 René Van Someren
EMOP as a leadership/followership guide: #2 / 5 - Height
Prevent hindsight bias and incongruity at different organisational levels.
Data from an entire group, such as from an organisation, tends to be less valuable than the same data from that same group, classified, such as by different organisation levels.
A group as a whole may, on average, have certain views on a certain matter. Often, it is more interesting to know if there are subgroups with mutually different views.
For instance, within an organisation, it is good to know to what extent group members experience work related stress. It may be even more informative to know that part of the group experiences significantly more work related stress than others do.
For leaders, it may be less valuable to know how they feel about a certain issue then knowing how their followers feel about that issue. In this example, it may be more valuable if leaders would know to what extent their followers experience work related stress.
Such information, received from followers, is often retrospective. For example: work related stress has, or has not developed. It would be good if leaders could develop a proper sense of their followers’ views, needs and sentiments. This would allow them to take more immediate action, or even take precautionary measures to prevent negative organisational developments.
Leaders may try to compare their followers’ reported stress levels with how they had perceived those levels to be. However, this carries the risk of hindsight bias: misremembering earlier thoughts. Often ones mind wants to match new information with ones earlier expectations of that information. Consequently, we wrongly believe that we knew or expected something.
We can reduce the risk of hindsight bias, by writing down our expectations before receiving actual data. In our example, we could ask non-managerial workers to what extent they experience work related stress and at the same time ask their supervisors, leaders and executives how they believe non-managerial workers experience work related stress.
Doing so, not only with regard to work related stress, but also with all relevant organisational aspects, would not only reduce the risk of hindsight bias, but it would also allow you to detect goal incongruity, mismatching expectations and differences in needs perception between organisational levels.
Collecting data at different organisational levels with non-managerial workers as the unit of analysis, can help detect goal incongruity, mismatching expectations and differences in needs perception between organisational levels, and reduce hindsight bias.
For instance, leaders could ask their followers: “To what extent do you understand what your leader expects from you?” and compare their answers to the answer to the question posed to leaders: “To what extent do your followers understand what you expect from them?”
If leaders are well attuned to their followers, then the answers of leaders match those of their followers. The extent to which answers to such questions match between organisational levels can serve as a measure of leadership effectiveness and sometimes also of organisational effectiveness.*
Collecting data at different organisation levels and looking at how those data relate to one another, may yield very valuable and often surprising information. This may shed light on matters, such as differences between strategic leaders’ perceptions and those of tactical leaders, and differences between perceptions of non-managerial workers and those of their managers.
When there is a mismatch between organisation members of goals, expectations and needs, organisational effectiveness and efficiency will suffer.
Collecting data this way can help detect goal incongruity, mismatching expectations and differences in needs perception between organisational levels, and reduce hindsight bias.
*Organisations in which organisation members are not dependent on the quality of their leaders may be very effective despite ineffective leadership.
René Van Someren’s personal website is: www.rene.vansomeren.org
René Van Someren's blog
|
