Organisational Psychology

We’ve all been there. You get hired for your expertise in a specific domain, and yet for some reason the powers at be seem to ignore your input, make a bunch of random decisions you think are at best ill-informed or at worst just plain wrong, and then hand it…

Listen to this episode here. Did you know that the 80:20 principle also works in reverse? Whilst 80% of your output will come from 20% of your people, the same is true of your problems. Meaning 80% of the errors will be caused by 20% of your people. But, says…

After outrage, sympathy and fear- then what? — Waves of firing are not a new phenomena. When it’s at your doorstep, it’s sharper than a headline. To the harsh organization, this is ‘liberating’ in terms of cost reduction. It’s not personal. To the employees and their families— it’s nothing less than tragic. What about a third group —…

Why your engagement strategy neglects the individual and needs a philosophy first — We’ve all seen the articles. ‘Your engagement strategy needs OUR survey tool.’ ‘No seriously ours is the best’ ‘Why are you still scrolling, I just told you we can unlock engagement.’ If there really was a breakthrough engagement tool it would have, well, broken through. The sad news — it’s…

In this article we will explore how the application of identity theory can be used by employers to better understand staff recruitment, induction and retention. Psychological principles of self & tribe (organisation) identity. It is well understood by most of us, at an intuitive level, that we like to be in social groups — this is a human…

The first time I heard about how around 70% of projects fail was when I was a consultant. “Hire us if you wish to avoid being a victim of that 70%” we said to our clients “our model is the best and most appropriate to your needs”. …

Using 360-degree feedback reviews for development or performance badly needs clarification — In April, it got very heated when Basecamp CEO* and Co-founder Jason Fried sent an internal memo with a load of policy changes that amounted to some distinct cultural engineering. I don’t use that term lightly because my view is culture is hard to engineer and more emergent. …

The science of unconscious behaviour change is very misunderstood but can transform organisational change — Am I alone in thinking the ‘latest and best thinking seems to carry a label that says ‘please misappropriate me for your own ends’? The biggest victims are often hot topics — gamification, nudging, brain-friendly training, millennials, Big Data, NLP, mindfulness … need I go on? Nudging has been around…

An area of intense interest within organizational psychology is that of change, and the received wisdom is that organizations need to change regularly to keep pace with a changing world. …