Making Human Behavior Compute

New techniques claim to be able to predict worker responses, enabling more efficient matching of people with tasks.

The term "human resources" is somewhat contradictory: human beings are able to do things, while resources can only have things done to them. Yet the popularity of the phrase reveals something important about modern management approaches. The inevitable uncertainty of human behavior is usually an inconvenience for managers. They mostly prefer that workers were as predictable as resources such as raw materials or equipment.

Much recent management inquiry has consequently focused on analysing the motivations and psychological reactions of the workforce in the hope that people's behavior can be anticipated and circumscribed. Computer technology is being used to analyse a bewildering range of "human data" in the search for the grail of predictability.

One approach, called biofeedback, involves connecting a person to a computer that records four types of physiological responses: muscle tension, skin response, finger temperature and pulse rate. Images are flashed in front of the subject, who rates them from one to 10. The physiological responses are recorded and correlated with responses to a questionnaire.

The method has been developed by psychologists Brian Costello and Russell Cassel, directors of the Cassel Wellness Centre in Mornington, Victoria. It has initially been applied to career guidance, but Cassel believes it can be used to analyse the potential productivity of workers, and the appropriateness of their career positions. "We are able to predict absenteeism or hypochondria," Cassel says. "Fifty per cent of people are in the wrong job, and this allows people to get into the right jobs so there is enjoyment of your vocation."

Costello says the biofeedback results are considered valuable if the different indicators produce uniform results. He says the method he and Cassel have developed is a breakthrough in providing such uniformity. "From a statistical point of view, this is about as close as one can get," Costello says. "We are not using inkblots anymore."

Costello and Cassel say that by tracking the brain's responses using biofeedback, it is possible to determine the degree to which a person's "life mission" is being fulfilled. They argue that most successful people are able to combine work and play in satisfying that 'mission'.

"It has been said of people like Robert Louis Stevenson, Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Browning and Thomas Edison that their real satisfactions came from their daily involvement in their chosen vocation. Those feelings of personal satisfaction are significantly related to brain dominance. The cognitive side of the brain provides satisfaction from logical and cognitive activity, while the non-dominant side has to do with feelings, visual input and emotional involvement. Always, the most satisfying jobs are those that provide input from both sides of the brain." they say.

Another approach to analysing worker abilities is used by Geoffrey Pickworth, consulting psychologist for the Chally Consulting Group. Called the Quadrant solution, it allows managers to analyse salespeople in order to identify who is best suited for a particular task. The approach closely matches the selling to the market by matching the personality type of the salesman with the kind of people who tend to buy the product.

There are four types of salespeople in the Quadrant model: consultative, closing, relationship and display. A closing salesman tends to be more aggressive, can start with nothing and is quickly able to establish a desire for the product in the client's mind. A consultative approach is usually used for high-price, prestige items, and emphasises patience and close personal contact. Relationship salespeople like to be independent and are able to persist over a long time to get a customer. This is appropriate in areas such as industrial supplies and stockbroking. Display salespeople, often found in the retail industry prefer a low risk of personal rejection and a reward system that does not depend on completing the sale.

Pickworth says the approach was developed by looking at good performers and average performers in different sales areas and isolating the traits that distinguished the good performers. More than 800 pieces of data on each person are collated and analysed on computer, including interview results, personality measures, tests for motivation, biographical data and measures of cognitive skills. "It enables us to produce a reliable measure of a person's 'fit' for an organisation," Pickworth says.

Identifying the right personality for the sales job should lead to higher productivity and lower staff turnover, Pickworth claims. He does admit, however, that there can be physical abuse of systems of psychological assessment. "This is not like medicine, where you get a definite result such as a cure for cancer or a cure for AIDS", he says. "In the social sciences there tend not to be any hard and fast rules that apply to all situations. But this Quadrant approach gets away from pop psychology and into hard statistics."

Pickworth says equal opportunity legislation in the United States provides some protection against inappropriate testing methods by forcing vendors to demonstrate that there is a degree of statistical reliability in their approach. No such legislation exists in Australia. Some people have tried to sell measures that are not predictive and don't work," he says. "You have got to ask people who are using it if it works, and ask the company administering the thing to show evidence that it works. That is hard for the ordinary layman. These systems can also be. used as self-fulfilling prophecies to justify a manager's decision that they don't like you.

The problem of predicting worker performance is not likely to be resolved in able the short term. Although psychologists are improving in their ability to predict workers' responses to existing jobs, the nature of work is itself changing rapidly. Pickworth says: "There are big changes occurring in the workplace; many people are being made redundant because of technology. The ordinary worker has to be flexible and prepared to work more than one job."
David James - Business Review Weekly, August 14, 1992.