Lecture 5 Flashcards
How can we measure work performance?
- Self-reports
- Other’s ratings
- ‘Objective’ measures
What are the advantages of self-reports?
- It’s not always possible to objectify what they do
- It’s easy
- People have a much better idea about how well they perform than others
What are the disadvantages of self-reports?
- Social desirability
- Some people think they perform worse than they actually do because they are very self-critical, very conscientious, depressed
o These people give more accurate ratings on how they perform than people that are psychologically healthy - Some people are very optimistic, have a high self-esteem and therefore overestimate how they perform
- So, there are differences in the extent to which the rate of performance are accurate. If everyone had the same bias this wouldn’t be much of a problem.
- You can for some extent control for social desirability or positive biases for example by adding additional questionnaires that measure this aspect. But this is not as good as having an accurate perspective of the performance.
How can self-reports be improved?
By making it more specific
- Ask about specific behaviour
- People are more restrained in their biases
- Especially if you make it a short period of time
By adding other ratings
Other’s ratings of work performance
- Supervisor
- Coworkers
- Customers
- Students (e.g., performance rating of lecturer)
‘Objective’ measures of work performance
- Output quantity
- Production loss
o E.g., sickness absence
o E.g., due to health problems
o This is considered a way of measuring work performance
How is work performance generally measured?
Self-reports
LMX
Leader Member Exchange
The quality of the relationship
What are the results of the study on Leader Member Exchange by Jan van Gool (2020)?
There is a moderately high positive correlation about the LMX between the supervisor and the employee (.46).
The supervisor rating of the task performance and the employee rating of the task performance were not significantly related (.22).
The supervisor rating of the contextual performance and the employee rating of the contextual performance was not related at all (.02).
- This is strange because they rate the exact same performance.
- The employee and the supervisor have completely different views on how the employee performs.
How the supervisor rated the contextual performance of the employee was highly related to how he/she rated the quality of the relationship with this employee.
- If the supervisor really likes the employee, they give positive ratings on the performance.
- Employees who perform well are much liked by the supervisor and they have a good relationship.
What is the Matthew effect?
- The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
- If a supervisor likes an employee more, they trust them more, they give them more tasks or responsibilities which makes it easier to perform well, leading to the supervisor trusting the employee even more.
- If someone is not performing that well, the supervisor can take away tasks and responsibilities which can cause the employee to performing worse.
- In the JD-R model this is called a gain or a loss cycle.
How do we measure a student’s performance?
Grades for output
Process
- Especially for the internship and the thesis
- It’s not often measured during courses
Other factors
- Being present
How do we measure a nurse’s performance?
- Technical skills
- Formal qualifications
- Patient’s satisfaction
- Number of hours worked
- Number of patients cared for
- Self-report
- Supervisor rating
- Coworker rating
How do we measure an academic’s performance?
- Formal qualification (e.g., PhD)
- Self-report
- Supervisor rating
- Coworker rating
- Student evaluations
o Especially if they are unsatisfactory - Number of publications
o Used to be one of the most important factors
o Slowly getting less important - Scientific impact (citation score)
o Used to be one of the most important factors
o Slowly getting less important - Societal impact (media coverage)
o More important than the number of publications and scientific impact
o E.g., media coverage - Obtained research grants
o The most important thing
o It’s hard to get research grants, but they are necessary to get certain functions (e.g., professor) - International network
- Number of hours worked
o In a part time position it is much harder to rise in the hierarchy in academia
Difference between WHP and OSH
- WHP (Worplace Health Promotino) focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of the employee with the ultimate goal of improving the productivity of the organisation, this is something that the organisations want.
- OSH (Occupational Safety and Health) focuses on improving the working conditions, this is something that unions really want.
Benefits of the integration of a health policy at the organisational level
- You not only focus on separate aspects, but you focus on the whole company.
- You think of health as a strategic issue.
- There is a whole health culture instead of a few policies.
- The individual aspects of the health policies together are much stronger than each individual aspect.
- It’s about health culture as well as health policy.
Benefits of experimental research
- You can make causal inferences
- You know quite certainly that the manipulation causes the effects that you measured
Use of longitudinal research
- Longitudinal relationships of health policy on job satisfaction, burnout and sickness absence
- In one study there was a mediation between the relationship between health policy and dedication
Causal inference in longitudinal research
- To what extent can you make causal inferences in longitudinal research?
- It is not so clear cut
- You can have some idea of what causes what but you can never say it’s the real cause because you can never exclude that there are alternative explanations possible. Even if you control for the baseline
What is the benefit of combining effect evaluation and process evaluation when evaluation an intervention?
That you can examine the exposure to the intervention, to what extent does that help predict outcomes.
Can you examine mediation in a cross-sectional study?
Yes, but then you need a theoretical aspect to make clear what the independent variable is, what the dependent variable is and what the mediator is.
What is better, a confirmatory factor analysis or a factor analysis? And why?
A confirmatory factor analysis is better than a factor analysis because you can state what leads to what and what separate construct are, and then test to what extent your theory is aligned with the data you found.
What is often the best way to examine longitudinal data?
A complete panel design
OR ratio
- Odds ratio
- The odds that is happens compared to the odds that it doesn’t happen, it’s a ratio
- Used in logistic regression, which you use if the dependent variable is a dichotomous variables
o Working fewer hours is either true (= 1) or not (= 0) - It’s significant if it’s < 1 or > 1
- If it’s < 1 it is negatively related
- If it’s > 1 it is a positive relationship
