staff five customer service call centers over the next 6 months. The GM knew these initial 1,000 hires would have a crit
File this article under “stuff you don’t learn at graduate school.” After my inaugural article in the January TIP where I invited input, I was sent an interesting question by Dr. Steven Hunt, the SVP of Customer Value at SuccessFactors/SAP: What is the best approach when a fellow scientist– practitioner makes an assertion to business leaders that you believe is more BS than PhD? While it doesn’t happen often (thankfully), it does happen and I’m never quite sure how best to deal with it. And sometimes it could lead to companies investing millions of dollars in what might be considered highly questionable HR practices. This was such an intriguing question that I invited Steve to help me write the answer. Here’s what we came up with. We still don’t think we have the perfect answer and welcome hearing from readers with their ideas! Dealing With Questionable Advice That Is Supposedly Rooted in Sound Science We believe that most scientist–practitioners strive to separate the advice they provide to business leaders into two categories: Richard M. Vosburgh Retired CHRO & President, RMV Solutions
1. Facts rooted in solid scientific empirical research; and 2. Opinions reflecting personal experience. Sometimes we’re talking as “Dr. Egghead: I-O psychologist who reads lots of peer-review research articles studying employee performance” and other times we’re talking as “Mr. Experience: strategic professional who has spent more than 20 years helping organizations maximize workforce productivity.” Although there is always some overlap between facts and opinions, most scientist–practitioners seem to do a reasonable job keeping this distinction. A problem you may have encountered is when a fellow PhD expresses personal opinions in a business setting as though they were accepted scientific findings or expresses scientific findings that have questionable validity. If this happens at
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SIOP we have no issue systematically pointing out the lack of scientific validity to our fellow I-O psychologists. After all, we’ve all gone through the pain of a dissertation or thesis defense. But such openly critical approaches tend not to work well in a business setting. To illustrate, let’s consider a hypothetical example. Imagine a retail company hired a new general manager (GM) and gave her the objective of hiring 1,000 employees to staff five customer service call centers over the next 6 months. The GM knew these initial 1,000 hires would have a critical impact on the long-term culture of the call centers. So she held a meeting with the director of Staffing and director of Organizational Development to define a staffing strategy that will help build a strong customer service culture. Both the Staffing and OD directors have PhDs in I-O psychology. The three of them met, along with three other call center leaders. The GM started the discussion by saying, “Within 2 months I need a process that will allow my managers to select the most qualified people for call center operations. The process needs to be easy to execute because we have five locations, and it needs to be legally defensible because we expect at least 20 people to not be hired for every one person who is hired.” The staffing director replied, “Let’s use the selection measures we currently use for our sales call centers. These have been validated using meta-analytic techniques that show they are generalizable across all call center jobs.” The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist
The OD director then replied, “I have strong concerns about the accuracy and legal defensibility of using a test without local validation. Meta-analysts often make very questionable statistical assumptions such as correcting for reliability of multidimensional measures using estimates like Cronbach’s alpha that assume unidimensionality.” The staffing director retorted by saying, “If you read Hunter and Schmidt you’d clearly understand that the issues about reliability correction in meta-analytic studies are vastly over-stated. There is no reason to establish local criterion validity if we can show adequate content validity.” At this point the GM said, “Could you two please leave while we find someone who can help us solve this business problem?” What went wrong here? The big issue is not whether one of these PhDs is more right than the other. The big issue is that both of them just got kicked out of the conversation and as a result “science just left the room entirely.” The reason science was kicked out of the discussion was because these PhDs failed to adjust their conversation to fit the realities of a business setting. The world of business is often not as tolerant of the “gift of critical feedback” as the world of academics. If you started picking apart the scientific shortcomings of a fellow PhD in a business meeting, you’d probably look more like a jerk than an enlightened scholar. In addition, a business audience is unlikely to understand a debate between two PhDs about things like construct validity of 49
survey tools or the significance of metaanalytic findings versus primary research. So even if you win the argument, no one that matters will be able to tell you were the winner. Last, when two I-O PhDs argue in front of business leaders, the main impression the business leaders get is that our field is neither conclusive nor sound, so they listen to someone else entirely. So we’ve identified what not to do. But what should you do when you encounter a fellow PhD providing “scientific” advice to business leaders that strikes you as being more myth than reality? First, try to find a way to have a discussion with the person in a more private forum. This will allow you to dig into the science without alienating your nonscientific business colleagues. If you still find yourself at odds with this person’s advice, then politely present data or research to the company that supports an alternative point of view.
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But try to avoid challenging the validity of the person’s claims directly. Such a challenge could easily come across as an attack on the other person’s knowledge, competence, and even integrity. Regardless of whether such an attack is warranted, it won’t make you look good. Last, remember the goal is to influence the organization not “win the argument.” The training we get in graduate school often rewards people who tear into flawed logic or inaccurate data like a grizzly bear tears into a wild salmon. There may be times when such argumentative behavior is appropriate in a business setting, but more often than not it tends to backfire. We invite scientist and practitioner perspectives on what advice you would give to people who may have faced similar situations. Please email me at
[email protected].
April 2015, Volume 52, Number 4
