Manager coaching behaviors and learning agility: Key drivers for employee success

Are you a new manager?  Or, perhaps you've been in a management position for a while and wondered how you can help your line reports perform and innovate more.  For much of the past two years, I've been researching a couple of content areas that may be able to help managers in these situations.  My research has shown a few new findings in the world of workplace psychology that can be useful to leaders and managers to help drive performance of those people they oversee.  My research has found the following:

1) The highest performers at work have a certain proclivity for success that they already come to work with.  This is called learning goal orientation.  Basically, people with a high degree of learning goal orientation see specific goals as opportunities to learn something new, rather than a means to an end.  They tend to not get bogged down by focusing only on how that big upcoming presentation MUST wow stakeholders; instead they see their preparation for the presentation as a chance to learn something about stakeholders needs.  If they do not wow stakeholders immediately, these employees want to focus on how they can do better next time because they genuinely love to learn.  For managers, having line reports with this type of outlook is not something that can necessarily be shaped or changed; instead, employees come to the job with this kind of outlook baked in.  As has been noted in previous research, these employees tend to be higher performers.

2) While learning goal orientation is harder to coach for because it is a personality trait, there are things managers can do like modify their own behavior that can help increase subordinate performance.  When managers adopt a coaching orientation, they can drive subordinate performance and success.  Specifically, they need to do a few things:

• Be available for their line reports.  You can't coach someone if you don't reasonably take the time to coach them.  Telling them that your door is always open if they have question/concerns about a specific problem is a great place to start.
• In a similar vein, managers need to provide guidance.  Perhaps their line reports are stumped about a particular problem, and need suggestions about where to take their ideas next.
• At the same time, managers should not provide all the answers to their subordinates.  Taking a questioning (a true coaching) stance is a great solution because it forces line reports to come up with their own ideas instead of always relying on you to solve their problems.
• Finally, managers need to provide inspiration.  Do you exude confidence that your line report can improve in a problem area?  Do you support their taking on of new challenges?

3) In modeling these types of behaviors for your line reports, you are able to create a safe space for your team to learn.  This safe space (also called psychological safety in the scholarly literature and in ground-breaking research by Google's Lazlo Boch) is necessary for teams to feel supported to try new things and innovate.  If someone is worried that making a few mistakes will lead them to be terminated immediately, they will feel stifled and scared to solve problems, undercutting their (and your team's) performance.

4) All of these factors work in tandem to support subordinate learning agility - the propensity for individuals to learn quickly - that ultimately drives their performance.  Learning agility is really important and is a new conceptualization of performance.  High performers are, ultimately, "high learners" - individuals who are able to see both what works and what doesn't to quickly and nimbly modify their behavior for a new context.

The crux of my research has ultimately shown that there are specific things managers can do to coach for learning agility, which can lead to high performance in individuals and teams.  By keeping these behaviors in mind, managers can take subordinate effectiveness, especially in subordinates who already have high learning goal orientation, to the next level.  However, no matter the extent to which an employee already has a strong desire to learn, manager coaching behavior has a knock-on effect because it creates a safe space for teams to learn that can lead to both greater performance and innovation.

Selected references:

Amabile, T. M., Schatzel, E. A., Moneta, G. B., & Kramer, S. J. (2004). Leader behaviors and the work environment for creativity: Perceived leader support. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(1), 5-32.

Burke, W. W., Roloff, K., Mitchinson, A., Catenacci, L., Drinka., G. O., Kim, J. (2016). To live is to learn: A behavioral model and measurement of learning agility. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Organization & Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.

DeRue, D. S., Ashford, S. J., & Myers, C. G. (2012). Learning agility: In search of conceptual clarity and theoretical grounding. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 5(3), 258-279.

Drinka, G. O., Catenacci, L. C. & Burke, W. W. (2017). Assessing potential: Validating a new learning agility inventory. Poster session presented at the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology Annual Conference, Orlando, FL.

Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41, 1040–1048.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Heslin, P. A., Vandewalle, D., & Latham, G. P. (2006). Keen to help? Managers’ implicit person theories and their subsequent employee coaching. Personnel Psychology, 59(4), 871-902.

Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (2000). High potentials as high learners. Human Resource Management, 39(4), 321-329.

Smith, B.C. (2015). How Does Learning Agile Business Leadership Differ? Exploring a Revised Model ofthe Construct of Learning Agility in Relation to Executive Performance. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Academic Commons (http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8765D95).

Uber's Toxic Organizational Culture: What it is, How it Came to be, and How to End it

Organizational culture is a pertinent topic for any company, and culture can have both positive and negative effects on employees, productivity, and the bottom line.  The purpose of this post is to explore more of those negative effects and understand how companies with destructive organizational cultures can use diversity initiatives to turn culture into something more positive and productive. 

Culture, very simply put, is "the way we do things around here[1].”  Culture is important to consider because it governs rules of interacting between employees on a day-to-day basis.  The ways in which people talk, write, converse and just are with each other are woven into fabric of organizational life.  When coming to a new company, you may be able to observe the organizational culture best because it may contrast sharply with the culture of previous companies you’ve worked for.  After awhile though, you may stop noticing these differences as you get more and more accustomed to in these newer standards of behavior and conduct.

In the past few weeks, Uber has been in the news repeatedly with a string of bad press.  Specifically, the negative conduct of many employees, whom one employee refers to as “brogrammer” culture[2] is rife with allegations of sexual harassment.  Susan Fowler Rigetti, who wrote the blog I refer to, detailed many instances of going to management with complaints of sexual harassment at work.  She was told that the company would protect the man who harassed her because he was a high performer.  She also recounted how very few women worked at Uber, and after over a year there, that number continued to dwindle.  Eventually, and unsurprisingly, she left the company.

These issues might be symptoms of a wider problem – a pervasive negative culture that has trickled down from senior management.  So, while this kind of behavior existed and was reinforced within the company-at large, what was taking place in the C-suite?  There are some clues as to what type of conduct the CEO at Uber considers to be acceptable.  Shortly after Susan Rigetti’s blog post detailing the egregious workplace culture at Uber went viral, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, was caught on camera arguing with an Uber driver.  They argued over what the driver said was unfair working conditions.  Kalanick retorted back, with very little empathy for the driver’s plight, “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit^[3].”  Earlier on the same ride, a female friend in the backseat asked about the state of business at Uber and mentioned she thought it had been a difficult year for the company. Kalanick said that, “I make sure every year is a hard year.” He continued, “That’s kind of how I roll. I make sure every year is a hard year. If it’s easy I’m not pushing hard enough.”  These two interchanges, caught on tape, give a pretty good sense of what type of leader Kalanick is – one who drives (no pun intended) employees relentlessly and has little regard for their personal insecurity.

When leaders model such caustic behaviors in their everyday life, they are implicitly telling others within the organization that those behaviors are acceptable, and this can have an impact on the wider company.  We know from previous research on social networks that people want to work with others who are similar to them[4].  Usually, research focuses on how demographic characteristics are one major way people select for similarity (think all men in the C-suite), but personality characteristics can also be a point of similarity.  We also know that once people are attracted to similar others and join a particular company, depending on how the company fits with their expectations, they either decide to stay or go.  Put succinctly, organizations tend to become full of similar people with similar traits[5] over time, which is known as the attraction-selection-attrition model[6].  Putting these pieces together, Kalanick seems to have made Uber a breeding ground for these types of behaviors to exist.  He has done this, in part, because of his cut-throat management style that has most likely become embedded in all parts of the organization. Simply put, he has modeled for others that those behaviors are acceptable.  In summation, these insidious management practices, that Rigetti notes, have become a part of the organizational culture.

Getting back to Rigetti’s blog though, one issue strikes me as particularly interesting given my research interests on the lack of women present in leadership positions in organizations today.  What if Uber had more female leaders – would this type of organizational culture still exist at Uber?  I am not suggesting that simply promoting more women into leadership positions would be the panacea that Uber needs in order to course-correct.  Furthermore, given the attraction-attrition-selection model, Uber may be likely to hire only women who have a particular set of personality traits that are similar to those at Uber writ large.  But, I do wonder what kind of an impact female leadership would have on Uber’s culture, especially because of the noted drop of female employees during Rigetti’s tenure.

So while culture can either make or break an organization, and many of these cultural traits can stem from the C-suite because of tendencies to hire similar individuals, there are things organizations can do to prevent negative traits from becoming overpowering.  One of these, I suggest, is to enhance diversity initiatives.  If a company like Uber could recruit more female programmers in order to water down the negative “brogrammer” culture, the presence of these women might be able to help shape the organizational culture.  They could do this by modeling specific behaviors they deem acceptable (namely, that sexual harassment should never be tolerated in any organization).  Hiring more female leaders specifically could help those positive behaviors (and absence of negative behaviors) permeate top levels of leadership.  Given enough time and the proper context to thrive, these behaviors would have the capacity become a yardstick for future behavioral interactions.  Furthermore, given tendencies described in the attraction-selection-attrition model, these behaviors might be able to permeate throughout the entire company to become baked into the organizational culture over time.

However, there is hope for Uber.  Recently, Uber hired Eric Holder[7] to investigate claims of workplace harassment, which may help shine the light needed to expose and correct negative workplace behaviors.  Arianna Huffington, a champion for female leaders everywhere, has also become involved in her role as a board member.  After the video of Kalanick arguing with a driver went viral, Kalanick admitted he needed “leadership help[8]” which, while obvious, was probably personally difficult to state publically, and I do hope he utilizes resources to correct his leadership style.  In making some of these needed modifications, and with other agents for change becoming more active within the organization (e.g., Holder and Huffington), Uber might have a chance to shift their organizational culture into something more positive for their employees.

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^[1] Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons.

^[2] Rigetti, S. J. (2017, February 19). Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber. Retrieved March 14, 2017, from https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber

[3] Newcomer, E. (2017, February 28). In video, Uber CEO argues with driver over falling fares. Retrieved March 14, 2017, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-28/in-video-uber-ceo-argues-with-driver-over-falling-fares

[4] Ibarra, H. (1992). Homophily and differential returns: Sex differences in network structure and access in an advertising firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(3): 422-447.

[5] Schaubroeck, J., Ganster, D. C., & Jones, J. R. (1998). Organization and occupation influences in the attraction–selection–attrition process. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(6), 869.

[6] Ployhart, R. E., Weekley, J. A., & Baughman, K. (2006). The structure and function of human capital emergence: A multilevel examination of the attraction-selection-attrition model. Academy of Management Journal, 49(4), 661-677.

[7] Overly, S. (2017, February 21). Uber hires Eric Holder to investigate sexual harassment claims. Retrieved April 03, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/02/21/uber-hires-eric-holder-to-investigate-sexual-harassment-claims/?utm_term=.4ab906513ce7

[8] Lashinsky, A. (2017, March 02). Uber's CEO asked for leadership help, so here's some advice. Retrieved April 03, 2017, from http://fortune.com/2017/03/02/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-driver-advice/

Women Rising: Moving Past Organizational Barriers for Leadership Success

There are several areas of organizational psychology that I spend a lot of time thinking about: the lack of women in senior leadership positions and how to promote an inclusive organizational culture for all people, especially women.  These thoughts have been compounded after the string of recent reports about Uber and other such companies not being female-friendly places to work because of issues of rampant sexual harassment embedded in their cultures[1]. While these may seem like different issues, I believe they are simply different sides of the same coin: when women rise, all women are treated better because female leaders can model the behaviors they want from others and the respect they deserve in their organizations.  This phenomenon has been well documented in many cases and contexts, most recently in the book by a former professor of mine, American Hookup.  She compared cultural differences between fraternities that were led only by men, and co-ed fraternities that were led by both male and female leaders.  In these co-ed fraternities, sexual assault occurred at far lesser rates than the male-only fraternities[2] at other universities[3]. 

On the other side of the coin I mentioned, only 17% of executives are female in Fortune 500 companies[4] and 20.4% of executives are female in The Financial Times and Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies.[5]  There have been a variety of explanations as to why there are not more women in leadership positions.   One of the explanations for this gender gap in senior leadership positions is that women are excluded from relationships that confer power and resources[6]. Because men are at the top of organizational hierarchies, they oftentimes control coalitions that have access to resources[7]. Developing these relationships that confer power can be more difficult for women than men because their ties to those in power (men) tend to be weaker[8].

Another explanation for why fewer women are in leadership positions than men relates to relationship capital, which is a quid pro quo type of relationship[9].  Relationship capital relates to how women and men have different perceptions about how to advance their careers.  Women tend to feel uncomfortable leveraging relationship capital, because they fear it may be perceived as inauthentic to their senses of self and that it may violate their stance that they should be rewarded for hard work with promotions[10].  Furthermore, they are oftentimes uncomfortable leveraging relationship capital because they think it comes across as “dirty” – instead, they believe they should keep their heads down, do their work, and put all their faith in an organizational and cultural meritocracy that will help them advance.

One way to help women advance has been proposed through various developmental career experiences (DCEs). DCEs are experiences in the workplace that help employees become more successful and may help advance their careers (e.g., coaching, sponsorship, networking).  Women and men are exposed to DCEs that differ from each other on two key dimensions. These dimensions are 1) the amount of access to powerful social networks one has and 2) the need for leveraging relationship capital in order to get work done. With these differences in mind, I conducted research recently to examine two questions.  The first was: which DCEs do men and women perceive as being the most helpful to their careers?  My second question was: which DCEs specifically predict women’s and men’s levels within an organizational hierarchy?

Before I dive into the details of my research findings, let me step back and give more background about some of these DCEs.  Research has shown that having a powerful male sponsor to help show women how to navigate upper levels of an organization is effective in securing promotions for women; however, these relationships are more helpful for men.[11] Other work suggests that it can be more difficult for women to have sponsorship compared to men because sponsorship between a female subordinate and a male boss can look like an affair, so both women and men tend to avoid it. While the career-boosting potential of sponsorship is significant for all individuals, oftentimes, women have not been able to benefit nearly as much as men.  The very act of self-promoting themselves to get results in this type of relationship makes women feel like they have engaged in something “dirty” because the relationship is not based on a leveraging their skills only.

Another important DCE to consider is networking.  Research on professional networks has shown that men’s careers benefit more from networking than women’s[11] in part because men oftentimes have access to more powerful coalitions within organizations that they can leverage for their benefit because of in-group power and affiliation.  Additionally, similar to sponsorship, cross-sex networking is likely to require using relationship capital as a means to get ahead, which may make women feel uncomfortable.

When I analyzed the data in my sample, collected from over 4,000 employees at organizations in the UK, I found a few interesting things: women are more likely than men to find all DCEs I examined (coaching, mentoring, sponsorship, development programs, networking, and peer feedback) as helpful for their careers.  However, for women, only sponsorship was linked to their organizational level.  Specifically, women who had a strong belief that sponsorship had helped their careers also were at a higher level in the organization.  For men, both sponsorship and networking were linked to having a higher organizational level.

So what does this all mean?  What are the implications?  My sense is that pertaining to the first result – that women are more likely than men to find all DCEs helpful for their careers – women may see engaging in DCEs as a way to put their head down and take part in the meritocracy they see as working.  They are able to get their work done and do not take part in the “dirty” work requires them to have access to powerful social networks and to use quid pro quo to get ahead. 

Related to the result for men, this very much makes sense given the previously noted literature and research. Men have more access to social networks, so networking and sponsorship may be something they have access to.  Furthermore, they are more comfortable leveraging relationship capital compared to women. 

What about the last result I found – that when women perceive sponsorship as helpful, they are more likely to have a higher level in the organization? These may be women who have gotten over the “dirty” feeling of leveraging relationship capital.  They may have accepted the fact that they need to engage in quid pro quo relationships, rather than being what they see as “authentic”, in order to get work done.  Or, they are negotiating and coming to terms with what authenticity means to them.  In using quid pro quo in workplace relationships, they may have broken into social networks and finally have that access to their benefit.

As I mentioned earlier, one issue women are fearful about is what the perception of sponsorship with a man might look like to other individuals in the organization: it might look like an affair.  So perhaps women are more likely to want to engage in these types of relationships when organizations have made sponsorship look and feel safer.  Some companies do this by creating cohorts of executive women to sponsor other senior women.  The sponsorship oftentimes focuses on the realm work, but can also focus on other areas of commonality, in order to build a sense of safety into the relationship.

What’s clear is that women need solutions that work for them.  Sponsorship appears to do that, when women can get over the “dirty” feeling of using quid pro quo to gain access to social networks.  Some companies have tried, with success, to ease the contextual constraints to make sponsorship feel safer, and if other companies adopt similar techniques to enhance the feeling of safety, women may be more eager utilize sponsorship in the future.  Part of this is creating a “holding environment” where women can compare similar experiences with each other, offer feedback, and serve as references for social comparison in order to surface and understand the gender bias that they have inevitably faced at various points in their careers.

Other solutions hinge on internal work that women themselves can do.  After a safe environment is created, it is imperative that women and women’s leadership programs spend time doing the necessary identity work to understand who they are and what they can become.  It is also important for women to focus on their sense of purpose and goals, which can get lost when they spend so much time thinking about their reputations and how they come across to others.  Women may fear that they do not come across as authentic when they engage in the “dirty” work of leadership and that some of these behaviors come more naturally to men.  They may mistake that learning to become a leader is a complex skill and takes a lot of practice in order to master[12].  This framing of the issue can be helpful for women who seek to become leaders.

Perhaps though focusing on the “holding environment,” and the intense work women can do to hone their unique leadership identities, as well as through working with sponsors, women will be more likely to be elevated to leadership positions at a frequency similar to men.  When that happens, companies are likely to experience shifts in their workplaces cultures that benefit everyone, which is something I will explore in my next post.

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[1] Uber hires Eric Holder (2017). The Washington Post. Retrieved March 2, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/02/21/uber-hires-eric-holder-to-investigate-sexual-harassment-claims/

[2] Princeton’s eating clubs have benefitted from going coed. The New York Times. Retrieved Marc 3, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/09/16/should-college-fraternities-and-sororities-be-coed/princetons-eating-clubs-have-benefitted-from-going-coed

[3] Harvard University task force on the prevention of sexual assault: Final report. (2016, March 7). Retrieved March 3, 2017, from http://sexualassaulttaskforce.harvard.edu/files/taskforce/files/final_report_of_the_task_force_on_the_prevention_of_sexual_assault_16_03_07.pdf?m=1457452164

[4] 2013 WM 50 best companies for executive women. (2013). Working Mother. Retrieved October 3, 2013, from http://www.wmmsurveys.com/NAFE_Executive_Summary_2013.pdf

[5] The 30% Club. (n.d.). 30 Percent Club. Retrieved March 14, 2014, from http://www.30percentclub.org.uk/

[6] Brass, D. J. (1985). Men’s and women’s networks: A study of interaction patterns and influence in an organization. Academy of Management Journal, 28, 327-343.

[7] Ibarra, H. (1992). Homophily and differential returns: Sex differences in network structure and access in an advertising firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(3): 422-447.

[8] Ibarra, H. (1993). Personal networks of women and minorities in management: A conceptual framework. The Academy of Management Review, 18(1), 56.

[9] Ely, R. J., Ibarra, H., & Kolb, D. M. (2011). Taking gender into account: Theory and design for women's leadership development programs. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(3), 474-493.

[10] Hewlett, S., Periano, K., Sherbin, L., & Sumberg, K. (2011). The sponsor effect: Breaking through the last glass ceiling - Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review Magazine, Articles, Blogs, Case Studies, Books - Harvard Business Review.

[11] Forret, M. L., & Dougherty, T. W. (2004). Networking behaviors and career outcomes: Differences For men and women?. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25(3), 419-437.

[12] DeRue, D. S., & Ashford, S. J. 2010. Power to the people: Where has personal agency gone in leadership development? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 3, 24–27.

Learning Agility: How Expert Manager Coaching Can Increase Performance

In the world of talent management, learning agility, a concept that clarifies how individuals learn in organizations, has received a good deal of attention in the last five to ten years. Some researchers have questioned the existence of learning agility as a construct, and have intimated that it may only be a passing fad. Counter to these claims, recent studies conducted as part of my research team at Teachers College, Columbia University, show that learning agility explains a significant proportion of variance in performance scores of executives, demonstrating that learning agility holds much promise as a topic for future study.

To date, our work has focused mainly on how high-performing leaders can develop their learning agility capacity to distinguish themselves from leaders with less potential. However, I believe that since learning agility research is in its infancy there are many other applications. Specifically, learning agility may well be a construct, that, when developed, can be used to differentiate high performers from other employees - not just leaders.

Long before our work started in the realm of learning agility, leadership success has been measured in terms of follower and team success.¹ Other important skills for leadership success are delegation, mentoring, supporting and consultation to their followers.² These sets of skills for successful leadership beg the question: How can leaders enhance the success of their followers? Does providing consultative support help? Additionally, an important question that is the focus of my research is: Does learning agility play a role?

Part of the answer to this question lies in another vein of research whose authors argue that coaching is a key skill of any leader in order to successfully lead their followers.³ Current research, at this point in time, has focused on general contextual constraints needed for a leader to effectively support their followers, however, the emphasis on specific behaviors leaders should engage in to help their followers succeed has been minimal.

Psychological safety may be a necessary link in this process and may help to explain how leader coaching can be translated into follower learning agility. Put simply, psychological safety defines the extent to which a follower feels comfortable taking risks and being authentic on a team or with his or her leader in a work context. Psychological safety is an important concept to consider because it can help push learning agility to a higher level.^4,5

 

The extent to which followers have a mindset that values learning instead of feeling threatened to demonstrate good performance - learning goal orientation - is also important to consider in the context of learning agility and ultimately, performance.⁶ Studies show that when individuals value learning for the sake of it, rather than performance as a means to an end, their performance actually increases.⁷ Recent studies⁸ have also demonstrated that individuals who have high learning goal orientation are more likely to be highly learning agile.

Over the next few months, the research I will conduct for my dissertation hypothesizes that both contextual elements in one’s work environment (leader coaching behavior to create a psychologically safe work experience) and follower personality variables (learning goal orientation) have a critical impact on follower learning agility and in turn, on follower performance. I am looking forward to conducting this work because it may demonstrate that learning agility has many applications in organizations that can be used to predict the success of all employees, rather than just the success of leaders. Furthermore, I hope to show that the excitement about learning agility in the talent management world is not just a fad that will dissipate anytime soon.

 

References

1. Hogan, R., Curphy, G. J., & Hogan, J. (1994). What we know about leadership: Effectiveness and personality. American Psychologist, 49(6), 493.

2. Yukl, G. A., Wall, S., & Lepsinger, R. (1990). Preliminary report on the validation of the management practices survey. In K. E. Clark & M. B. Clark (Eds.), Measures of leadership (pp. 223-238). West Orange, NJ: Leadership Library of America.

3. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

4. Argyris, C. (1993) Knowledge for Action: Changing the Status Quo. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

5. DeRue, D. S., Ashford, S. J., & Myers, C. G. (2012). Learning agility: In search of conceptual clarity and theoretical grounding. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 5(3), 258-279.

6. VandeWalle, D. (1997). Development and validation of a work domain goal orientation instrument. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 57(6), 995-1015.

7. Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1040.

8. W. Warner Burke research team, 2012-2016

Paradigm Shift: Using Social Media to Predict Personality Traits for Employee Selection & Development

Technology has had a substantial impact on assessment methods. While research in this area is in early phases, some work has found that using data like Facebook “Likes” can predict personality. Data mined from other social media networks has been linked to other facets of personality. In fact, new technologies have the potential to completely change the structure of the assessments market because of enhanced user experience and crowd sourcing as a method for employee selection. There are, however, several ethical issues with new assessment methods. One relates to the purported validity of such new tools. The other issue relates to transparency and anonymity concerns. While some predictive technologies are in place to revolutionize the assessments market, using data without explicit user consent may undermine the process from an ethical point of view. Our aim in this post is to examine changes in the assessments field in light of new technologies and to provide information on the emerging use of big data-based assessments for organizations.

New technologies have opened doors in order to use assessments for HR purposes. One study, published in 2013, demonstrated that correlations between personality traits, cognitive ability, and demograpics could be predicted with surprising accuracy simply based on what users “Liked” on Facebook. Two other studies have found differences in narcissism between Twitter & Facebook users. Yet another study has found links between words bloggers use and personality with significant accuracy. Additionally, metadata has the potential to predict personality. Clearly, there is incredible potential for individuals in HR roles in organizations to harness this data to assess and profile individuals.

Recent changes in assessment tools that utilize new data methodologies have the potential to change the marketplace significantly because of their potential to reduce costs. According to experts, the gap between organizations hiring people who do not fully fit their needs and professionals who want jobs that fit them may close. Analytics utilized for HR purposes have the potential to create a situation in which organizations can directly "crowd source" the talent they need. This has been referred to as the “Uberization” of talent – after the on-demand car service. Accordingly, these new methods could drastically cut costs for organizations in the hiring process. Put simply, it is significantly less expensive to configure and run an algorithm than it is to use an established test to find talent.

User experience may be enhanced in the future with new methodologies compared to tried-and-true assessments. Ten to 15 years ago, consumer experience did not matter as much with assessments for HR purposes. Now, it is more important to potential applicants to use tools that are enjoyable to complete rather than tedious and time consuming. The case of gamification has emphasized this point. Gamification has involved the creation of various “games” whose outcomes can be correlated with measures of personality or other factors. One example is Knack.com that provides a game called “Wasabi Waiter” that is a situational judgment-type task. When all potential talent need to do is “Like” something on Facebook or play a game, clearly their enjoyment with these types of methods will be greater than with previous assessment methods such as filling out an irksome job application online.

While these new advances have occurred in the field, the research to substantiate the validity of such assessments has not kept apace. Incremental validity (the extent to which a new measure is valid over and above previously established measures) of certain algorithms has yet to be measured. Incremental validity is important to assess because, for example, in the Facebook “Likes” study, we need to know if this type of assessment algorithm might offer something better over and beyond traditional assessment methods (as of this writing, the Facebook algorithm study and other types of big data-based methods only offer about 50% of the predictive validity of traditional assessments). While the validity is not yet there, does the fact that such algorithms are cheaper and easier to administer have an impact on decision-making from an HR point of view? Clearly, as this field opens up, researchers need to partner with those who are commercializing these tools in order to make sure they are actually valid and rigorous.

In addition to understanding incremental validity of various new tools, the fact that some assessments have not been substantiated in a rigorous way can create ethical issues for organizations and for those commercializing various measures. The potential exists for manipulation and poor quality of assessments. For example, one new tool, has faced criticism. In this particular case, Lumosity, a product utilizing “brain games” is targeted toward two groups: the elderly hoping to stave off Alzheimers and to individuals hoping to benefit their cognitive abilities in general. Many neuroscientists have criticized Lumosity and similar tools for making unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims about their effectiveness. While this assessment has not made it into the HR sphere, similar tests have the potential to. For the most part, the big data-based assessments industry has gone relatively unregulated and almost anyone can make claims about their tools. Corporations preying off the ignorance of the elderly or anyone wanting to “improve” their cognitive abilities pose substantial ethical concerns that need to be investigated further.

The emerging field of big data-based assessments may also have other ethical issues. According to an article in The Atlantic, “By one estimate, more than 98% of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007”. With such a vast amount of data at our disposal, how do we use it in an ethical way? Much of this data has been collected outside of our conscious awareness – web browsing, meta-data collected from when, where, and to whom we make telephone calls. Using social media has unwittingly helped to unleash this new database of information. Of course, after the Edward Snowden revelations, we now know that there is a database of such information that the government is actively collecting. After Snowden revealed the NSA’s data collection practices, the public was outraged and clearly felt violated. A quarter of US citizens changed their patterns of social media platforms. Additionally, 52% of US citizens surveyed said they were either “very concerned” or “concerned” about US government surveillance. Given the reach of current dissatisfaction among US citizens, large-scale programs like the NSA clearly make individuals feel uncomfortable with the fact that their data can be stored and recalled, and used for unknown purposes at any point in time. Similarly, using data on a smaller scale within the realm of a single organization for assessment purposes might leave participants feeling violated if their data is being used without their consent. Therefore, when using data to profile individuals, these data need to be used in a transparent way.

The use of large-scale big data-based assessments for hiring and development practices might have another downside although organization change efforts might be able to reduce ethical concerns. As discussed previously, monitoring people at work electronically is dubious from an ethical point of view. However, when people do know they are being monitored at work, their engagement from work-related tasks can suffer, which may have an impact on performance – although at this point, more research needs to be done to substantiate these claims. Other research has shed light on this potential point as an ethical violation. If people in a given workplace are being electronically monitored, negative outcomes can be reduced by providing them with a compelling reason for using their data and giving them input in the process. When these conditions are met, they feel more at ease and may be more in line with a sense of procedural justice. This could have practical implications for ethics in using assessment tools. If companies were to scrape data from emails, for example, and try to make links between the content of those emails and individual performance, individuals might be more likely to buy into this process if they have had some input on the process to understand why the policies are in effect. Granted, our explanation here is simplistic as such a change in organizational policies would likely involve massive organizational change efforts, but there still is evidence that some of the effects of using big data in a way that invades privacy could be negated if employees participate in the process.

New advances in psychological assessments that are open to HR professionals and organizations are exciting and changing quickly. Suddenly, we live in a world in which the algorithms from social networking sites and metadata from our smartphones and Internet usage can predict things like personality, cognitive ability, and demographics. Due to the shifting nature of assessments, the market is also shifting. Finding talent through assessments has the potential to become on-demand and crowd sourced like Uber. Furthermore, user experience will likely be enhanced through gamification. These exciting new directions in the assessments field are not without their problems, however. Several concerns exist regarding the use of such data. Major issues still remain regarding validity. Products have the potential to be sold (and are) without being properly scientifically vetted. Furthermore, gaining explicit user consent with the myriad sources of data available to researchers, data scientists, and employers alike, is important. If explicit consent is not obtained and employees find out their data is being used, they may lash out against the company in destructive ways and organization-wide performance could suffer. One way around this may be to instill major organizational change to gain buy-in from employees so they do not feel uncomfortable that their data is being used. Clearly, the direction big data-based assessments are currently moving in is exciting, but it also implies many shifts – in assessments themselves, in the marketplace, in ethics, and in how we work with organizations and accept the use of our data in a major way. These changes are not minor – instead, they are radical and like the revelations of Edward Snowden, are likely to involve impassioned large-scale societal discussions on all sides of the issue.

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