This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When Martin Wiernsperger was a graduate student, he and fellow student Mackenzie Feinberg realized they both had family members in the health care field—and both had heard relatives complain about lower-performing employees getting more opportunities for training and professional development than their higher-performing peers. "It seemed like it was always those who performed badly who got selected by the head nurse or by the manager to go to those trainings," said Wiernsperger, assistant professor of accounting at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
"And this creates a fairness dilemma, both for the manager who makes this decision and for the employees who react to this." It's a common conundrum: Faced with limited funds for staff training and development, the boss must decide which member of their team receives advanced skills training, which can be costly. Is it the high-achieving employee who is already a leader on staff, or the less-proficient worker who might benefit more from the opportunity? The research team found, through an interactive role-playing experiment, that workplace fairness norms play a big role.
Egalitarian norms are more structured, while meritocratic norms allow employees more freedom to choose their tasks. Lower-performing workers appear to expect the extra training in an egalitarian workplace, while higher performers feel more slighted when passed over for training in a meritocracy. Wiernsperger is a co-author of "When Is It Fairer to Allocate Resources for Training to Lower-Performing Versus Higher-Performing Employees?" published Sept. 20 in the Journal of Accounting Research.
Other co-authors are Eric Chan, associate professor of accounting at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin; and Feinberg, now an assistant professor of accounting at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Training is not only an opportunity to travel and network, Wiernsperger said, but it also increases one's "human capital" and future marketability. From a manager's perspective, however, training might be a bigger benefit to workers who have more room for growth than those who are already at a high level—thus the dilemma.
"From a manager's perspective, in terms of productivity they would typically think, "I should send my lower performers for professional development so that they can essentially catch up,'" Wiernsperger said. "The dollar spent on improving their performance typically goes further than somebody who is already doing a good job." Wiernsperger and the team devised a unique experiment to replicate both egalitarian and meritocratic work environments. A total of 186 study participants were divided into three-person groups, with one person acting as the manager and the other two as employees.
The employees were given one of two quizzes on popular idioms, with questions in either mostly English (8 of 12 questions) or mostly German (8 of 12), which only a few participants could understand. One group could choose which quiz to take to replicate a meritocratic environment; the other was given a quiz at random, in line with a more egalitarian ethos. Based on the results of the quiz, the manager would select one of the two employees for "training"—in this case, getting help with the German idioms to do better on a second quiz.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
