Misplaced Talent
Misplaced Talent
A GUIDE TO MAKING BETTER PEOPLE DECISIONS
JOE UNGEMAH
Cover design: Michael J. Freeland
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2015 by Joe Ungemah. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Ungemah, Joe.
Misplaced talent: a guide to making better people decisions / Joe Ungemah.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-119-03094-2 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-119-03097-3 (pdf);
ISBN 978-1-119-03090-4 (epub)
1. Decision making. 2. Personnel management. I. Title.
HD30.23.U54 2015
658.3′128 – dc23
2015008302
Foreword
When Joe asked me to write a foreword for his book, Misplaced Talent, the request arrived on the very same day that I completed an article I was working on with a colleague from another university looking at the relationship between science and practice (“the science-practice gap”). We reported on some research we had been doing on the ways in which practitioners bring scientific evidence to bear in their practice within the field of “occupational psychology,” as we Brits call it, or, for those with a more European or North American background, work or industrial-organizational psychology.
Despite differences in name, what comes through from the wealth of international experience upon which this book is based is that there are many more commonalities than differences when we look at how psychology has been applied to the world of work across the globe, but yet practitioners can sometimes struggle in their attempts to translate and apply to their own practice the very rich body of scientific research and theory upon which the profession is based. This is why Misplaced Talent is such a useful book.
Recognizing that the fundamental drivers of performance in the workplace stem directly from the most basic and deeply held set of motivations and desires that we all share in common as members of the human race, Joe’s ability to see beyond the surface details, through to the very heart of what drives human beings in a work context, and then to use the insights thus gained to see the bigger organizational picture is what characterizes both his own work as a practitioner and this book.
I recall a time over a decade ago when I invited Joe to make a presentation at the university research centre I was running at the time. Duly armed with enough data to satisfy the hardest-nosed of empiricists, along with a PowerPoint presentation of accompanying statistical analyses that would leave even the most eager of statisticians similarly sated, he scrolled effortlessly through his slides, pointing out the key findings to the varied audience of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and other assorted disciplinary specialists that are to be found in most university-based business schools.
After the presentation, the usual round of questions and answers began, whereupon, of course, I expected the conventional criticisms to emerge – the sociologists taking one point of view, the economists another, and so forth. Instead, I was surprised that, although each group had a range of challenging and probing questions, they all seemed to agree on the main points that he had managed to distill from the data.
In Misplaced Talent, Joe achieves a similar effect – firmly evidence-based and drawing from well-established research findings while at the same time highlighting the key points that are most useful for practitioners when considering how to apply these ideas to the particular talent management issues they are facing. His book is very clearly a product of his own personal embodiment of the scientist-practitioner model to which all work and organizational psychologists aspire.
The scientist-practitioner model, which emphasizes both methodological rigor and also relevance to the reality of work organizations, on the other, reflects what has been termed the “rigor-relevance debate. According to this debate, the research-practice gap arises through academics engaging too often in what has been termed “pedantic science” (obsessed with meticulous theoretical and methodological precision, but of little practical value or relevance to those working in organizations) and practitioners sometimes resorting to popularist science, based more on commercial interests and client acceptability than sound scientific research.
A similar debate on the relationship between science and practice has taken place within the field of management more widely. Denise Rousseau, in her presidential address to the Academy of Management, called for practitioners to adopt an evidence-based approach, defining evidence-based management as “translating principles based on best evidence into organizational practices” and positioning the approach as a response to the research-practice gap that was bemoaned by both scholars and practitioners. Both seemed to acknowledge that management practice was often, if not usually, based on something other than the best available scientific evidence – a suspicion supported by research indicating that less 1 percent of HR managers regularly read the academic literature. It is for this reason that Misplaced Talent is such a timely and useful book.
Based on sound evidence, but at the same time questioning the suitability of some tried-and-tested approaches within their contexts of application, the book advances practice-based knowledge by drawing key lessons from the academic literature and scrutinizing the ways in which they have been applied or, on occasion, misapplied in practice. A key feature is how these have been summarized into practical, useful pointers for practitioners, illustrating relevant issues and dilemmas through copious examples from the author’s own practice that bring to life the challenges