Organizational effectiveness - More of the same or versatility?
Research by now is pretty consistent in identifying that individual factors are predictive of individual success. Cut out interviews and CV heavy recruiting processes and you´ll be fine. You can reduce risk and up your chances of getting that next star employee by being structured and use the right profiling method.
Research however have yet to dive deep into the question about team effectiveness and even more, organizational effectiveness. When you recruit your next cop-worker. Should it be someone that “fits” into your organization or do you need versatility? Perhaps someone that’s different from the rest of you?
If you read these blogs you might remember that passion is an inter connected trait. Meaning that if your manager values passion, then they ask passion of you. It has little to do with effectiveness or success. More a matter of taste.
In 2015 In-Sue Oh, Kim and Iddekinge conducted a meta study to address this gap by directly investigating the relationship between organizational-level emergence of personality and firm internal and external performance.
This was made based on data from 6,709 managers across 71 different firms. What they did was that they took the mean data and compared it to organizational performance.
It turns out that (in the charts below) teams with low variance in traits. People that have similar personalities perform better and they achieve job satisfaction better. Teams with high variance. People that are different from one another. Struggle to perform
Psychologically speaking this is not new. It might not be politically correct, but it is a fact that the better we understand our surrounding and the less energy we need to use to comply, the better we feel and perform. The unconscious tools that we use to structure our surroundings are many many and very sophisticated.
Does that mean that we should strive for more of the same in our organizations?
Yes in short, but there is more to it.
(For those of you that say that versatility is a requirement to achieve creativity, that is also not true. Creativity has to do with IQ levels and levels of openness)
Without profiling there is absolutely no way for you to know who fits in your organization. The risks of making a “gut-call” is so big that once you turn that risk into economic numbers, you would never allow it. Still that’s the common way of recruiting.
What we are looking at above is teams that have a low variance in neuroticism, continuousness and extraversion. These traits significantly predicts organizational-level managerial job satisfaction and labour productivity but not significantly predict financial performance.
There is ample evidence that organizations that use more rigourous selection practices perform better than organizations that do not. (Combs, Lui, Hall & Ketchen 2006; Huselid 1995)
There is tons of money to be saved using the Five Factor Model in recruiting AND identifying the present status of the group which is to receive and work together with a new colleague.
