Eng Mgt 6113

Advanced Personnel Management

(Strategic Human Resource Management & Measurement)

Analytical Foundations of HR
Measurement
David G. Spurlock, Ph.D., Instructor
Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
6 topics (obviously interrelated) typically concern HR:
Recruitment and retention (encouraging applications
from the external labor pool and defeating the efforts of
competitors to recruit from your existing talent)
Selection (including internal staffing and duty
assignment decisions & some aspects of promotion)
Performance (including productivity, absenteeism,
performance appraisal, & some aspects of promotion)
Training and development (very broadly construed)
Compensation & benefits (including health care)
Employee attitudes & motivation (satisfaction,
commitment, engagement, etc.)
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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
All 6 processes usually involve some sets of
measures that are usually (but not necessarily)
quantitative
One typically thinks of measurement as some
systematic method (i.e., a rule preferably a
testable & justifiable one) for assigning actual
numbers to instances or cases or events
Simple categorizing is considered by some as a
crude form of measurement
(Strictly speaking one can argue that it isnt, but it can be
useful to consider it as such in some applications)
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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
A widely used but somewhat flawed scheme in
behavioral science is due to S.S. Stevens:
Nominal (categorical) (e.g., biological taxonomy)
Ordinal only rank orders items (e.g., Mohs scale)
Interval has equal intervals between units (e.g., Celsius
temperature with arbitrary 0 and negative values)
Ratio has equal intervals + a true 0 (e.g., Kelvin
temperature) so ratios of scale values are meaningful
This scheme and the theory of scale measurements upon which it
is based has been the subject of debate for a number of decades
and more sophisticated and mathematically justifiable approaches
to scaling exist but that would be too much of a digression for us

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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Some analytics (statistics, formulas, or
procedures) and inferences are only appropriate
with particular types of scales
Metric units of length are a ratio scale so one can infer that
someone who is 2 meters tall is twice as tall as someone 1
meter tall
However, IQ is only really an interval scale so someone with
an IQ of 160 doesnt have twice as much intelligence as
someone with an IQ of 80
(No one really has zero intelligence despite our occasional
encounters with those who seem to)

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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Most common measures are of
Behaviors (e.g., work performance, skill
acquisition & application, attendance, punctuality,
citizenship)
Traits (e.g., intelligence, personality, physical
aptitudes)
Reactions (e.g., attitudes, approval, satisfaction)

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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Measures may be self-reports, observations by
relevant others, or mechanically obtained
measures
Measures may be tied to individuals or may be
anonymous
Measures may be obtained directly and
immediately as an activity occurs or may be
indirect (such as trace measures) reflecting some
inferred effect of an activity

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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Some measures are useful as individual,
unprocessed data (your time in a mile run
crudely measures your physical fitness)
Usually aggregate measures (statistics) are
compiled and used
to compare between groups or processes
to compare within groups or processes over time or
under different conditions
to create general evaluation standards to apply to future
cases
to predict future behaviors or outcomes
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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Typically these aggregate measures can include:
Summative scores (e.g., number of correct test answers)
Ratios & percentages
Frequency distributions
Means, medians, modes
Standard deviations, variances, covariances
Correlations, regression weights
Reliability & validity coefficients
Goodness of fit statistics
Many others

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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Scientific fields often have specialized subfields
focused on measurement processes
In engineering and physical sciences you may know
the term metrology refers to the science and
technology associated with the calibration of physical
measuring devices for time, space, heat, mass,
electricity, radiation, etc.

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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Fields that are heavily dependent upon statistical
inferences often have specialties with their name
and an appended term -metrics that concentrate on
solving measurement and quantitative modeling
problems in the broader associated discipline
Examples include:
Psychometrics
Econometrics
Sociometrics
Technometrics
(and even) Cliometrics
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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
The scope of this course will allow only the briefest
treatment of measurement technicalities but you
should know that there are vast and sophisticated
literatures on measuring human behavior in a
variety of disciplines

The important point the authors want to make here

though is that contemporary measures of HR
processes should have a strategic (and usually
financial) importance beyond simply being accurate
representations of whats going on
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Traditional & Contemporary HR Measures
Example scheme from Google discussed in text
Counting, Clever counting, Insight, Influence
Goal should be to take the measurement process
to the last step if possible

Side comment - the four measurement steps the authors

attribute to Googles People Analytics Group seem to me to
correspond pretty closely (though not perfectly) to a well-known
set of goals for a science that typically tend to be sequentially
better satisfied as the science matures
Description, Prediction, Explanation, Control
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 Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Text very briefly reviews three fundamental ideas
Generalizations to populations from sample data
Correlation and causality
Experimental design (and the notion of quasi-
experimentation)
There are entire courses on research methods
specific to particular disciplines in behavioral and
social sciences
I used to teach one at S&T
We will only be scratching the surface now, but Ill discuss
other important ideas as we need them through the course
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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Generalizations from sample to populations
Purpose of inferential statistics (e.g., null hypothesis
testing using parametric statistics based upon sampling from
normally distributed population)
Key requirement is that sample be representative of
population one seeks to generalize to
Representative samples can be generated through
Random sampling (any population member is equally likely to be
chosen for the sample)
Stratified random sampling (e.g., subsets like gender or ethnicity
sampled randomly but in proportion to presence in population)
Other techniques

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Generalizations from sample to populations
Many arguments in HR and other areas studying human
behavior are based upon data obtained through highly
flawed (non-representative) samples like case studies,
samples of convenience, biased samples, n of 1
anecdotes, etc. that dont justify generalization
Even honest, well-trained, careful researchers sometimes
dont notice sampling flaws in their studies that, once
revealed, limit the persuasiveness of their arguments

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Generalizations from sample to populations
Non-representative samples (like found in otherwise well-
done case studies) can sometimes be informative
because they can show that a phenomenon can occur in
certain ways under certain conditions
This is useful for illustrating the possibilities (e.g., as
examples or counterexamples) as well as documenting
causal mechanisms as they occur in the real world
The problem is that one cant assume the result will
generalize to a particular population of interest since that
population wasnt accurately represented in the study

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Correlation & causation
Correlations are mathematical representations (coefficients)
that measure the degree of association of two variables
Usually we mean to the Pearson correlation, r, which
measures the degree of linear association of two sets of
numbers that represent measures of two variables or
measures of one variable in two samples or populations
The correlation coefficient is a precisely defined
mathematical concept as is the term covariance
In ordinary language though, the term correlation is
sometimes used loosely to mean any sort of apparent
covariation of values of one thing with values of another
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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Correlation & causation
Correlation does NOT imply causation!
Many famous examples used to illustrate this point:
Bars & churches
Popsicles & drownings
Even the correlations themselves can be illusory
Illusory correlations are perceived covariations that dont in fact exist
Associated with stereotypes, superstitions, and other situations where
some distinctive information leads one to overestimate frequencies of
co-occurrence of events or instances
Explained by role of judgmental heuristics like representativeness,
availability to memory, etc. (I teach a whole course, Managerial
Decision Making, that covers these topics.)

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Experimental design (& quasi-experiments)
There are whole courses on Design of Experiments
including in engineering curricula
TRUE experiments require BOTH
(1) random assignment of experimental units
(subjects) to conditions often through a two-step
process of randomly assigning subjects to groups
and then randomly assigning conditions to those
groups
(2) manipulation of experimental conditions usually
resulting in at least one treatment condition and a
control condition
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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Experimental design (& quasi-experiments)
The purpose of experiments is to ascertain the cause-effect
relations among variables of interest by
manipulating the presumed causes (the
independent variables)
and measuring the resulting effects (the dependent
variables)

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Experimental design (& quasi-experiments)
Quasi-experiments retain some features of true
experiments in that they investigate causal relations by
comparing the values of effects (dependent variables) in
different conditions
Quasi-experiments:
lack random assignment to conditions
manipulations of the independent variables (causes)
are usually limited

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Experimental design (& quasi-experiments)
Quasi-experiments are of great value in the behavioral
sciences though since they are usually performed in real-life
field settings and thus can demonstrate causal relations
in important contexts outside the laboratory
Text provides an example of the recurrent institutional
cycle design which is a type of quasi-experiment
you should read through that carefully so you get the idea of some
of the issues in this sort of study

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Review (?) of basic concepts in statistical
inference & research design
Experimental design (& quasi-experiments)
Quasi-experiments represent a useful compromise
between
(1) the ideal gold-standard of double-blind, placebo-
controlled true experiments, which may be too
expensive or actually impossible to perform and
(2) purely observational (correlational) studies that,
while useful for identifying and describing some
phenomenon, cant eliminate plausible but conflicting
alternative causal explanations for that phenomenon

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Review (?) of basics in economics & finance
Again, whole courses in curriculum devoted to these topics so
our treatment will be brief but you should read these pages in
the text carefully to refresh your knowledge of the following
ideas (or learn them for the first time now) sufficiently for you to
understand their application in this course
(1) Costs & Savings: Fixed, Variable, Opportunity
(2) Time Value of Money: Compounding, Discounting, Present Value
(3) Estimating value of employee time using Total Pay
(4) Cost-Benefit Analysis (e.g., ROI) & Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
(5) Utility as a weighted sum of utility attributes (MAUT)
(6) Conjoint Analysis (this is most commonly used in marketing and
consumer behavior applications and is not likely to be familiar to you
it is a multivariate statistical technique that you wont learn in this
course but you should know what it can do)
(7) Sensitivity Analysis & Break-Even Analysis

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END OF SLIDE SET

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