HR, Learning and Performance

Not sure how I've managed to miss this, but there's an excellent report in the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge Series by Amy Edmondson, someone whose work is always worth listening to and I've often cited her publications in the past. In this Q and A session, she decribes her research journey into organizational learning and learning organizations over a fifteen year period following an earlier career as an OD practitioner. One of the key messages she has taken from it is the tension between the need for organizations to learn in order to survive in the long run and the short term problems learning creates for performance because such learning frequently involves making errors and, more importantly, acknowledging in public the errors you have made. This tension is a difficult one for managers to handle in most arenas so the tendency is to go for the short term performance gains at the expense of learning because of the typical basis on which their performance is managed and rewarded. Nowhere is this more evident than in the frequently reported and experienced clashes between short term target achievement in the NHS and long term organizational success. Edmonson's work is particularly appropriate in this context because her early research was set in a clinical context.


Edmonson describes the challenge for managers as two-fold:

'One is to become team leaders who promote open discussion, trial and error and the pursuit of new possibilities in the groups they directly influence. The other is to work hard to build organizations to produce extraordinary teamwork and learning behaviours'.

These challenges are part of the message of the papers and reports I've been discussing on engagement in the last few blogs. It is also a message we are delivering in a new paper we're (myself, Paul Gollan and Kerry Grigg) writing on how employer branding can and should contribute to the innovation agenda. Talent management, employer branding and engagement have traditionally been aimed at building human capital in organizations, focusing on the beliefs, values, attitudes, competences and behaviours of individuals. However, as much of the research on innovation has shown, it is the creation of social capital (building bridges, bonds and trust in teams and organizations) that is the necessary condition for organizational learning and innovation. Edmondson's work over the last decade and a half begins to show how this can be achieved.

Even Newer (but Mildly Disappointing) Perspectives on Engagement

Having just reviewed an excellent academic paper on engagement in the previous blog, I was interested to see what would be the outcome of the UK government sponsored McLeod Review of employee engagement. This review is the outcome of almost a year long study by two Government appointed practitioners who have taken evidence from a range of senior executives, some academics and leaders of professional organizations with an interest in the topic. The outcome is a 150 page report on what engagement means, why it matters, barriers to an engaged workforce, how engagement might be made to work and a series of recommendations for making it work in all sectors of the economy.

While there is much to commend this report, and I'm sure it will get lots of press coverage, I have to say I'm mildly disappointed with the outcome. For the novice manager (and chief executive who still 'doesn't get it' -I can't believe it), it will serve as a useful introduction to the topic and provide some pointers on how to get it, but for the experienced HR professional it tells us little that is new. Nor, paradoxically, is it likely to have much impact on practice. By going for breadth (i.e.trying to engage as many mainly practitioner views on the subject as possible together with lots of randomly selected case illustrations), it lacks the kind of depth needed to really move the issue forward (i.e the insights that a good critical analysis and theoretically sound treatment that the topic deserves, e.g. the Balain and Sparrow white paper). It also exhibits a number of the failings the previous blog identified as characteristic of the engagement 'industry' - conceptually unclear, lacking in hard, predictive evidence, no clear logic of the antecedents and consequences of engagement, etc.

So, though this report certainly deserves to be read, did we really need a year long study of this kind to tell us what most managers have known for a long time (listen to the video introduction by David McLeod)? Maybe I expected too much for our money?

New Perspectives on Engagement

Last week I had a very productive time doing some work with a large multinational company based in Zurich which is doing some really interesting work on employer branding and HR strategy – hello Saskia, Paulo and team. Like all organizations operating in a multinational context, they are struggling with the integration-responsiveness problem discussed in the last blog, which, in part, turns on the need to have employees identify and ‘engage’ with the organization globally and locally. Engagement has become one of the hot topics among HR practitioners, driven mostly by the management consulting industry’s desire to re-invent, re-package and re-fresh tired old ideas that have been around for many years in the academic community such as satisfaction, commitment, organizational citizenship and identity, and psychological contracting, and link them statistically to appealing notions such as share price increases, financial performance and a range of other outcomes.
In a chapter of a book we wrote on corporate reputations and HR in 2006, we criticised this arguably naive and perhaps even cynical attempt by consulting firms to re-invent the wheel and to do so in a with a lack of rigour that hardly justified the huge amounts of money being spent on this new ‘industry’. We examined a number of such approaches and found little or no agreement on what the meant by engagement, a significant problem in its own right; nor was the evidence particularly compelling since it was based on a lack of identifiable and sound logic connecting the precursors of engagement to engagement itself and onwards to the outcomes claimed for it. Our argument in the form of a question in that chapter was: why not use some of the more rigorous work on psychological contracting, citizenship etc., that has been around for a number of years and build in some of the newer ideas of the engagement industry to improve their utility? In part, we were basing our arguments on a book produced by Paul Sparrow and Cary Cooper in 2003, so it is with great interest we read a new working paper by Paul and one of his colleagues, Shashi Balain to be found on the website of Lancaster University’s Centre for Performance-led HR.
In this paper they begin with a section on why engagement is becoming so important to practitioners, arguing that it has served three functions: as an internal marketing process to sell complex change to the workforce; as a means of linking employee motivations and committed behaviour to process improvement; and as a predictor of service and organizational performance, usually in the form of a variation on the well known ‘service-profit’ chain. Like our own chapter, they proceed to evaluate the consultancy attempts to develop ‘theories’ of engagement, claiming that the research designs used do not allow them to infer that their own versions of engagement cause performance improvements, that there is little construct validity in what they choose to define and measure as engagement, and that they all use different items to measure what they describe as engagement. Though some promising work in proving useful statistical relationships has been produced by some of the consulting firms, it lacks strong logical basis and argument as why their versions of engagement should be linked to individual and organizational outcomes, and is thus unlikely to be helpful to HR practitioner seeking to manage the process.
Balain and Sparrow suggest an extremely useful way forward to make the concept more useful. They argue that HR directors in specific companies need to reverse engineer the type of performance that an organization is trying to create, in much the same way as the book previously reviewed by Becker et al does. What is it that we are asking employees to engage with at an individual level and organizational level? In answering these questions they produce a model of antecedents of engagements (job characteristics, perceived organizational support, leadership, reward and recognitions, procedural fairness and trust), which leads to strong performance bonds (individual and organizational identification, internalisation of company values, psychological ownership, etc), leading to conditions of engagement (i.e. job engagement and organizational engagement) , which result in important individual and group level outcomes (e.g. motivation, discretionary effort, commitment, improved group and organizational morale, organizational citizenship, etc). One of the key points of this model is that it makes use of well-known and validated scales. Another is that it is necessarily more complicated than most of the overly-simplified consulting models.
A further, extremely important point they make is that there is no single organizational performance recipe. The potential contribution that employee engagement makes in different organizations is likely to differ, so why should engagement have the same performance impact across different service models? To reinforce this point, they identify four different service models from the marketing literature - personal v non personal service, encounter v relationships, collaborative v single service relationship and B2B and B2C interactions – all of which are likely to make different demands on what and who employees need to be engaged with . Their claim is that HR directors have a ‘fantastic opportunity’ to really get under the skin of engagement in their own organizations by developing more complex understandings and models of engagement that apply to their specific circumstances. Two key questions they need to address is: what are they asking their employees to engage with, and what beliefs, attitudes, intentions and behaviours do we require of them to engage. To make the construct more useful to practitioners, HRDs need to identify the performance belief – ‘a shared belief of a team that it has the required ability, resources, goal clarity and leadership attributes to achieve the desired performance outcomes’ (p 38). The performance belief is the cause, while being engaged to perform is the effect. Answering these questions allows HRDs to manage engagement more effectively, but this requires them to measure different things from the standard attitude or engagement survey, which Balain and Sparrow begin to describe. Here they need to do a little more work. Overall, however, the general arguments in the paper are excellent and take us a lot further in understanding engagement than anything else I’ve read so far. There is still a need to do some tight editing and crisping up of the arguments to make them more accessible to most practitioners, but this paper is certainly the best place to begin for serious work in this burgeoning field.

In visiting this excellent site you will find other papers of interest and also a survey on HR in tough times that Paul would like you to help him out with.

Linking Employer Branding to Strategic HRM and Customer-based Reputation

I'm working on a couple of projects just now, which require me to focus on some of the problems involved in employer branding in multinational environments. I've also just finished an enjoyable exercise acting as a judge on Personnel Today's employer branding awards, which has caused me to reflect on the criteria for assessing and measuring the impact of employer brands. With both of these projects in mind, there are a couple of good sources of material that may be worth looking at if you are working in this field as a reflective practitioner ( I've got a few people in mind when writing this blog) or academic. One source I've written myself with Susan Hetrick ( I'm saying this is good but I'm not really the best judge of that); another is in the recent edition of the British Journal of Management. These works are written mainly for academics in the field but are accessible and useful for those who want to get beyond the usual homilies or lack ofevidence-based practice that characterised much of the employer branding literature.

Our piece is entitled 'Employer branding and corporate reputations in an international context' (pages 293-320) and can be found in the new 'bible' edited by Paul Sparrow on 'Handbook of International Human Management: Integrating People, Processes and Context' published by John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, UK, 2009. This chapter sets out a model of employer branding in an international context and illustrates some of the problems of negative capabilities associated with 'thinking global and acting local' using a case from the financial services sector. In the case we argue the need for authenticity in employer branding to favour the local rather than the current fashion for global. More of this in later blogs, because this issue gets to the heart of strategic HRM and employer branding in international contexts, the subject of a forthcoming paper by myself, Paul Gollan and Kerry Grigg.

The second extremely useful source is an excellent if somewhat parsimonious attempt to provide a theory of customer-based reputations (C-bR), written to explain the basis on which customers attribute positive reputations to companies and what such reputations lead to in terms of important outcomes. The paper by Walsh, Mitchell, Jackson and Beatty in the British Journal of Management current edition and the core argument is that customer satisfaction and customer trust in the organizations drive positive (and negative) customer-based reputation attributions. In turn, C-bR causes customers to be more loyal (CL) and to produce high levels of customer advocacy through word-of-mouth (WM). The authors show highly significant links among these variables, especially among C-bR and its consequences for CL and WM.


I'm sure I can learn from this parsimony in two ways, largely because my own attempts to explain the causes and consequences of employer branding are so complicated and cannot easily be tested. The first way is to ask the question: what are the workforce and HR antecedents or drivers of customer satisfaction and customer trust? This is likely to lead us into a refinement of the logic of the 'three compellings' from the Sears service-profit chain, a favourite example of many who wish to demonstrate links between satisfied employees, satisfied customers and profits. So, you might expect that employee satisfaction, employee commitment and employee engagement might by related in some way, together with the authenticity of the employer brand, to drive trust in organizations and their leaders (see CV Harquail's application of authenticity to personal branding for an idea of where I'm going).

The other use of this model is to translate the variables into employer branding language. So, you might expect that high levels of employee satisfaction, commitment and engagement, and high levels of trust on the part of employees in the organization and its leaders may drive Employee-based reputation (Eb-R). In turn high Eb-R is likely to result in key outcomes such as employee loyalty/ intention to remain and to word-of-mouth advocacy of the organization, the latter of which is so important to our current project for the NHS.

Although this line of reasoning has been pursued by Gary Davies and Rosa Chun from Manchester Business School in a number of recent articles, the ideas from the Walsh et al paper do suggest how their work could be developed.

When I've worked through some of these ideas a little more, I'll put these up for consideration in a further blog.

Dealing with 'Negative Capabilities' in Strategic HR: Social Capital and Corporate Branding versus Human Capital and Segmentation

The notion of negative capabilities, often attributed to the poet John Keats, refers to the ability to work with issues that can't be resolved and the need to keep an open mind. W. Scott Fitzgerald, a famous American writer, dubbed this a sign of intelligence - being able to hold two or more inconsistent ideas in your head simultaneously and still work with them. Such an intelligence is one that HR practitioners need to develop in spades, especially when dealing with the paradoxes and tensions manifested in the 'think global, act local' mantra of many organizations - and not just multinational ones. Unfortunately, most organizations treat this as a problem to be solved rather than resolved by drawing on packaged solutions, which usually create further and potentially worse problems down the line.

Two such examples of these HR paradoxes are the corporate (global) employer brand versus segmented employer brand issue and the decision-making over whether to put your money behind social capital (teams and organizations) versus human capital (talent and stars), which has been at the heart of the talent management controversy for the last decade or so. For the purposes of this blog I've conflated them because they naturally link together. As I mentioned in the last post, I've been working with a group of excellent HR managers from a Swedish-based multinational, all of whom come from different countries and different business units within the one corporate entity. Our job has been to raise our game, individually and collectively, by learning to think more strategically and more corporately, which turns out to be another negative capability. To that end I've been helping them learn and in doing so learning myself about what strategic HR might mean in their context. So I drew on a number of new books and research from the US that offer excellent insights into this question. These books offer sound, evidence-based practical advice of the kind that most consulting manuals don't. However, they still need to be treated with a certain caution in complex situations because of the potential problems created by an unreflective application of heavy doses of human capital and segmentation. The one that seems to summarise this more than any other is the new blockbuster by Brian Becker, Mark Huselid and Richard Beatty on the Differentiated Workforce, which encapsulates a number of messages from solid, research-based work by these authors themselves and others. The others are Boudreau and Ramstad's 'Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital', Cascio and Boudreau's book on Investing in People: the Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives(reviewed in the last blog), and the work on HR architectures by my good friend, now returned to Rutgers to work with Mark Huselid, David Lepak.


Being US in origin, these books are strong on prescriptions, especially the new Becker et al book. One such prescription is that HR begins with understanding the strategy and environment - the strategy map - of the organization, and not its people, which is where most HR specialists are likely to begin - a 'trained incapacity' often used to beat HR over the head with. Incidentally, this is a view that the high priest of strategy, Michael Porter, would endorse but not so resource-based strategy theorists who argue for a more inside-out approach to these issues. A second prescription is the need for sound logics and the need measure. All of these works are especially strong in making a case for causal measurement rather than best practice, benchmarking and scorecards. This, they argue is single most important activity that HR can do to prove its credibility with senior managers - being able to identify and predict the strategic outcomes of HR initiatives. A third and probably the tie that binds these books and research more than any other is the need for greater segmentation of the workforce, which is to use the power law (80/20 rule) to focus on those 'A roles and players', 'pivotal positions', or 'core' segments of workforce that add most value, exhibit most performance variation (the range of performance variation between the best and worst performers in very high), and which are relatively unique. The Differentiated Workforce is particularly strong on these messages, the logic (though not the intent) of which leads us further and further away from any notion of global, including corporate strategies, corporate employer brands and global value propositions, global employer of choice approaches etc. Indeed, the authors repeat their 2005 message in the 'Workforce Scorecard' that adopting employer of choice approaches are a recipe for mediocracy - an argument and rail against 'best practice' that I mostly agree with. In essence the logic, and in one case the title of these works, is to attribute strategic performance and capabilities to human capital in the form of individual roles, people, pivotal points etc, and workforce segmentation.


However, in working though these ideas with the HR group in Sweden, we constantly came up against problems with this logic, one of which is that human capital and segmentation divide organizations. The line pursued by Boris Groysberg from Harvard with increasing sophistication over the last five years on why the focus on stars can be bad for business is testament to this excess focus on human capital. A second problem is that human capital and segmentation is rooted in a US centric view of equity that does not always translate into the more equality-conscious continental European mindset. A third, related problem is the over-attribution of performance to human capital rather than social capital, which can be defined in terms of the bonds between people, the internal and external networks or bridges they build, and the extent of trust needed in organizations, especially networked organizations, to survive and prosper. As excellent research in the field of innovation by Subramaniam and Youndt has shown, it it social capital more than human capital that accounts for transformative innovation; at the very least these have to be seen as complementarity forms of capital assets.

Some of these features of social capital were beautifully illustrated during a factory tour we had in the plant where the group and I were working. The fact that manufacturing was been conducted at all in this very Swedish plant was bucking the trend towards off-shoring to Eastern Europe or Asia, although it was high-end batch production rather than mass production. One of the reasons why the design, development and manufacturing of a family of products was so successful (and successful it is) seemed to be down to the focus on design, development and manufacturing based on social capital (i.e. involving customers, designers, shop floor workers in the interative design and development process, flexible manufacturing based on autonomous work groups, extensive job rotation and group training so that everyone could do everyone else's job, investment in work life balance and flexitime to engage the workforce, etc etc). In other words, it was the system and social capital that seemed to be important rather than any notion of A players, pivotal positions, valuable and unique segments.

All of which brings me back to the broader issues raised in the title of this blog. The logic of these books, excellent though they are, is of human capital and segmentation. And it is a compelling logic. However, it doesn't sit easily with the equally compelling logics of investment in social capital and the need for a reflective and reflexive corporateness (corporate strategy, branding, identity, value system) that considers and is influenced by what goes on at local levels. One way of working with these negative capabilities is to treat them as complementary, not competing, assets. What that might mean in practice is to do what most organizations don't do, which is to begin with and even privilege the local rather than the global to ensure ideas - brands, strategies, values, etc., ring true among employees and managers at business unit levels - in other words to privilege authenticity. Arguably from the perspective of organizations, whether or not we have high levels of human capital is not really so important to organizations; what is important, especially for innovative organizations. is how human capital and identity feeds forward into group learning and team-building and then into organizational learning and organizational identification. In other words, by building on what is locally authentic and on evidence of good local practice (maybe even created by A players who aren't 'assholes'? - see the book by Robert Sutton) we learn to develop social capital, organizational IQ, corporate strategies, and authentic corporate and employer brands.

Evaluating Investments in HR

For many HR practitioners being able to provide a logical business case and proper evaluation that links HR investment to key financial outcomes would represent a huge step forward for their credibility. Yet, it is a fact that we typically spend large sums of money implementing leadership development programmes, talent management, employer branding etc, and almost nothing on assessing their strategic impact. In part, this is because we believe that it is impossible to measure intangibles - what's meaningful isn't measurable and what's measurable isn't usually meaningful. So we justify our actions on the basis of acts of faith or attempt to persuade senior managers with arguments along the best practice, 'everyone is doing it', so 'we don't want to be left behind' lines (often following attendance at some networking event). Unreflective copying and jumping on the bandwagon, alongside legal requirements (themselves often based on 'best practice'), are the main drivers and justification for spending vast sums of money on 'soft' initiatives. This is why institutional theorists argue most organizations and their HR architectures end up looking the same, and, as the more perceptive strategists point out, where is the competitive advantage (or even best practice) in that?

So it is with some relief (not total) that I've picked up two recent American books. One, the Differentitated Workforce' by Becker, Huselid and Beatty, I will leave for a later post because it is more mainstream and I'm currently testing some of their ideas with a group of great HR managers from Getinge as we speak. The other is Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau's 'Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives'. This book is probably the best I've read in the field, in part because it deals with measures in a sophisticated way, in part because it not so much a book about measures but about understanding the logics that link strategic decisions to human capital initiatives and their outcomes. John Boudreau is a 'name' on the HR circuit following his book in 2007 on 'Beyond HR', while Wayne Cascio I know from my time working at the University of Colorado where he teaches and researches. Wayne wrote one of the first books on measuring HR and this works represents the culmination of a long career in introducing rationalism into the HR profession.

For me, the highlights of their book are three-fold. The first is the LAMP framework, which states that you can only use HR metrics as a force for strategic change if you have the right logic (that link your measures to competitive advantage, pivotal points through causal modelling, etc), the right measures (timely, reliable and available data) the right analytics (good questions and analysis of data) and the right processes (good knowledge management in the organization and a culture that supports learning, not just assessment, from measurement).

The second is the use of yield curves to examine the types of jobs (and people) where firms should invest their money for the greatest return. Boudreau tackled this in his earlier book and the book by Becker et al also make great play of this very important point that it is the range of performance variation in jobs (the difference between best performance and poor performance) that helps determine this yield. The most quoted example is Disney: where do you put your money for greatest return ie satisfied customers, Mickey Mouse or the street sweepers who are key customer relations people? The answer is for a small extra investment in selecting and developing street sweepers you get an enormous yield in satisfied customers because their performance varies so much; investing more in the characters playing Mickey Mouse etc is unlikely to yield such returns because the performance variation in these characters has been effectively drilled out so that one Mickey Mouse is no different to another. You can apply this analogy in healthcare, education and many other jobs - well worth thinking about.

The third key element is the focus on causal modelling and logic. This is fast becoming de rigeur among sophisticated HR functions and forms part of a project we are conducting for the Scottish Governement and ESRC. The core argument is that organizations need to develop the right logic linking their HR practices to business unit or strategic peformance. Sounds logical but it is not what most organizations do, judging by the use made of engagement models and engagement data in the firms I observe. So if you are involved in assessing employee engagement, just reading the chapter on the logics of engagement (derived from sound evidence-based academic research) will be worth your time and money alone.

Two words of warning. This is not an easy read for the more mathematically challenged, but don't be put off because the arguments are the most important element in the book (and you can always employ a statistician). Second, it begins to sound a little like best practice by railing against best practice, just like the Becker et al book I'll discuss next. I'm always worried by the idea there is only one way or the highway approaches to HR, which this is close to becoming. There are some important assumptions and simplifications in this book that just don't stand close scrutiny. For all that, this is one of the HR books of the year for me, and I will use it extensively in teaching and consulting.

Why Leaders Change Things, Often with No Impact

The leadership seminar we did for the ESRC and Scottish Government yesterday provided me with an excellent explanation for why leaders’ desire to change things often results in no significant progress (but plenty of change fatigue and rewards for leaders). I’m grateful to Keith Grint for pointing me in the direction of this interesting piece of research over a cup of tea prior to the seminar.

(By the way, if you want access to what we talked about, here’s the publication we produced for the seminar with the help of Chris Blunkell, the ESRC and Scottish Government. It will be posted shortly).

Back to the story - a group of Israeli researchers shed new light on these issues, drawing from the art of goalkeeping in soccer [Bar-Eli, Michael, Azar, Ofer H., Ritov, Ilana, Keidar-Levin, Yael and Schein, Galit (2006): "Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks," in: Journal of Economic Psychology].

Here’s how one blogger, Elli Malki, from the financial services industry described the research because the analogy has been used before (and she summarises the article well saving me from doing it).

‘ The researchers examined a very unique situation in soccer games—penalty kicks. From a behavioral point of view, penalty kicks have several unique characteristics:
ln most cases, the penalty kick ends with a goal being scored, thus having a significant effect on the result of the game.
An experienced goalkeeper has faced many penalty kicks and thus is expected to know how to react to them.
From the moment of the kick, it takes 0.2-0.3 seconds until the ball reaches the goal. Thus, the goalkeeper cannot know in advance what will be the direction of the kick and must choose the direction of his jump based on his past experience.
As a result of these characteristics, a penalty kick is a type of a "natural experiment" in which it is possible to examine the choices made by the goalkeepers under uncertainty. Since soccer players' compensation is dependent on the performance of their team, the result of the goalkeeper's choice will not only affect the result of the particular game, but also the long-term prospects for himself and for his team.
The researchers examined 286 documented penalty kicks from games of top soccer teams. For each one of the penalty kicks, a group of three qualified referees was asked to determine: (1) the direction of the kick; (2) the direction of goalkeeper's jump.

The results are presented in Table 1 and Table 2 in the original paper.


To summarise, Table one showed that the directions of the kicks were almost uniformly distributed. About 1/3 of the kicks were aimed to each one of the directions (left, right or center of the goal). On the other hand, the decisions of the goalkeepers were biased toward jumping to either the left or the right side of the goal. Only in just over 6% of the penalty kicks did the goalkeeper choose to stay in the center of the goal.

Were the decisions of the goalkeepers rational? To answer this question, the researchers examined the success rate of the goalkeepers to stop the penalty kicks. Altogether, goalkeepers succeeded in stopping 42 penalty kicks—14.7% of all the kicks that were examined. The overall success rate of stopping penalty kicks is very low and most kicks result in a goal being scored. The results showed that there is no connection between the success rate in stopping the kick and the direction of the kick. The success rate is very similar regardless of the direction of the kick.
On the other hand, an analysis of the 42 successes showed that the success rate of staying in the center (e.g., doing nothing) was more than double than the success rate of jumping to either direction.

Thus it seems that the decision made by the goalkeepers in 94% of the cases—to jump either to the right or the left—was not rational, since it decreased their chances of stopping the penalty kick.

Why does it happen? The researchers provide the following explanation:

An identical negative outcome (a goal being scored) is perceived to be worse when it follows inaction rather than action. The intuition is that if the goalkeeper jumps and a goal is scored, he might feel "I did my best to stop the ball, by jumping, as almost everyone does; I was simply unlucky that the ball headed to another direction (or could not be stopped for another reason)." On the other hand, if the goalkeeper stays in the center and a goal is scored, it looks as if he did not do anything to stop the ball (remaining at his original location, the center)—while the norm is to do something—to jump. Because the negative feeling of the goalkeeper following a goal being scored (which happens in most penalty kicks) is amplified when staying in the center, the goalkeeper prefers to jump to one of the sides, even though this is not optimal.

And this explantion was confirmed by subsequent interviews with top professional goalkeepers

The researchers call this behavioural phenomenon an "action bias." (Elli Malki, http://www.indexuniverse.com/sections/research/4801-what-can-investors-learn-from-goalkeepers.html?start=1&Itemid=7)

Elli’s concern was the relationship between and action-bias and investment decisions. However, the authors of the article also point out implications for management, the most obvious one being why leaders change things (even when doing nothing would be the right course of action). When an action-bias is couple with significant rewards for changing things, as is often the case under modern day performance management, appraisal and pay systems, this action-bias is likely to be magnified substantially – ‘ leaders change things, they do not maintain’ goes the clarion call and is given further credence by the often made distinction between management (who do maintain) and leaders. Yet, often this action bias, motivated and sustained by the rewards system, leads to little else other than the creation of further problems, which, yes, you’ve guessed it, requires a further action bias. The result is, as Keith Grint pointed out, 25 years of constant structural change in the NHS has resulted in no change. We’re pretty much where we were at the beginning.

Bruce Ahlstrand made a similar point in a book many years ago revisiting productivity bargaining at the Esso Fawley Plant, made famous by Alan Flanders book in the 1960s (for the old industrial relations scholars). Twenty-five years of productivity bargaining from 1960 onwards implemented by frequent changes in HR leadership resulted in Esso Fawley remaining bottom of the productivity league table, exactly where it began in the early 19060s. He attributed this to a performance appraisal system that rewarded change, a failure to monitor the results of the changes but people being promoted on the basis of introducing change. New appointees were stuck with the same problem (because the unions learned new tricks to re-invent them) so naturally they came up with the same solution, albeit in a different guise. So, there's definitely something in the old saying, "the more things change, the more they remain the same'.