I’ve been reading about performance management, and a section of the textbook I’m reading focuses on The Nature of the Performance Distribution. It reminded me a little of Max Daniel’s and Ben Todd’s How much does performance differ between people?, so I thought I’d share it here for anyone who is interested.
The focus is less on true outputs and more on evaluated performance within an organization. It is a fairly short and light introduction, but I’ve put the content here if you are interested.
A theme that jumps out at me is situational specificity, as it seems some scenarios follow a normal distribution, some scenarios are heavy tailed, and some probably have a strict upper limit. This echoes the emphasis that an anonymous commented shared on the Max’s and Ben ’s post:
My point is more “context matters,” even if you’re talking about a specific skill like programming, and that the contexts that generated the examples in this post may be meaningfully different from the contexts that EA organizations are working in.
I’m roughly imaging an organization in which there is a floor to performance (maybe people beneath a certain performance level aren’t hired), and there is some type of barrier that creates a ceiling to performance (maybe people who perform beyond a certain level would rather go start their own consultancy rather than work for this organization, or they get promoted to a different department/team). But the floor or the ceiling could be more more naturally related to the nature of the work as well, as in the scenario of an assembly worker who can’t go faster than the speed of the assembly line.
This idea of situational specificity is paralleled in hiring/personnel selection, in which a particular assessment might be highly predictive of performance in one context, and much less so in a different context. This is the reason why we shouldn’t simply use GMA and conscientiousness to evaluate every single employee at every single organization.
I’ve been reading about performance management, and a section of the textbook I’m reading focuses on The Nature of the Performance Distribution. It reminded me a little of Max Daniel’s and Ben Todd’s How much does performance differ between people?, so I thought I’d share it here for anyone who is interested.
The focus is less on true outputs and more on evaluated performance within an organization. It is a fairly short and light introduction, but I’ve put the content here if you are interested.
A theme that jumps out at me is situational specificity, as it seems some scenarios follow a normal distribution, some scenarios are heavy tailed, and some probably have a strict upper limit. This echoes the emphasis that an anonymous commented shared on the Max’s and Ben ’s post:
I’m roughly imaging an organization in which there is a floor to performance (maybe people beneath a certain performance level aren’t hired), and there is some type of barrier that creates a ceiling to performance (maybe people who perform beyond a certain level would rather go start their own consultancy rather than work for this organization, or they get promoted to a different department/team). But the floor or the ceiling could be more more naturally related to the nature of the work as well, as in the scenario of an assembly worker who can’t go faster than the speed of the assembly line.
This idea of situational specificity is paralleled in hiring/personnel selection, in which a particular assessment might be highly predictive of performance in one context, and much less so in a different context. This is the reason why we shouldn’t simply use GMA and conscientiousness to evaluate every single employee at every single organization.
Very interesting. Another discussion of the performance distribution here.
Thanks for sharing this. I found this to be quite interesting.