Tom Goddard's blog

It is widely understood that the more your organization's employees are oriented to customer needs, the more likely is your organization to receive high ratings of performance from those customers. This is true not only in the service sector, but also the manufacturing sector.

What are the factors that increase employee customer orientation ("ECO")? Liao and Subramony took at look at this issue and found a number of factors, the most obvious being proximity to the consumer. Customer-contact employees, such as customer service and sales personnel, had a greater ECO than did those in production roles (e.g., product design and production), who, in turn, had a greater ECO than support staff (HR, IT, and accounting). No surprise there, certainly, but it's not all that useful a finding on its own, because it doesn't tell an organization what it can do to improve its ECO.

Liao and Subramony also looked at the role of leaders, calling the extent to which an senior leadership is oriented toward customer needs "leader customer orientation" ("LCO"). While they found a positive relationship between the senior leadership team's customer orientation and ECO across all employee groups, regardless of proximity, they found a stronger connection between LCO and ECO among support staff (i.e., those farthest from customers). This was a predicted result, as support staff, being farther from the day-to-day expression of customer needs, will benefit more from leadership on this topic than those who are much more involved with consumers.

Most organizations (91%) evaluate their training programs with satisfaction surveys. Far fewer evaluate what trainees learned (54%) or how well their training transferred to their work (23%). Does this make sense? Are we training employees so that they can be satisfied, or so that they can learn how to do their jobs better?

One answer is that it is too hard or too expensive to assess how much people learned in the training. The argument then goes, “if they’re satisfied with the training, perhaps that means they learned something, and therefore we’ll be able to use satisfaction as a substitute for learning.”

But is that true? Sitzmann and her colleagues set out to find out the answers not only to these questions, but to other questions, like what characteristics of the trainee or the course will predict how the trainee rates the course?

Post-training satisfaction surveys are good for telling you about how motivated employees are likely to be as a result of the training, but not about how much they learned. Organizations are much better off asking a trainee whether he/she feels confident about their ability to use what they learned in a training than how much the liked the training. Of course, if you really want to measure how effective at teaching the trainees your training is, measure their learning, not their satisfaction with the course.

Personality tests are valid – to a point.  It’s almost undisputed that the major personality tests generally tell us something useful about a person.  But how much they tell us is usually pretty small – they make us only slightly smarter about the person taking the test. 

So, how do you change the tests so they make us more than just slightly smarter?  Context, context, context!  One name used for context is “frame of reference.”  So, instead of a context-free item like “I pay attention to details,” you go with an item like “I pay attention to details at work.” 

Lievens and his colleagues challenged the conventional wisdom about why context works.  It has been widely argued that contexts reduces the variability among test-takers, making it less likely that some of the test takers will answer a question across all contexts and others will self-select a context in which they interpret the test questions. 

Sports fans have heard commentators talk about certain players "understanding the team concept." But what does that mean in the organizational world? Is there such an understanding, and can you measure it in job applicants (and thereby select employees based on it) and does it predict job performance once hired into a team?

Mumford and his colleagues have come up with a measure of this very thing, and have provided evidence that it is a valid measure. They call the aspect of this understanding of teams that they focused on "team role knowledge." They define it as "the knowedge an individual possesses about the nature of team roles and the situational contingencies govening their use." They go on to explain that the term "encompasses the declarative and procedural knowledge of role types and contingencies that is needed to effectively perform team roles."

In what will be absolutely no surprise to practitioners of mindfulness in all traditions, researchers have found evidence that meditation may be able to increase one's compassion.

While meditators have reported this for several millenia, what makes it interesting is that the study is focusing on the neuroscientific aspects of the phenomenon, or what Integral Theorists might call the "upper-right quadrant". Like it or not, meditators, Western culture requires this sort of inquiry, in addition to individual ("upper-left") and collective ("lower-left") reports that validate this finding from the inside of our experience.

All of us have either seen anger used, or have used it ourselves, in a workplace conflict.  It’s safe to say that sometimes it is effective in getting the result the angry person seeks, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it backfires and makes matters worse, generating stubbornness in the person who is the object of the anger.

Van Kleef and Cote have looked at the question of whether there is a pattern to when anger works and when it does not, and have concluded that it has something to do with the appropriateness of the expression of anger and the relative power of the two involved in the conflict.

Yesterday (March 9, 2008), renowned Zen teacher and author Genpo Roshi led a 4-1/2 hour workshop on his "Big Mind" process for a gathering of about 65 people in downtown Washington, DC yesterday. Despite operating on a bare 3 hours of sleep because of a now-typical classic airline snafu from New York City to the nation's capital, he took the participants on a spirited tour of some of the "voices" that comprise what he described as the "facets of the diamond" that each of us is.

As even Snow White knew, good moods in the workplace are to be encouraged.  It is not news, either to Walt Disney or to organizational psychologists, that positive moods not only feel good, but also improve task performance.  What is not fully understood is why that is so.  Why is it that positive mood generally improves performance?  Tsai, Chen, and Lieu think that it is a combination factors both intrapersonal (motivational) and interpersonal (giving help to and receiving help from co-workers) that provide the key link.

If we see Barack Obama in the midst of an excited crowd of admirers, are we more likely to see him as charismatic?

According to Pastor and his colleagues, we are.  But don’t get excited, you uncharismatic leaders out there.  Simply persuading your supporters to get excited won’t substitute for your own charisma – you’ve got to have that, first.  Only then, with your own charisma established, will the sight of your excited supporters increase observers’ belief that you are charismatic.