Tuesday, February 14, 2012

the environment you create can influence your employees' IQ

I keep hearing people say that IQ is static and that EQ can change. I disagree: there is plenty of evidence that both can change. And, organizational leaders may influence their employees' IQs by the way they evaluate them:

"A group of participants suffered an average IQ drop of 17.4 points during an experiment in which they were ranked by their intelligence scores, suggesting that simply being ranked can profoundly diminish some people's ability to express their cognitive ability, says a team led by Read Montague of Virginia Tech." -- The Daily Stat, Harvard Business Review February 1, 2012

Do you rank your employees against each other? You might find being ranked motivating, but many people become stressed by these rankings -- and while some stress is good, this kind of stress limits the mind's ability to access information held in memory (psych.nyu.edu/phelpslab/papers/04_CON_V14.pdf ) and make good decisions (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v10/n6/box/nrn2648_BX1.html).

I know you didn't devise a ranking system so that you could lessen your employees' ability to do well; you did it thinking a little healthy competition will generate the good stress -- the kind that gets everyone hussling a bit more. Can you share some other tools you can use to facilitate/develop your employees' innate motivation without preventing them from utilizing their greatest potential?

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