Do you believe in self-help?
One of my favourite quotes is from Henry Ford:
Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right
Personally I am all for a bit of self belief, but does it work for organisations as well as people?
Does belief have a place in business?
In 1974 Albert King (a professor of Management Science at Northern Illinois University) carried out an experiment to improve employee engagement and productivity.
The subject of the experiment was interesting work; he hypothesised that if you give people wider, more varied jobs they become more productive.
To test the hypothesis he ran an experiment in two manufacturing plants in the US midwest. The plants made clothing patterns. Each factory was organised into ten crews of six men who printed, folded and packed clothing patterns.
- In the first plant he tried high skill level job enlargement. The crews were trained so they were multi-skilled and did different jobs on the line all the time.
- In the second plant he tried a lower level job rotation approach. Employees were periodically moved from one job to another according to a schedule.
He then sat back and measured output over the following 12 months.
Did either approach work?
The results from the experiment are shown below:
It appeared that giving people more varied jobs has an impact on their productivity. A 6% improvement in productivity. Not too shoddy. What wouldn’t you do for a 6% improvement in a year?
But it wasn’t that simple
Professor King put a wrinkle in the experiment. He ran it across 4 plants not just 2, and into the mix he threw another variable; management belief.
In two of the factories the manufacturing director primed the management team and workforce. He explained that the experiment was expected to improve productivity. In the other two factories he explained that the experiment was simply to improve employee relations.
The experimental design looked like this:
And the results looked like this:
The interventions didn’t matter
It didn’t matter which of the two approaches the factories tried, whether they practiced job rotation or job enlargement made precisely no difference to their output.
Expectations made all the difference
If the plant manager and the workforce believed that the change was going to make a difference to productivity, then it did. If however, they didn’t then it didn’t.
What do you believe?
Can improve the way your organisation works? Self fulfilling prophecies are powerful things.
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Read another opinion
Image by Elvin
James,
I wrote about this – the Pygmalion Effect – previously as it relates to the customer experience. I do believe it’s a powerful thing. Believing we can do something is half the battle.
Annette :-)
A very good post it was too, Here is the link if anybody would like to read it:
http://www.cx-journey.com/2014/10/is-your-customer-experience-self.html
Hope is NOT a Strategy…If teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from children, then the children’s performance was enhanced. This study supported the hypothesis that reality can be positively or negatively influenced by the expectations of others, called the observer-expectancy effect. Rosenthal argued that biased expectancies could affect reality and create self-fulfilling prophecies.
All students in a single California elementary school were given a disguised IQ test at the beginning of the study. These scores were not disclosed to teachers. Teachers were told that some of their students (about 20% of the school chosen at random) could be expected to be “spurters” that year, doing better than expected in comparison to their classmates. The spurters’ names were made known to the teachers. At the end of the study, all students were again tested with the same IQ-test used at the beginning of the study. All six grades in both experimental and control groups showed a mean gain in IQ from before the test to after the test. However, First and Second Graders showed statistically significant gains favoring the experimental group of “spurters”. This led to the conclusion that teacher expectations, particularly for the youngest children, can influence student achievement. Rosenthal believed that even attitude or mood could positively affect the students when the teacher was made aware of the “spurters”. The teacher may pay closer attention to and even treat the child differently in times of difficulty. Jane Elliott incorporated this into her study of the classroom when racially profiling her children when creating her responses to her “inferior” or “superior” children.
Rosenthal predicted that elementary school teachers may subconsciously behave in ways that facilitate and encourage the students’ success. When finished, Rosenthal theorized that future studies could be implemented to find teachers who would encourage their students naturally without changing their teaching methods. The prior research that motivated this study was done in 1911 by psychologists regarding the case of Clever Hans, a horse that gained notoriety because it was supposed to be able to read, spell, and solve math problems by using its hoof to answer. Many skeptics suggested that questioners and observers were unintentionally signaling Clever Hans. For instance, whenever Clever Hans was asked a question the observers’ demeanor usually elicited a certain behavior from the subject that in turn confirmed their expectations. For example, Clever Hans would be given a math problem to solve, and the audience would get very tense the closer he tapped his foot to the right number, thus giving Hans the clue he needed to tap the correct number of times.
A major limitation of this experiment was its inability to be replicated well. “Most studies using product measures found no expectancy advantage for the experimental group, but most studies using process measures did show teachers to be treating the experimental group more favorably or appropriately than they were treating the control group…because teachers did not adopt the expectations that the experimenters were attempting to induce, and/or because the teachers were aware of the nature of the experiment.”
Thanks for the information, the idea for the post came from Dov Eden’s book Pygmalion in Management. A Very interesting read
I sent this out yesterday to one of our teams.
Here are my thoughts on entraupranuership. From a very wise man who has had much success in the area. The most important thing is to have a dream, then simultaneously plan the dream, work the dream, love the dream, because you are asking yourself and the team to take the improbable and make it probable, which is actually a dream because it’s more than likely taking the impossible and making it possible, so doubts can never occur in conversation, yet reality of assessments and adaptation off the plan are certain. Belief in everything everyone does is critical, leaders at the top must then assess and many times refocus efforts but not because of doubts or failures but because of doubt and failures. Success will come when this is emotional path for all as the work towards goals of the company. And success many times is the hug of the team at the end of the effort. Money obviously is the trophy but the focus and joy must be on the desire and effort. Just a thought.
I love this dream and have no doubts I will love this team.
Scott, I suppose without belief there isn’t much.
Thanks for your comment
A different spin on the Hawthorne effect?
Maybe Edythe, I just thought it was interesting that the same response didn’t happen in all the factories.
Hello James,
What is striking to me about the human-being and the human species is the role of imagination, belief, and creativity. Growing up in several different cultures, I finally made sense of my puzzling existence around the age of 8. At this stage I got “It’s ALL made up!” Folks cook stuff up. Folks are imaginative (even if they think they are not) and they can imagine all kinds of stuff into existence or out of existence.
What has this got to do with the subject matter of your post? Good question. Well, being imaginative (and also invested in that which we have imagined up) we can prove just about anything. Hey, we can prove that witches exist. Heck, we can bend altruism (the existential fact-observation of non-selfishness) and turn that into another form of selfishness to keep intact our commitment to imagining folks are being innately-genetically selfish!
So this where I see the possibility of a flaw in that which you have cited. You write:
“In 1974 Albert King (a professor of Management Science at Northern Illinois University) carried out an experiment to improve employee engagement and productivity.
The subject of the experiment was interesting work; he hypothesised that if you give people wider, more varied jobs they become more productive.”
Now this may seem scientific yet is is not scientific. Not at all! As the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out the only way to go about being truly scientific is as follows:
– Come up with a hypothesis; and
– Set out to DISPROVE it with all of your might.
And if after going full out to disprove it you have not disproved it then you can claim that your hypothesis has not yet been disproved. And you wait for some age, some person, to come along and disprove that which you have not yet disproved.
Is there such a thing as a pygmalion effect? Quite likely. Is it a universal say like the law of gravitation? Unlikely. Human beings are imaginative, creative, and ‘deviant’. Unlike planets. And that difference makes all the difference.
All the best
maz