Rol, responding to Robert Bacal, writes...
>Robert, you say,
>>I'm sorry to get picky, but the triage concept isn't ranking, it's
>>categorizing except if you have as many categories as people.
>I wondered if that might be a source of confusion on this discussion.
>Others have referred to this (categorizing) as ranking, so I do too.
>Thank you for providing clarification, this may reduce some of the debate.
>What do others think? Is categorization better -- more effective -- than
>ranking? Or do others think this is an important distinction?
I think there could be an extremely important distinction in there, but
not necessarily so. Bear with me as I try to explain that ambiguous
remark.
Measurement mavens talk about nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio scales
of measurement. In much plainer language, those scales define what I call
the Four Cs of measurement: classifying, counting, comparing, and
calculating.
To rank some number of employees from highest to lowest or best to worst
results in those employees arrayed along an ordinal scale. To group that
same number of employees into some number of groups that is itself less
than the number of employees is an exercise in classification (or, as
Robert says, "categorization").
The rub comes in the example above when doing the arraying. If the
employees are simply compared one against the other, perhaps through some
kind of forced choice mechanism, the measurement is ordinal. You could,
for example, easily array some number of employees according to height by
comparing them against each other. You could also measure their
individual heights and then array them according to the results of such
measurement. In both cases, the end result is an ordinal array, however,
it is arrived at via two very different means of measurement.
The central issue, then, is the means used to do the ranking. If they are
ranked based on objective measures of performance, the ranking, although
constituting an ordinal array, has a basis in some other scale of
measurement. If they are ranked simply in terms of managerial preferences
or perceptions, that is an entirely different basis of measurement.
All that said, I do not believe the debate is about the niceties or the
basis of measurement but, rather, the psychological and organizational
consequences of ranking employees. On that score, I believe the
discussants on this list fall into two categories: proponents, and
opponents.
Regards,
Fred Nickols
The Distance Consulting Company
nickols@worldnet.att.net
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
--Fred Nickols <nickols@worldnet.att.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>