Effect of Training in Verbal Self-Guidance on Performance Effectiveness in a MBA Program, The

Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, Jan 2006 by Brown, Travor C, Latham, Gary P

Hypothesis 1: People trained in VSG have significantly higher performance than those who are not trained in VSG.

Hypothesis 2: There is an interaction effect between VSG and goal setting on performance.

Method

Sample

Adults enrolled in the first year MBA class (n = 126) of a Canadian university were randomly assigned to a 2 (VSG, control) × 2 (goal, do your best) factorial design. This number represented 95.46% of the students (n = 132). On average, these MBAs were 29 years old, male (59.50%) with 4 1/2 years of fulltime employment experience. Participants did not differ significantly from nonparticipants on sex, age, or work experience.

Procedure

The procedure used in this experiment consisted of the following steps: 1) development of a behavioural measure of interpersonal skills, 2) random assignment to experimental conditions, 3) goal setting intervention, 4) training in VSG, and 5) data collection.

Interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills (see Table 1) were assessed using behavioural observation scales (BOS; Latham & Wexley, 1977, 1994) developed by Sue-Chan and Latham (2004). Using a previous firstyear MBA class, a job analysis, namely, the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954), was conducted with faculty who teach in the MBA program as well as MBA students. This job analysis asked people to recall examples of both effective and ineffective teamwork or interpersonal behaviours that led to high or low GPA in the program. These behaviours were used to develop BOS. BOS were used because they are reliable and valid, and they correlate positively with performance outcome measures (e.g., Latham, 1997; Latham & Wexley, 1977; Taggar & Brown, 2001).

Assignment to teams. Each year the director of the MBA program assigns each student to a team. Steps are taken to ensure that the teams are relatively balanced in terms of sex, quantitative/qualitative undergraduate degrees, and international/national students. Group size in the present study ranged from five to six individuals. The tasks performed by these teams were similar to those performed by teams in other organizational settings. Specifically, these tasks included multidisciplinary analyses and presentations, as well as consulting projects based on organizational site visits. As consulting groups, the teams met client organizations, analyzed data, made recommendations, and presented their findings to key stakeholders. These team projects, as noted earlier, represented a minimum of 40% of the final grade in each MBA course.

The roles of team members were highly interdependent. Each team was identifiable by a name (they also had web folders, mailboxes, etc.) and each had total authority on project planning regarding assignment of tasks to individuals among the team. Each team also made decisions that had important consequences for them, both as a team and as individuals within the team, in terms of GPA. The only directions given to the teams by faculty members were the task assignments and their completion dates.