It’s important to consider other factors that will most benefit an organisation and its employees. The issues above demonstrate the limitations of basing decisions on personal experience alone. It emphasises and discusses how decision makers can and should become savvy consumers of research.īarends, Rousseau and Briner define evidence as information, facts or data supporting (or contradicting) a claim, hypothesis or assumption. Our ‘insight’ article When the going gets tough, the tough get evidence explains the importance of taking an evidence-based approach to decision making in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. So we need approaches that help us determine which research evidence we should trust. This bad habit is hard to avoid – it's even common among academic researchers. In our In search of the best available evidence report, we note the tendency to ‘cherry-pick’ research that backs up a perspective or opinion and ignores research that does not, even if it gives stronger evidence on cause-and-effect relationships. And while scientific literature on key issues in the field is vital, there’s a gap between this and the perceptions of practitioners, who are often unaware of the depth of research available.Įven when looking at research, we can be naturally biased. One organisation may look to another as an example of sound practice and decision-making, without critically evaluating the effectiveness of their actions. Received wisdom and the notion of ‘best practice’ also creates bias. More specifically, ‘ confirmation bias’ can lead recruiters to form an early opinion of a candidate, based on a personal characteristic that won’t affect their performance, and then look for examples that align with this positive or negative impression. For example, the ‘availability heuristic’ means we judge the likelihood of an event based on how readily a memory of that event comes to mind. As discussed in our reports Cognition, decision and expertise and Our minds at work: the behavioural science of HR, because people have limited cognitive resource and time, our minds use mental shortcuts or ‘heuristics’ to make decisions easier: our brains are less able to multi-task than we expect. They argue that individuals at all levels of employment have a moral obligation to use the best available evidence when making important decisions.Īssessing the reliability and validity of evidence becomes more important as the mass of opinion and claims continue to grow. They show that it’s common in decision-making for popular ideas of management, and personal experience which is highly susceptible to errors and bias, to be prioritised ahead of sound, critically-appraised evidence. In their report Evidence-based management: the basic principles, Barends, Rousseau and Briner of the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa) outline the challenge of biased and unreliable management decisions. Why is evidence-based practice important? Finally, the factsheet explains the practical implications of applying evidence-based practice to real-life organisational scenarios. It outlines and refutes a number of misconceptions about evidence-based practice, before looking at literature which demonstrates the effectiveness of evidence-based practice. This factsheet outlines the four sources of evidence considered key to effective evidence-based practice, before highlighting the importance of combining these to ensuring actions have the greatest chance of success. It’s important that people professionals adopt this approach because of the huge impact management decisions have on the working lives and wellbeing of people in all sorts of organisations worldwide. It makes decision makers less reliant on anecdotes, received wisdom and personal experience – sources that are not trustworthy on their own. An evidence-based approach to decision-making is based on a combination of using critical thinking and the best available evidence. Evidence-based practice is about making better decisions, informing action that has the desired impact.
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