Work Matters

Tag: randomness

  • Is It Sometimes Rational to Select Leaders Randomly? A Cool Old Study

    This term at Stanford, I am teaching a doctoral seminar on leadership.  Of course, this one of the broadest and most confusing topics on earth.  I am not qualified to teach a seminar on love or religion; so, for me, this is the most vexing topic I can teach.  The topic for the first meeting was "cynicism."  I started out by assigning academic papers that brought evidence and perspectives that undermined conventional assumptions about leadership and that even questioned why scholars bothered to study the topic at all (my friend and co-author Jeff Pfeffer raised this question in a 1977 paper called "The Ambiguity of Leadership").

    The most entertaining paper we read was by S. Alexander Haslam and a long list of coauthors, called  "Inspecting the emperor's clothes: evidence that random selection of leaders can enhance group performance" (Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998, pp. 168-184).  The two key studies in the paper entailed assigning student groups to play various versions of the "survival exercise" (see some of the variations here), where the group imagines that they have experienced some kind of disaster and are stranded (a plane crash, a broken car in the desert, and a nuclear war were used in these studies).  The group's task is to rank order the importance of a dozen or so items that might help them survive the ordeal (e.g., a compass, map,  loaded pistol, newspapers, cigarette lighter).  The performance of the group is determined by comparing their rank-ordering to those produced by experts.  This is, of course, just a simulation of reality.  But I've participated and led these exercises and they are quite engaging — I suspect many of you have had similar experiences. 

    Overall, the researchers compared the performance of these student groups under four conditions:

    1.  A leader selected via a formal selection process (self-ratings by group members)

    2. A leader selected by an informal process (group members had a discussion and picked a leader)

    3. A leader who was randomly selected.

    4. No leader selected. 

    The consistent finding was that groups with RANDOMLY selected members performed significantly better than groups in all other conditions, and there weren't significant differences found between the other conditions.  The researchers also did some follow-up surveys, and revealed some mildly interesting findings; notably, groups with randomly selected leaders rated their leaders as LESS effective even though their performance was BETTER.

    The authors assert that this rather surprising finding — which was fairly strong and replicated across two (albeit modest) studies — occurs because performance on this task requires cooperation, input, and effort from all group members.  They suggest that the very act of selecting one individual, of singling him or her out as better than the rest or simply focusing attention on that person, undermines the group's sense of unity and shared identity. They suggest that doing so may lead to social loafing.   As they put it, in describing the impact of a contest for the "best" leader:

      'In effect, their thoughts about the leader may have been of the form "if you're so wonderful, you can get on with it.' 

    I am still not entirely sure that these arguments are right, but I guess they make some sense (although they do not quite explain why groups that did not select leaders at all did equally badly — the researchers suggest this is because the leadership role is necessary).  Yet the study, imperfections aside, is provocative.  I like it because it challenges so many deeply held assumptions about groups and organizational life.  I especially like how it implies that just THE PROCESS of selecting the leader can provoke group dynamics that undermine the performance of the group as a whole.  That is worth considerable attention as this is something that selection committees and such often forget — and consistent with findings from many corners of the behavioral sciences that show "what you do is as important as how you do it."  Also, while the survival games probably do not generalize well to most tasks in organizational life, another possible implication is that, if you are doing a task where no one has any special expertise or experience, you might try randomly selecting your leader.

    What do you think? Does this have any implication in real life, or is it just one of those crazy studies that is irrelevant to real people and organizations?

    P.S. As veteran readers of this blog may remember, I have written about the virtues of randomness before; check out this post about Karl Weick's cool ideas about randomness and wisdom.

    P.P.S. Do not miss the link to the study from Arie below.  More evidence that randomly promoting people might work! Thanks Arie, fantastically weird.

     

  • Ig Nobel Prize Winner: If The Peter Principle is Right, Then Organizations Should Randomly Promote People

    The Ig Nobel Prize is given out by a group called Improbable Research, which celebrates "achievements that first make people laugh,
    and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate
    the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science,
    medicine, and technology."  The 2010 awards were handed out on September 30th, and one one of the doctoral students I work with, Isaac Waisberg, pointed out that one of the prizes was awarded to a simulation that demonstrated — if the Peter Principle is true — organizations would be better off promoting employees randomly rather than promoting people until they they reach their level of incompetence.  Isaac knew I was interested in The Peter Principle as I wrote the foreword to the 40th Anniversary edition. Here is a link to the PDF of the article and here is the abstract:

    The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study

    Authors:
    Alessandro Pluchino,
    Andrea Rapisarda,
    Cesare Garofalo

    In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an
    apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be
    summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization
    climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum
    incompetence'}. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would
    realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards
    the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical
    structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level,
    usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here
    we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features
    actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical
    structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields
    in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.
    Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies
    and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best
    ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote
    each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst
    members in terms of compete    nce    .

    This is just a simulation, not an empirical test. But the virtues of randomness are also found in an earlier experiment that showed groups that randomly selected leaders performed better than those that were asked to selected a leader from among their peers.  Here is the summary I wrote in Weird Ideas That Work:

    Further evidence for the virtues of
    making random decisions comes from a pair of experiments in Australia by S.
    Alexander Haslam and his colleagues. Their experiments compared the performance of
    small problem solving groups (3 to 5 people) that were asked to select their
    own leaders with groups that were randomly assigned a leader (i.e., a person
    whose name appeared either first or last in the alphabet).  These experiments involved 91 groups that
    worked on one of three closely related group decision-making exercises, the
    “winter survival task,” the “desert survival task,” or the “fallout survival
    task.”  Each of these small groups of
    college students developed a strategy for ranking potentially useful items for
    the particular task,  and their decisions
    were scored relative to expert ratings. 
    Both experiments showed that groups
    that had randomly assigned leaders performed significantly better than those
    that had selected their own leaders    . 
    Random assignment was shown to be superior to groups that had used
    either an informal  process where they
    selected leaders by “whatever means you see fit” or a formal process where each
    group member completed 10 self-report questions on a leadership skills
    inventory that had been shown to predict managerial success in prior
    studies.  Leaders who scored the highest
    on the inventory were assigned to lead groups that used the formal process.
    There were no significant differences between groups that used an informal or a
    formal process.  Both had inferior
    performance to groups with randomly selected leaders. 

    Haslam and his colleagues believe that
    the process of selecting a leader in these experiments focused attention on
    differences between group members, which undermined the group’s sense of shared
    identity and purpose, which in turn, undermined performance.  Instead of thinking about how to solve the
    problem together, or having a “united we stand, divided we fall” mentality,
    they thought about differences between them that were unrelated to the task —
    like who had more prestige in the group and why.  My interpretation is similar.  I would add that the leaders who are given a
    mandate to be in charge of a group often – without realizing – start imposing
    their individual will too strongly, which can stifle the range of ideas that
    are seriously considered by the group. 
    The researchers admit that they have suggested only one possible
    explanation for these findings, and acknowledge that a random process of
    selecting a leader is probably inferior to a systematic process for groups that
    do other tasks.  But these findings are
    intriguing because they force many of us – both practitioners and researchers
    –  to see an old problem in a new way,
    they spark the “vu ja de” mentality. 
    They suggest our     assumptions about how to select
    a leader may, at least at times, be flawed.

    I am not arguing that we ought to give-up and start selecting and promoting leaders randomly.  But it is interesting to consider randomness because doing so challenges our assumptions about the rationality of what we do in life  Indeed, speaking of randomness, last year I heard that Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (he won the real prize, not to Ig) was running a simulation that seemed to show that if the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were randomly reassigned to different companies, there would be no significant impact on firm performance.  I don't know what happened to that research, or even how accurate that rumor is, all I can find is this WSJ article where he chimes in on the subject.  If anyone knows more, please comment.

    P.S. The reference for the experiment is
    Haslam, S. A, C. McGarty, R. A. Eggins, 
    B. E. Morrison, & K. J. Reynolds, “Inspecting the Emperor’s Clothes:
    Evidence that Randomly Selected Leaders can Enhance Group Performance”,      Group
    Dynamics: Theory, Process and Research     2 (1998): 168-18

    P.P.S. For another post on randomness, check out this one about decision-making among the Nasakpai Indians.