Dispelling Performance Myths

Dispelling Performance Myths by Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D. | Talent Management   You accidentally break a mirror. What is your first reaction? "What a mess!" or "Oh, no! Seven years of bad luck!" Surprisingly, large numbers of people focus on the bad luck. Superstitions and myths possess amazing staying power, perpetuated through frequent repetition and by the feeling that it never hurts to be cautious.   Superstitions and myths about workplace performance also abound. Here are four familiar ones and what to do about them.   1. High job satisfaction results in high performance. Research has found the correlation between job satisfaction and performance to be illusory. Satisfied workers are not necessarily more productive, and knowing an employee's job satisfaction level can actually bias performance appraisal ratings. Managers tend to rate the performance of employees they hired more highly than those hired by others. Support of more intensive work and job challenges appears to produce better performance than job satisfaction.   What to do: Do not view job satisfaction ratings as performance indicators. Set objective criteria and standards to verify performance. Communicate these clearly to performers, and provide ongoing, timely feedback. Focus on management actions such as encouragement and support to obtain high performance rather than on job satisfaction.   2. When employees select their own work goals, their motivation to achieve them is greater. Studies indicate that employees willingly buy into assigned work goals if they perceive those who set them as trustworthy and credible. Meaningful goals that inspire belief and confidence and are considered fair are readily accepted. Such goals work particularly well if managers encourage employees to select the means to achieve them.   What to do: Have respected managers set credible performance goals. Communicate these clearly, meaningfully and fairly. Seek input from performers on the means to attain goals. Accompany goal assignments with support for successful accomplishment.   3. Personality inventories used for selection purposes are strong predictors of job performance success. Some highly respectable studies suggest that labeling people through personality and trait tests is unreliable despite widespread use. Their ability to predict job performance has also been seriously questioned. There appears to be little consistency in trait definitions across published instruments. Performance-based hiring procedures produce more reliable predictions of job performance success.   What to do: Conduct job analyses using top performers to help determine desired performance. Then, identify the characteristics of highly successful job performers. Use both findings to select new performers. Avoid selection based solely on interviews, reference letters and personality inventories. Employ performance-based hiring methods that require candidates to demonstrate what they can do.   4. Organized, supervised work teams outperform self-managed teams. More than 20 years of research overwhelmingly supports self-management. Worker self-management decreases management time and costs. It generates close work coordination, less slacking off, less absenteeism and higher productivity. Workers share ideas, implement needed changes immediately and share benefits, resulting in a greater sense of ownership. Organizational benefits of self-management include fewer supervisory levels, faster task execution, increased loyalty, innovative practices and faster new-hire on-boarding.   What to do: Investigate to identify the best self-management practices. Determine their feasibility in your organizational setting. Develop incentives for self-managed teams. Loosen external controls; shift internal management to the team. Track productivity and other desired performance indicators. Share findings across the organization.   Separating organizations from firmly held - but unsupported - beliefs is difficult. But the hallmark of a true performance professional is the ability to marshal powerful arguments that counter unsubstantiated practices in order to achieve results that everyone ultimately values.