Marlo Raveendran

Modest Goals Let Workers Adapt to Market Change

ilseu — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:25:19 +0000

Modest Goals Let Workers Adapt to Market Change ilseu Fri, 01/19/2024 - 07:25 More News David Danelski (david.danelski@ucr.edu) | UCR News January 18, 2024

When companies set challenging performance goals for their employees, the strategy may work well when their marketplace is stable or when the company wants fast results, but perhaps not as well when workers need to adapt to turbulent times.

Marlo Raveendran, associate professor of management

These are some of the findings of new research by Marlo Raveendran, an associate professor of management in UC Riverside’s School of Business. The research probed how employees respond when faced with either challenging or moderate work performance goals and provides insights on how supervisors may more effectively manage their employees.

So, what strategy works better? Well, it depends on the circumstances, Raveendran said.

“If you're trying to get your employees to explore more options that they haven't tried before, give them moderate performance goals,” Raveendran said. “If you want them to find a good solution fast, give them higher performance goals.”

Workers with challenging goals will tend to see a greater number of possible tasks as failures and will focus instead on tasks that have shown to produce good results in the past, Raveendran said. For a salesperson, this could mean trying to increase sales to existing customers rather than making cold calls to find new ones.

Setting more challenging work goals benefits employers the most when they compete in more stable and reliable marketplaces, where tried-and-true strategies remain effective, Raveendran said.

Challenging goals are also effective in situations where time is of the essence to capitalize on new market demands, she said.

For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company set a goal to develop a vaccine with 90% efficacy. This ambitious goal compelled the company’s research and development teams to disregard a lot of options with uncertain potential and focus instead on only the most promising biotechnologies. Had the company set a less ambitious goal, say 70% efficacy, its R&D teams would have been freer to explore more pathways for vaccine development, likely resulting in a longer development time, Raveendran said.

But challenging work goals may be detrimental in times of rapid change or market disruption, such as when legacy news media companies, such as The New York Times or CNN, faced new competition from social media and thousands of websites during the rise of the Internet. This is because challenging performance goals can make workers blind to newly arising options by limiting their search space.

More moderate performance goals give workers more time and freedom do what Raveendran described as “broader search” – efforts that may or may not have more immediate payoff and that allow workers to learn more about the payoff of a wider variety of options. Such tasks could include learning new software programs, starting up social media promotions, attending professional conferences, or looking for customers in previously overlooked sociodemographic groups.

“If you give your employees moderate performance goals, they will keep exploring a lot more,” Raveendran said. “So, they’ll keep trying different things.”

Raveendran’s study had hundreds of participants play the role of managers who set either challenging or moderate earning goals over 50 rounds of a fictitious R&D investment game.

Each participant had to choose among three fictitious R&D teams named on a screen, and after they made their choice, they would see how much money their choice brought back to the company, and be credited for those earnings. They would repeat the process over the 50 rounds, each with the same R&D teams, but the participant would only improve their knowledge of the different R&D teams if they chose to invest in them.

To simulate a stable marketplace, the average earnings of each R&D team remained the same through the 50 rounds. In these trials, the participants would soon learn which team was the top earner, choose it most often, and they would easily meet their performance goals. Those with the more challenging goals brought in more money.

“With challenging goals, they stopped exploring the worst options much faster than when under the moderate goal, and that was great when the environment was stable,” Raveendran said.

To simulate a turbulent marketplace, the first 30 rounds were the same as in the stable environment, but after round 30, the worst and best team switched their payoffs, unbeknownst to the participants.

“It threw them off after the shock occurred, and it took those with higher performance goals longer to reach their goal again,” she said.

Her study, “How Do Performance Goals Influence Exploration-Exploitation Choices?” was published in the journal Organizational Science. Her co-authors are Kannan Srikanth of Ohio State University, Tiberiu Ungureanu of Appalachian State University, N.C., and George L. Zheng, of Singapore Management University.

Sharing Love of Learning with Real-world Lessons

ilseu — Thu, 19 May 2022 23:54:39 +0000

Sharing Love of Learning with Real-world Lessons ilseu Thu, 05/19/2022 - 16:54 More News Darin Estep May 19, 2022

Marlo Raveendran, assistant professor of management

When Assistant Professor of Management Marlo Raveendran is not researching organization design and the division of labor, or engaging her students in discussing real-life examples of these topics, you might find her in another realm: playing World of Warcraft.

The “massive multiplayer online” game is primarily a fun activity she shares with her husband—but one that has some parallels to her academic field of interest.

“In the game, you need a lot of coordination between the group members. If players just focus on what’s best for themselves, they will fail,” she says. “What I find fascinating is, first of all, you have to be very good at what you do. But at the same time, you also have to balance that with what’s good for the group.”

Her ability to relate the real world—or, in this case, a virtual world—to business theory is one of the qualities that earned Raveendran recognition among the 2020 “Best 40 Under 40 Professors” by Poets & Quants. One of two UCR School of Business professors to earn that distinction in 2020, Raveendran was praised in nominations for creating meaningful connections with students.

One student quoted by Poets & Quants put it this way: “She encourages her students to think critically about strategic management issues, encouraging dialogue, and an exchange of ideas with a heavily Socratic methodology. Her assigned course materials focus on relevant, real-world scenarios happening on a global scale.”

‘That’s what I want to teach my students’

Raveendran says there is a reason for the focus on real-world scenarios.

“At least in management, the frameworks we are teaching are extremely simple,” she says. “The learning comes by applying those to situations of imperfect information that all managers face. … That translation from the frameworks into the real world is what fascinates me the most. And that’s what I want to teach my students.”

To accomplish this, she encourages students to develop their critical thinking skills, to challenge her ideas and, most importantly, to engage in classroom discussions.

“The way I usually introduce it is that if you don’t talk in class, you will not learn anything in the course. You just won’t,” she says, acknowledging some students will have to overcome fear of saying the wrong thing or expressing ideas if English is their second language.

She understands these concerns. She describes herself as very shy and, although all of her higher-education was in English, she grew up in Germany.

“I understand how frightening it can be to try to express yourself in a language that is not your main language, your first language,” Raveendran says. “So, I tell them that I will not tell them they’re wrong, ever—because on strategy, you’re never wrong. It always depends.

“I also tell them that if they just can’t speak in class to please let me know, so I can give them alternative assignments if they really don’t want to talk.”

The value of diversity

Raveendran has always loved learning—accumulating new knowledge and connecting it to the real world. It’s one of the things she appreciates about the perspectives students bring to her classroom.

“Without diversity, this would be such a boring class,” she says. “The best way to learn in strategy and management is to learn from each other. And I try to have a very open and accepting conversation with them from the beginning.”

That openness and curiosity are two of the characteristics that drew her to UCR after completing her Ph.D. in strategy and entrepreneurship from the London Business School.

“I came to this school, and I loved the interview. My now-colleagues were just so open and curious and research-focused,” she says. “And Dean Yunzeng Wang was very much pushing for research and pushing toward becoming a tier one research university. … I feel our department is really growing in that research productivity. And I love the feel of the place.”

Balancing research and teaching

Raveendran’s lifelong quest for learning has taken on a new outlet: the polo arena. She took up the hobby during the pandemic and describes it as “a constantly evolving strategy game.” Such a description is not surprising coming from an expert on organizational design.

Over the course of nearly a decade at the School of Business, Raveendran has continued to pursue her love of research. She recently co-authored a research paper on the “Division of Labor through Self-Selection,” published in Organization Science, with a summary appearing on the World Economic Forum.

Raveendran says she has learned to balance the workload of research and the extensive preparation she does for each course she teaches—but it is all worth it.

“I love my job,” she says. “Honestly, UCR provides a community and a kind of an environment that feels inclusive, that celebrates diversity. And that just fosters—I think I sound like our mission—it fosters excellence in us, not by forcing us to do it, but by enabling us to do it.”

Marlo Raveendran playing polo

Should Employees Choose Their Tasks?

ilseu — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 20:15:20 +0000

Should Employees Choose Their Tasks? ilseu Mon, 04/12/2021 - 13:15 More News Holly Ober April 12, 2021

Letting employees select their own tasks is a popular means of increasing work satisfaction. However, managers should also consider the nature of the task and the employees’ specialization before letting them select their own, suggests a new study led by UC Riverside and published in Organization Science.

Traditionally, managers allocate tasks to employees who are expected to produce a defined output. As organizations must increasingly respond to markets and opportunities quickly and decisively, they have begun to experiment with letting employees choose their own tasks. There is to date little hard data, however, to help managers determine the best task-allocation strategy to optimize worker productivity and satisfaction, and the organization’s success.

Marlo Raveendran

Marlo Raveendran, an assistant professor of management in UC Riverside’s School of Business and the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, led an international team of researchers who studied when and why self-selection may outperform allocation of work by a manager within an organization. They found that manager-led allocation tends to perform better than self-selection when employees have a broad skill range, tasks are highly interdependent, and coordination requirements are high. Self-selection tends to perform better than managerial allocation when employees are highly specialized, tasks are fairly independent and when new workers join a firm or project over time.

“We tend to think of the upside of self-selection as providing greater motivation for employees and better information on their own skills,” Raveendran said. “However, we found that even in the absence of motivational and informational considerations, self-selection can outperform managerial allocation depending on the employees’ degree of specialization and the nature of work.”

The researchers developed an agent-based model to see whether self-selection may have performance benefits over managerial allocation even in the absence of heightened job satisfaction. The model showed the skill-to-task fit tends to be higher under self-selection than under managerial allocation, but at the cost of over- and under-staffing of tasks. In self-selection, employees often pick their tasks without considering other employees’ skills, while managers may give away a task to an employee today for which a better-skilled employee may come along later.

The trade-off between self-selection and managerial allocation rests on a trade-off between interpersonal coordination failure under self-selection and intertemporal coordination failure under managerial allocation. This trade-off exists in addition to motivational and skill or information advantages that usually benefit self-selection.

“We provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism underlying the relative performance differences between self-selection and managerial allocation of employees to tasks that goes well beyond the expected motivational and informational advantages that intuitively characterize self-selection,” Raveendran said. “The results of our analysis offer a window into the conditions under which each form of intraorganizational division of labor may have relative advantages.”

The research adds rigor to the question of when to use self-selection as a form of task allocation within organizations. Managerial allocation has many coordination advantages, but self-selection likely outperforms it under a confluence of specific conditions: When employees are very skilled but at only a narrow range of tasks, tasks are independent, and employee availability is unforeseeable.

The researchers hope these results can be used to inform, if not guide, managerial thinking on when and how to use self-selection as an allocation process within the firm.

Raveendran was joined in the research by Phanish Puranam of INSEAD in Singapore and Massimo Warglien at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy. The paper, “Division of labor through self-selection,” is available.

_________________

Banner image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay