, or
who don’t like the idea that success should be determined by
something not entirely under a person’s control. The idea that
an equation might perform better than human judgment is also
likely to seem threatening to many people. More generally, the-
re are a number of common characteristics of research findings
that tend to be rejected by practitioners (or people in general):
threatening or anxiety-provoking findings, findings that con-
tradict current beliefs or personal experiences, findings that
require change, and findings that are not supported by the
practitioner’s context (Giluk/Rynes, 2012; Johns, 1993). Many
of the reactions that people have to research findings appear to
be emotional, rather than rational. If that’s right, then people
are unlikely to be persuaded simply by presentations of facts
and findings. As Tetlock (2000) observed, “Academics who rely
on evidence-based appeals to change minds when the disagree-
ments are rooted in values may be wasting everyone’s time.”
PERSONALquarterly:
Do you have examples where firms clearly
benefited from applying EBMgt practices?
Sara Rynes:
The most striking example, in my mind, comes
from a joint application of both EBMed and EBMgt: Dr. Donald
Berwick’s “100,000 Lives” campaign in the United States. By
studying the major causes of preventable deaths in U.S. hos-
pitals and then determining (via research reviews) the most
effective ways of preventing them, Dr. Berwick inspired a lar-
ge number of hospitals to implement a six-point checklist to
dramatically reduce the most common causes of preventable
deaths in hospitals. Using a pre- and post quasi-experimental
design, results suggested that the hospitals exceeded the tar-
geted 100,000 reduction in deaths over an 18-month period
(Ayres, 2007). Similar dramatic reductions in accidents and
infections during surgical procedures have been achieved by
applying other checklists tailored to surgical teams (Gawande,
2009). Note that in these cases, the decisions about what to
do came from medical evidence, but decisions about how
to best implement these practices came from management