Photographs of people in activity is a promising newer area for development of business-relevant assessments that has been in use for years in healthcare.  Originally developed in the Netherlands to help patients suffering from fear of pain when moving the body (kinesiophobia), the University of Maastricht’s website has details on citations and free compressed (zipped file) short version of the main test.

Clearly, this same approach could be used to develop more engaging employee and organizational assessments that may be difficult to fake, have better face validity, and more workplace fidelity than other types of items.  Further, with cheap and even free video sites, video items could also play a bigger role in future assessments.

Consider these possible fruitful examples.

a) Vocational Interest Assessment

Vocational interest tests help people identify career paths for which their interests, values, and aptitudes are particularly suited.  But most all are purely text-based.  What if each career alternative had photographs of the tasks in each job or job family, with video vignettes of major tasks?  Perhaps this could be a fun way to assess what activities and careers would ultimately help the person realize their goals.  Take another look at the picture at the top of this article.  It’s an actual picture from PHODA’s assessment, but couldn’t it represent the task of lifting articles out of a trunk for the job of a taxicab driver?

b) Employee Selection

Cognitive and knowledge-based tests are often used to select new employees, but not nearly as often or instead of the ubiquitous job interview.  What if good instruments could be developed, perhaps with a combination of item types, to include pictures?  People could rate pictures like this one on the degree to which it looks similar to their desk – would you expect highly conscientious people to endorse this picture?

I would guess that highly conscientious and prudent people would be unlikely to indicate that this picture reflects their own office.  Sales Convention pictures would be good for the high-end of extraversion; Police taking down violent offenders for low levels of agreeableness.  The potential for pre-hire selection, especially using to add to Computer-Adaptive Testing item banks is tremendous.

c) Culture & Climate

Static pictures may be difficult to identify that reflect various organizational cultural differences, but videos could certainly be used to assess these. 

Limitations
As optimistic as I am about the potential for picture-based items to take a larger role in organizational assessment, I recognize there are also downsides.  First, while digital cameras are cheap, actors may not be.  If you can find existing workplaces where you can take these pictures, it may help you avoid hiring actors for static pictures, but perhaps not for videos that could really suffer with amateur actors.

Second, one New Zeland user of the PHODA complains that if the photographs are context-specific, they can loose value in other contexts.  I remember once when I worked for AT&T Microelectronics, we hired Wally Borman to redo his 1970′s era rater training videos because while the content was good, the actors wore sideburns, bell-bottoms and leisure suits.  This was never going to be very persuasive as “cutting edge” to managers in a bleeding-edge semiconductor factory (computer chips).

Do you see the same potential for photograph-based items as The Scientific Leader?

Assessment, Test, Quiz, Survey, Questionnaire, Psychometrics, Photograph, Photo, Video, YouTube, Computer Adaptive Test, CAT, Measurement, Rasch, IRT, Item Response Theory, Item Bank, Vocational Interest, Selection, Culture, Climate, Free, Freebie

With dwindling habitats and large appetites, Elephants are increasingly dangerous in countries like India. Elephants are increasingly entering cities, killing people and eating crops of coconuts, ginger and other valuables.  On December 29th, for example, they entered the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, attacking a honking car and injuring six people reports The Times of India.  This video of an Elephant rampage in Sri Lanka shows how hard they are to control.  This elephant plays with a minivan like it’s a toy.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnOkbVJNaYc]

If you’re a farmer, or just live in a city with a forest that contains wild Elephants, they represent a special kind of
Enterprise Risks to your business, not unlike the Monkey Marauders noted in a previous blog entry.

But in the case of Elephants, several noteworthy options are being tested for efficacy in thwarting the Elephant menace:

1) The man honking his horn was hoping to scare away the elephant, and that strategy backfired

2) Forest officials in Mochapallam brought two trained elephants to drive a wild herd of 13 elephants back to the forest.  They successfully persuaded 12 to follow, but one got away and chased officials and local citizens.

3) The officials in Mochapallam ultimately were successful in getting the remaining renegade Elephant to retreat to the forest by lighting firecrackers.

4) A Bengali inventor, Amunuddin Ahmed, invented an “Elephant Repellent“, that combines sirens, bulbs and wires connected to a battery, or solar power.

Each of these examples, is a real option – the investment, or partial investment, with an uncertain payoff.  In one case, there was not only no payoff – but the strategy backfired.

I’m continuously fascinated by the range of risks that need to be considered by different industries in different countries.  Clearly Elephant rampages are rare, but so are Enron scandals and both have terrible outcomes. Are you considering all the risks to your operations, even if they’re not as exotic as Elephants?  Do you understand your options, and what they’re worth to you?

ERM, Risk Management, Elephant, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Real Options, Finance, Stochastic, Decisions, Decision Making, Choice

Apple, Jobs, Risk, ERM, Leadership, Stock, Human Capital, Presenteeism, Absenteeism, Health, iPhone, iPod, iTunes

Video 1

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Computer Adaptive Testing, CAT, Rasch, Rasch Measurement, IRT, Item Response Theory, Education, Learning, Training, Children, Pedagogy, Free

Professor Jette

Can Computer-Adaptive Testing Help Senior Citizens?  Research from Boston University suggests it can.  Professor Alan Jette, Director of the Boston University Health & Disability Research Institute published a recent paper examining disability assessments in traditional and computer forms.  With data from 671 older adults residing in care facilities, CAT compared favorably with fixed-form scales, even for a version of the CAT with only 10 questions.  In his study, each CAT was administered in less than three minutes, and were highly correlated with the original instrument.

His research strongly suggests that in situations where time is a scarce resource, and measurement fidelity is still important, that Computer-Adaptive Measurement approaches are often more useful than others.

Computer Adaptive Testing, CAT, Item Response Theory, IRT, Aging, Gerontology, Disability, Confirmatory Factor Analysis

As someone born in the US, and well traveled, I’ve often wondered about the variation in sentiments about leaders from America.  I often felt treated as a prototypical American.  People assume I fully support every action the politicians from the US government make, frequently false.  The feelings of people in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan, and Iraq about US Government Leaders are well known to be fairly negative.  I recall as a 16 year old living in Norway, that Europeans would often deride me because of their dislike of US government policy – though I wasn’t old enough to vote.  With the US Government meddling in others domestic affiars, and breaking its’ own rules frequently, I don’t like but understand the term “Great Satan” used in parts of the middle east to describe the USA.

But I’ve also experienced a sort of American “halo bias“.  In my frequent trips to India, I’ve found Indians extremely happy to meet an American.  I have had random strangers want to shake my hand, have me hold their baby for a picture, or buy me a free soda.  Yes, I often am offered free Coca-Cola at shops in India.

What I didn’t know until this article, is that there is actually a religion that worships the US.  The BBC reports that every February, the people of Vanuatu celebrate John Frum day with US army uniforms, wooden weapons and the Star Spangled Banner.  They paint “USA” on their chests.  Village Chief Isaac Wa, says “John is our god”, and believes that an American from World War II will be returning to Vanuatu’s 30,000 Frum worshipers.  This group of people in the small micronesian country are part of a “cargo cult“.

A cargo cult appears sometimes in tribal groups upon their first interaction with technologically advanced alien groups of people.  These cults are focused on obtaining material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, and religious rituals.  In Vanuatu’s case, they believe an American GI named John Frum helped them rebel against the aggressive teachings of British and French missionaries and colonial masters.  They believe the American helped them retain their culture by throwing off the oppression of a foreign state, not unlike the original patriots who founded the US.  Vanuatu people celebrate annually, hoping and praying for the return of the man they call their “Jesus”.

David Calderwood’s article about these Cargo Cults reminded me of Richard Feynman’s critique of 1960′s-era psychology.  But Calderwood makes a compelling case for the current lack of understanding of US natives optimistic about government intervention turning around the US economic crisis.  He notes that Americans have naive, and unsophisticated views of how wealth is created, and so they, like those from Vanuatu, have a sort of Cargo Cult worship of government-intervention in economics.

Business leaders would do well to consider how we’re perceived when we do business in other countries.  Most globe trotting leaders with whom I’ve worked with are already concerned with security.  But they often are relatively insulated from the root cause of the sentiment about the US – positive or negative.  Even though business leaders are not responsible for foreign policy decisions, they often take the brunt of it, with some being kidnapped or killed for their iconic status as an American.  As we are seen as prototypes of our entire homeland, we must be ambassadors for goodwill with other free people to do our best to change inaccurately positive or negative views of us and similar others.

Leadership, Satan, Savior, Cargo Cult, Jesus, USA, Patriot, John Frum, Vanuatu, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, Iraq

With the Bernie Madoff being the latest in a series of massive financial frauds caused by leaders who misrepresented themselves, the time may have come to broaden the financial world’s definition of “transparency”.  I’d like to offer a broader view to include publicly reported reports on leadership knowledge, skills, abilities, traits, values and interests.  Would you have invested in Madoff’s Ponzie scheme if you had previously reviewed a report from a trusted authority on leadership assessment that noted he is low on conscientiousness and prudence?  How would a board view this same report on a founder-CEO?

How well do you know your leaders?

Poor leadership is common, but leaders rarely fail in such a public way.  In one study of nearly 400 Fortunte 1000 companies, 47% of executives and managers rated their company’s overall leadership as fair or poor; and only 8% rated it as excellent (Csoka, 1998).  Personality traits predict both performance and ineffective leadership.  For example, conscientiousness is one of the “Big 5″ factors of normal personality that has been shown to consistently predict both job performance and dishonest behavior in the worklpace. Former professors of mine, Robert and Joyce Hogan have written extensively about this area, and have authored some of the better classical test theory instruments for normal personality, the “dark side” or disfunctional leadership, and leader motives, values and preferences.  None of these sorts of assesments are typically used systematically to plan CEO development in private by the board.  And it is entirely unheard of for these reports to be shared publicly with prospective customers, partners and shareholders.  Perhaps we should reconsider making these transparent, systematically, given the risk and lack of confidence in markets of late?   The free paper I drafted, “The Three Stooges of Operational Risk: Advances in Leadership Due Diligence and Rasch Measurement” proposes a way of improving our leadership assessments.  If desired, they could be used for this transparency purpose.   I welcome your feedback.

Special thanks to Alexei M for inspiring this idea.

References

Csoka, L. S. (1998).  Bridging the Leadership Gap.  New York: Conference Board.

Hogan, R., Curphy, G., & Hogan, J. (1994).  What We Know About Leadership: Effectiveness & Personality.  American Psychologist 49(6), 493-504.

Robie, C., Brown, D., & Bly, P. (2008, March).  Relationship Between Major Personality Traits and Managerial Performance: Moderating Effects of Derailing Traits.  International Journal of Management, 25(1), 131-139.

Bernie Madoff is the latest in the series of senior executives to destroy value, this time with an apparent $50 billion dollar fraud, according to the Financial Times.  Madoff, a former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, on thursday admitted to his employees including his two sons that his operations were “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme”.  The alleged fraud is the largest ever investor fraud ever blamed on a single individual.

Previously, I had written about the “Three Stooges of Operational Risk“, where I detailed senior executive destruction from Key Lay of Enron, Bernie Evers of Worldcom and most recently, Dick Fuld‘s follies with Lehman Brothers.  In two of those three I noted the dishonesty and fraud that accounted for their downfall similar to Madoff.  But unlike Madoff, they were less candid about thair fraud.  After Madoff’s brazen alleged admission, is there any uncertainty that leadership due dilligence is a critical part of the selection process of hiring senior executives?  Could it be any more clear that the pre-hire assessment procedure is a non-trivial subset of Enterprise Risk Management?

In fairness, these Industrial Organizational Psychology methods have their limitations.  No forecast could ever be perfect, or and even the best assessment procedures only account for 30-60% of the variance in job performance.  But it’s relatively rare that factors such as conscientiousness are used to screen executives – and conscientiousness highly predicts dishonest, and imprudent behavior in the workplace like that of Madoff.  With new methods from Rasch Measurement, Computer-Adaptive Testing, and an innovation from the Scientific Leader, “Inverted Computer Adaptive Testing” using Virtual Realtity, it’s increasingly difficult for people to fake or misrepresent themselves on these assessments. 

How much risk are you accepting when you use standard interviews to hire your employees?

Madoff, Ponzie, Fraud, NASDAQ, Selection, Pre-hire, Assessment, Psychometrics, Rasch, Item Response Theory, IRT, personnel, HR, Due Diligence

The Scientific Leader is pleased to announce that three submissions to the 2009 Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference have been accepted.

The Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is the premier professional association for scientists and practitioners of human behavior in the workplace.  Each year, they hold a popular conference with peer-reviewed articles and symposia.  The number of proposed sessions always far outstrips the number of available places, and so the standards for acceptance are relatively steep by the peer-review group who decides on placement.

Three submissions were accepted for presentation at the next conference, to be held in New Orleans

1.  Enhancing Utility Analysis: Introducing the Cue See Model

I’m particularly proud of this paper, as it represents a new approach to asset valuation, both tangible and intangible.  While traditional I/O Psychology has its’ own tradition to quantify the value of human performance called Utility Analysis, it largely does not include any of the other organizational sciences’ ideas.  My paper tries to synthesize finance, psychology, industrial/systems engineering, computational organizational theory, and computer science ideas into the “Cue See Model”.  The hope is that the approach can be useful to managers and theoreticians by helping to specificy how a company creates profit across levels.  Once understood, then the Cue See Model can be used to track it, objectively, without relying on subjective human ratings.  My hope is that future studies will empirically demonstrate the models’ efficacy, and help avoid the fields traditional problem of measuring and monetizing outcomes.

2.  Succession Planning: Beyond Manager Nomitations

Led by our parent company, Human Capital Growth’s Dr. Shreya Sarkar-Barney, this panel discussion will include experts on leadership discussing the use of psychometric assessment instruments and other science-based practice methods for succession.  Panelists include:

Shreya Sarkar-Barney, Human Capital Growth, Chair
Matt Barney, Infosys, Panelist
Eric Braverman, Merck, Panelist
Lori Homer, Microsoft, Paelist
Jennifer Irwin, Proctor & Gamble Company, Panelist
Kevin Veit, Gabbard and Co, Panelist

3. The Role of IO Psychology in Resolving the Healthcare Crisis

I was asked to be the discussant – a senior leader with expertise in the area to comment on all the papers in the session ,as I was the Chief Learning Officer & VP for Sutter Health previously.  It will focus on interventions
targeted at improving outcomes related to quality of patient care. The
interventions to be covered focus on selection, leadership and culture, team
training, safety, and others. The session will represent research on various
levels of the organization, including management, nurses, and frontline staff.

Kristin Charles, Kronos Talent Management, Co-Chair
David Scarborough, Kronos Talent Management/Black Hills State U., Co-Chair
Justin Rossini, DDI, Inc., Author
Sallie Weaver, Univsersity of Central Florida and MedAxiom, Author
David Hofmann, Univ of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author
Matt Barney, Infosys, Discussant

The papers I’ll be reviewing in this session include:
Defining quality of care: Behavioral competency models across nursing
departments: Kristin Charles, Autumn Krauss
Addressing Care Quality, Engagement, and Retention Likelihood: a Selection
Perspective: Justin Rossini
Can Team Training Improve Operating Room Quality of Care?: Sallie
Weaver, Michael Rosen, Deborah DiazGranados, Rebecca Lyons, Elizabeth Lazzara,
Andrea Barnhard, Eduardo Salas
Leadership Levers to Motivate Error Management: David Hofmann, Adam
Grant

I hope some of the readers of this blog are able to attend this excellent conference, and if you are, please comment below or send me a note (matt at scientificleader.com) so I’ll get to meet you.