Is this your first time, Doctor?

Topic: Training
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology
Article: Active learning: When is more better? The case of resident physicians’ medical errors.
Authors: T. Katz-Navon, E. Nevah, and Z. Stern
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

Active learning refers to a broad spectrum of training strategies in which individual trainees are encouraged to explore the learning environment, experiment with strategies, ask questions, and make many of the administrative decisions usually made by instructors in passive learning approaches (i.e., traditional classroom instruction).  Active learning places trainees in the driver’s seat of their own learning.  Sounds great, right?  But what if I told you that active learning strategies usually facilitate trainee errors?

Now, errors are not inherently “bad”.  In fact, encouraging trainees to make errors during training actually leads to improved learning and transfer of training.  Errors are considered “bad” when their consequences are bad (e.g., injury, death).  Should we then even consider active learning when such consequences are likely?

Katz-Navon, Nevah and Stern’s (2009) study of resident physicians suggests that even though healthcare errors can be disastrous, resident physicians often use active learning approaches.  Much of their training occurs on-the-job and in “high-stakes” situations (i.e., surgeries).  Thus, we arrive at a very serious dilemma: effective learning via active learning vs. safety.

Book Review

Topic: Book Reviews, Strategic HR, Measurement
Book Title: Investing in what matters: linking employees to business outcomes
Authors: Scott Mondore, Ph.D. and Shane Douthitt, Ph.D.

In SHRM’s recently published the book, “Investing in What Matters,” Scott Mondore, Ph.D. and Shane Douthitt, Ph.D. offer a process to understand the links between HR strategy  and business outcomes.  Below is Dr. Mondore’s overview of the book.

Organizations collect vast amounts of data from operations to people, but rarely do organizations bring this data together to discover how these data relate to each other. In addition, current economic conditions are demanding deep budget cuts—leaving HR departments with few tools to figure out where to cut and where to invest.  “Investing in What Matters” provides HR leaders with a straightforward process of six steps, that they can immediately implement, to allow them to create an HR strategy that is business-focused and based on expected ROI. With these steps, HR leaders will learn how to discover key business outcomes, show the link between HR data (training, surveys, competencies etc) to those business outcomes, execute programs that have an expected ROI and create a culture of measurement, analysis and adjustment going forward. 

The six steps in the Business Partner RoadMap process are:

1.     Determine Critical Outcomes (conduct stakeholder interviews with     

senior/functional leaders, examine the organization’s scorecards)

2.     Create a Cross-Functional Data Team (bring together data owners from across the 

organization to set up the analyses)

3.     Assess Outcomes Measures (make sure the data being looked at is measured at the 

same frequency and level within the organization)

4.     Analyze Data (use advanced statistical to show cause-and-effect relationships between 

HR data and business outcomes)

5.     Build Programs & Execute (create initiatives around the drivers of business outcomes—

based on expected ROI calculations)

6.     Measure and Adjust (re-analyze data on a regular basis to discover new drivers of 

business outcomes or tweak current programs)

In addition, the book provides ten key principles for HR leaders to adopt during this process as it is not always easy and it needs to stay completely focused on business outcomes:

What to do about the Failure-Focused Employee

Topic: Job Performance, Motivation
Publication: Human Performance
Article: Failure avoidance motivation in a goal-setting situation.
Author: S.R. Heimerdinger, V.B. Hinsz
Featured by: Benjamin Granger

Although it is known that employees who set specific and difficult goals tend to outperform those who set broad and relatively easy goals, different employees have differing motivational mindsets when they set their goals.

Some employees are motivated to learn and master skills.  Others are motivated to demonstrate their competence to others.  (“Those darn showoffs!”)  Interestingly, though, some employees are motivated, not by accomplishments, but to simply avoid failing.  In other words, when some employees set personal goals, they are focused on NOT FAILING as opposed to succeeding (e.g., “My goal is to NOT completely bomb this presentation!”).

This is known as failure avoidance motivation and despite being such an intriguing concept, it is somewhat unclear how it relates to performance.  So the question is: Are employees who set failure avoidance goals good performers?  Or are these failure avoidance goals detrimental to performance?

Heimerdinger and Hinsz (2008) investigated how and why failure avoidance motivation relates to performance.  The authors found that the motivation to avoid failure leads to a number of negative consequences.  Specifically, Heimerdinger and Hinsz found the individuals who are motivated to avoid failure tend to have less confidence in their ability (i.e., lower self-efficacy) and are also less likely to persist in the face of obstacles or difficulties (i.e., lower goal commitment).  Most importantly, they tend to be poor performers.