Central Tendency Errors

Examples of Central Tendency Errors in the following topics:

• Evaluating Performance: Who, What, and How

  • Detriments of the PA system include the possible hindrance of quality control, stress for both employees and management, errors in judgment, legal issues arising from improper evaluations, and the implementation of inappropriate performance goals.
  • The most common problems in this area are leniency errors, halo effect errors, and central tendency errors.
  • Employee comparison methods attempt to evade the leniency and central tendency errors.

• Structuring Employee Feedback

  • Employee Comparison Models: Two of the main culprits of subjectivity are leniency error and central-tendency error (judging to favorably and judging everyone the same respectively).
  • This does incur halo effect errors, however.

• Evaluating Employee Performance

  • Detriments of the PA system include the possible hindrance of quality control, stress for both employees and management, errors in judgment, legal issues arising from improper evaluations, and the implementation of inappropriate performance goals.
  • Judgmental evaluation:One of the primary drawbacks of employee performance evaluation is the tendency for positive feedback despite negative behavior.
  • This method eliminates central-tendency and leniency errors but still allows for halo-effect errors to occur.

• The Impact of Culture on Business Operations

  • While culture as a general concept is broad and difficult to define concisely, within the framework of business and management there are a number of central considerations and implications.
  • Observing the cultural tendencies of an organization and finding ways to accommodate them, and their interaction with other cultural predispositions, requires experience, motivation and self-awareness (of one's own cultural predispositions).
  • This includes high levels of awareness along with consistent planning and trial and error to create a working strategy of how different cultures function.

• Methods of Excercising Influence

  • Heuristic persuasion appeals more towards emotions, habits, and other trial and error methods that are difficult to quantify.
  • While there are a wide variety of theories and methods attributed to persuasion, some of the ones most central to business include functional theories, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), conditioning, cognitive dissonance, attribution theory, inoculation theory and social judgement theory.
  • Conditioning - Behaviorism, and the tendency of the mind to desire an expected outcome from a familiar input, can be an extremely effective persuasive component.

• The Perceptual Process

  • Closure - This is the tendency to try to create wholes out of perceived parts.
  • Sometimes this can result in error, though, when the perceiver fills in unperceived information to complete the whole.
  • Similarity - Similarity between perceptions promotes a tendency to group them together.

• Cognitive Biases

  • They explained these differences in terms of heuristics, rules which are simple for the brain to compute but which introduce systematic errors.
  • Confirmation bias - Simply put, humans have a strong tendency to manipulate new information and facts until they match their own preconceived notions.
  • Self-serving bias - Another common bias is the tendency to take credit for success while passing the buck on failure.

• How to Assess Culture

  • Outlining the way culture is assessed, the pros and cons of multiculturalism and how culture is transmitted is central to management.
  • Cultural transmission, or cultural learning, is the tendency of a society or culture to pass on new information and generate new norms.

• How Attitude Influences Behavior

  • Ego-defensive: People have a tendency to use attitudes to protect their ego, resulting in a common negative attitude.
  • Value-expressive: People develop central values over time.

• Taking Corrective Action

  • This problem-solving process is the central consideration for effective corrective action.
  • Attempts at corrective action are often unsuccessful because of failures in the problem-solving process, like not having enough information to isolate the real problem, or a decision maker who has a stake in the process and may not want to admit that their department made an error.