There’s a figurative store where the roads of Management and Psychology cross. The shelves up front have the new and shiny theory or practice. More likely than not, it will join the former new and shiny ideas in the dingy back of the store. Some are just flat out wrong and others are just a repackaging of what’s already out there. It’s kind of depressing in that the time would have been better spent working on something truly innovative.
A common theme of these books is denigrating the role of intelligence in employee selection. Let’s be clear—there is a mountain of research that shows that for most jobs, the smarter people (using Western measures of intelligence for doing jobs in Western economies) will perform better. And these tests are consistently better predictors than non-cognitive (e.g., personality) assessments. Ignoring these facts reduces the value that HR brings to an enterprise.
Cognitive ability tests are not perfect predictors, and even if they were, there is plenty of room left to find additional ones. This is the space that the shiny new theories try to fill. In addition, the new characteristics cannot be traits, but rather a skill that can be developed (y’know, so the author can sell seminars, workbooks, etc.). This, combined with the current wave of anti-intellectualism in the U.S., leads to the search for something new, but not necessarily innovative.
The questions are:
- What value do these “new” methods bring (e.g., do they work) and
- Are they really different than what we already have?
One of the shiniest new objects in the store is Grit. The name taps into a very American cultural value. If you dig deep and try hard, you will succeed. Right there with pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. While its proponents don’t claim that it’s brand new, they won’t concede that it is just shining up something we already have in Conscientiousness (which is one of the Big 5 personality traits). Conscientiousness is a good and consistent predictor of job performance, but not as good as cognitive ability. Measures of Grit are very highly correlated with those of Conscientiousness (Duckworth et al. [2007, 2009]), so it’s likely that we are not dealing with anything new.
Does this spiffed up version of an existing construct really work? For that, we can go to the data. And it says no. The research currently shows that only one of Grit’s factors (perseverance) is at all predictive and it doesn’t predict beyond measures that we already have.
I am all for innovation and industrial psychology is really in need of some. But, chasing the new and shiny is not going to get us there. It’ll just clog up bookshelves.