On Evidence-Based Management
Scientific research could be applied to critical management initiatives and decisions, but generally is not.
Originally published in 2018 on stoweboyd.com.
In a stark expose of the anti-scientism in today’s management, Eryn Brown investigates the sad state of affairs in ‘evidence-based management’, where findings from scientific research could be applied to critical management initiatives and decisions, but generally are not:
Getting companies to pay attention to science and engage in so-called “evidence-based management” is a challenge that has been driving industrial-organizational psychologists nuts for the better part of 20 years. Whether it’s hiring staff or determining salaries or investing in technology, managers making high-stakes decisions have a vast scholarly literature at their disposal: studies conducted over more than a century, in labs and in the field, vetted through peer review, that show whether pay incentives drive internal motivation (often not); whether diversity training works (only under the right conditions); whether companies should get rid of performance ratings (yes, Colquitt would say); how to train effective teams; and more.
Executives love hard numbers, and they desperately want to know how to keep their best employees, how to make more widgets, how to be more creative. So you’d think they’d lap up the research. “It’s hard to find students in graduate school who don’t hear the idea of evidence-based management and say, 'Yes! Of course!’” says Neil Walshe, an organizational psychologist who teaches the approach at the University of San Francisco School of Management.
Except most companies don’t. Occasionally, a firm will make a splash — the poster child these days is Google, which gets kudos for its data-centric, research-based “People Operations” (a.k.a. human resources) department. But most executives would rather just copy another company’s proven ideas than do the hard work of assessing evidence relevant to their own circumstances. Managers falter, victims of inertia (“but we’ve always done things this way!”) confusion (“industrial-organizational what?”), even downright hostility to expertise.
The first advocate for evidence-based management was Denice Rousseau of Carnegie Mello University, who proposed the idea in 2005. She had thought companies were paying attention to industrial psychology research findings and had discovered they weren’t.
Slowly it began to dawn on her that that wasn’t the case. It was an epiphany that “blew my mind,” she says today.
Even after a decade of pushing, advocates admit that evidence-based management hasn’t made much of a dent:
“We’d love to see a commitment from a leader that says, 'I expect our decisions about people and work and the organization to have evidence behind them,’” says John Boudreau, research director at the Center for Effective Organizations, housed in USC’s Marshall School of Business. “I don’t know that I have seen examples of that. Especially at the high level, the CEO level.”
“I’m a little baffled that it’s not more widespread,” says Jennifer Kurkoski, director of Google’s People Innovation Lab (PiLab), the internal research and development team behind the company’s People Operations department. “Companies spend billions on R&D, almost none of which is devoted to making people work better. It’s not something we understand yet. And we should.”
Brown enumerates the reasons why managers have been slow to get on the bandwagon (but they are all excuses):
It’s a lot of work.
People fear change and risk.
Managers put more faith in intuition than they put in science.
Parsing the scientific literature can be hard.
So, they are basically lazy and stupid, and unwilling to change.
Meanwhile, evidence mounts that dumb management fads are harming companies’ productivity and employees’ wellbeing and engagement:
Studies that find open offices don’t, in fact, encourage conversation and collaboration. Studies that find employees resent the corporate fad of hot-desking— jumping from desk to desk instead of having a dedicated workspace, based on a notion that this will spark synergies and blue-sky thinking.
In one recent paper calling on industrial-organizational psychologists to put “an end to bad talent management,” [Alan] Colquitt [the author of Next Generation Performance Management: The Triumph of Science Over Myth and Superstition] … called out companies who fall for consultants promising to help them understand “the brain science of millennials” and other trendy topics, with little or no evidence for any of it.
Sigh.
Harvard Business Review ironically peddles a lot of this bad science constantly in order to fill its digital content stream...I wish we could just start with ‘behavioral interviewing’ training so companies would stop getting played by candidates...
Stowe,
Why don't obese people lose weight? Why don't abused people leave bad relationships? Why do people not get that moar information is the solution (insert angry scientist waving hand image)...
Human Resources [in the broadest sense of the word] seems to to still suffer a lack of understanding of Human Nature.
The only thing that replaces a story is a better story we can tell ourselves [not better as in technically, but better as making me feel better or will better ensure my -ego-survival].
And that even requires a perfect storm of zeitgeist, pressure, momentum and more (see the documentary 9to5: The Story of A Movement about women office workers and their path to today).
As we've seen with a whole bunch of things, skepticism of science is more outspoken than ever [ I would wager it was always high, but in the olden days authority could override that reflex, where as now authority/cred for most institutions is shot]
A few people who are major evidence-based supporters have talked about the need for dropping the "But the evidence should be enough" attitude.
Rory Sutherland in his Alchemy talks about how the irrational/placebo is not a barrier but an opportunity.
And on a micro level "deep canvassing" is science backed political campaigning innovation that shows that people can quickly change... but perhaps too fringe at present to be adopted mainstream.
Most of the time people, emotionally/psychologically are in a different year than those seeking change.
For instance the ketogenic diet (https://barbend.com/keto-diet-history/) has been around for many many years in the "bro/meathead" circles, and only recently in conjunction with science has this "fad" become mainstream and shown to have benefits many people aka the mainstream care about [ like diabetes].
Change is messy, takes time and is very unpredictable. It is the elephant in the room that people do not want to admit because it does not rhyme with the story [rational master of my own faith] that capitalism / companies tell themselves about themselves
And things that are lindy [resume for instance] also become industrial complexes which means a lot of interests and money in keeping things as they are, more or less.. Like the other reply said, even HBR is as much part of the complex while selling "solutions" within the current overton window.
In the end it seems that sowing many seeds at a various levels of power and influence is a way forward for some of the evidence to be adopted at some point.. if it survives the fad/boring cycle a few times one day we wake up and call it culture..