Rankings and Motivation – Why You Need to Read This Blog

I had a whole ‘nother post planned (or at least considered – it was all done, I just needed to write it) but I saw a tweet from @BobCorlett ths morning linking to an article on the Wharton site with this headline:

Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire

And this rather blunt conclusion:

“’Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens,’ says Barankay,…”

Those kinds of statements get my attention.  I know for a #fact that social norms, consensus and relative status DOES affect performance and behavior.  It has been proven (as much as any psychological/sociological theory can be proven) in many studies (see Cialdini Influencers here.) 

Let me recap the results:

• When given the choice of getting feedback on their relative ranking or not, workers chose NO feedback 3:1 over getting feedback.  
   
• In a second experiment to test whether workers who were shown rankings wanted to more work versus those that weren’t shown relative rankings, 66% of those that were NOT ranked came back for work versus 42% who were ranked.  The author then concludes that ranking decreases desire for more work.  Additionally, he noted that workers who were ranked were 22% less productive in future work than those that weren’t ranked.

Pretty interesting results and if taken at face value many companies and managers may start to question whether reporting relative rankings is an effective lever for influencing behavior.

But… I don’t think it’s valid…

Here’s why you need to read this blog – ‘cuz I read this stuff maybe a bit closer than the average bear.  If you read the study and look at the process they used to pick their study population you’ll see they used something called “Mechanical Turk.”  A description of this service from the article:

“His study involved 330 employees recruited via Mechanical Turk, Amazon.com's "crowd-sourcing" platform for work conducted and submitted online. Employers post jobs on the website's listings section -- most of which involve piecemeal, routine work, such as organizing photos, writing or editing text, and basic data entry. Prospective employees scroll through the list and select a task they want to complete.

When workers, also called "turkers," click on a job, they are led to a web page that presents a set of tasks. After completing the tasks, a worker can decide whether to continue on to the next job. The jobs typically pay $.03 to $.50 per task, and tasks usually take between a few minutes to an hour to complete. Among the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.”

So… the big problem?

Relative rankings (social proof, consensus in other words) is a “social” behavior influencer.  In other words you need to be part of a social group (sales department in a company, sales in general as an occupation, etc.) In order for social influencers to work you kinda need the social thing – you need to identify with or connect with those that you’re being compared to.

This experiment, for all intents and purposes REMOVED the one thing that makes relative rankings work – the SOCIAL aspect of comparing performance.

Let me put it this way – 

I CARE if you compare my blog writing skills to other blog writers (especially if narrow it down to those that I follow and respect) 

I DON’T CARE if you compare my blog writing skills to a high-school English teacher who writes short stories on the weekend.  Why would I care?  He/she is too far removed from my identity for me to give a rip how well I compare.

That’s what the Mechanical Turk population is – a rag-tag group of people with no social connection that search for work online.  Who knows what their real skill sets are?  Why would Bobby in Alabama, who fixes cars for a living, care if he did a better job categorizing photos than Mary in Poughkeepsie, who is a social media maven?  There’s no connection – other than that specific, free-lance job – and that ain’t enough.  That’s transactional, not social.

The Key Learning?

• First of all – read these studies carefully and think about them for few minutes.  Invest some time in the analysis.
   
• Second… read my blog more often and recommend it to your friends (this reduces your need to do the first thing on this list)
   
• Third… if you have very disconnected people with very different backgrounds, identities and social groups – relative rankings won’t be a big influence lever.
   
• However, if you have a group of people who identify with each other and see themselves as similar in nature – relative rankings are still a very, very effective behavior influencer.

What do you think – is this a valid way to review this research?  

I care what you think and how I think relative to you.

Comments

[Kurt Nelson]

Paul,

I find that we tend (me included) to quickly look at a blog or a study, find the key conclusions of that blog or study, say yes, pass it on or retweet it and then move on. Critical thinking skills are not ofter used (although I think they are required even more these days - and sadly, not really being taught as much as they should). Part of that critical thinking requires that we slow down and take the time to "think about them for a few minutes." Thus I really like your key learning number 2 - read your blog since it does the heavy, time consuming jobs for us...

Thanks again for some great thought starters this week...

Kurt

[Jen Turi]

Great post that made me think. I agree that it only matters to me if I am compared to a peer. Otherwise the comparison makes no sense. There is huge value in reading studies carefully, absorbing, and considering the agenda before deciding that a study provided genuine results. Thanks for the insight.

[Paul Hebert]

Funny thing is I almost hit the rt button while I was reading the blog. It took me a few minutes to process. Even a few minutes adds a lot of perspective to our thinking. Unfortunately, we're hearing more and more speed is the new black and we need to inject some slow in our fast.

[Paul Hebert]

My pleasure and thanks for reading and stopping buy.

[Scott Crandall]

Paul --- Based on my first hand experience, I think rankings are a crock.
Unless they are completely (is that possible?) objective, my observation is there are so many disparate agendas wrapped around the ranking process that I think they're invalid on their face.
So -- socially connected or not -- I reject any validity whatsoever around rankings. However, as usual, great post and a thoughtful analysis of the other findings.

[Scott Crandall]

Paul --- Just went out to read the article on the research.
I think the ranked work was less popular (desirable) because of the same thing I said above: I think most workers inherently reject rankings as NOT being objective or accurate as to the real quality of their work. So while it's probably nice if you rank high, perhaps you suspect it's about something besides quality of work, while those rank low are sure of the same thing.
While in vogue since the mid-'90s (?), I wonder how well rankings have done to foster engagement, pick the winners from the also-rans, the As from the Bs from the Cs, etc. My guess is it's another business fad down in flames. Again, great post.

[Paul Hebert]

Thanks Scott for weighing in. While I agree with the idea that many ranking systems are patently unfair and subjective - the need to establish our "ranking" is still a viable and important psychological principle. The key point I was trying to make was that without the "social" part of the equation rankings - done correctly or poorly - won't be effective. However, a well-designed ranking system still has profound affects on people's internal need to know where they are relative to the norm (and how they can be above it!).

Even simple ranking systems - class rank based on GPA, baby weight/height charts - we all want to be as everyone in Lake Wobegone is - "above average." Just human nature.