Major Research Findings
There has been a considerable amount of research using this approach to measuring and improving organizational effectiveness. A recent edited book of projects using this approach (Pritchard,Holling, Lammers, and Clark 2002) reports results of field experiments from over 50 organizational units which have tried the system. These projects were done by different research groups, in countries.A recently completed meta analysis (Pritchard, Harrell, DiazGranados, & Sargent, 2007) reports results from 83 studies of ProMES done by 9 researcher groups in 7 different countries. (Complete references can be found in the Publications on ProMES page
The results have indicated that the system can be developed in many different types of organizations doing many different types of work including manufacturing, service, educational, and sales settings. ProMES can be done by people with minimal to high levels of formal education. Groups are able to do the steps of the process, they perceive the resulting system as valid, and they are quite committed to it. The data indicate that the system also improves organizational productivity. The standard experimental design is for effectiveness data to be collected during a baseline period without feedback and then compared to the effectiveness data after feedback has been implemented. The figure shows the effects of feedback under ProMES compared with baseline for 83 applications of the system where such productivity data are available. The horizontal axis is time period with the letter "B" indicating baseline and the "F" indicating feedback. Depending on the project, a single time period can be as short as a week or as long as several months. Most typically, it was a month. The vertical axis is the overall effectiveness score that comes from the ProMES feedback report. Most typically, it was a month. The vertical axis is the overall effectiveness score that comes from the ProMES feedback report. More information on these data can be found in Pritchard et al. (2002, 2007). It is clear from these data that the effects of ProMES on productivity are quite strong. There is an immediate and large increase in productivity at the point when feedback from ProMES is introduced. The figure also shows that the effects last over significant periods of time since productivity improvements continuing through 20 work periods, which is typically 20 months. We have data from studies going much longer than this and in the longest running application, the positive effects from ProMES feedback have lasted for over four years and are still present. Data from the comparison/control groups in the studies which did not get ProMES feedback showed no change over the same time period.
The effect size (the number of standard deviations of change) of the feedback intervention can also be calculated for each study. The mean effect size. For studies which used the complete, original ProMES methodology the effect sizes were even higher the mean weighted effect size was 1.81
Finally, results of these studies indicate that attitudinal variables such as job satisfac-tion and morale improve and stress goes down with ProMES feedback.
Conclusions
It is very clear from this line of research that organizational productivity can be substantially improved in many different types of work in different types of organizations through efforts to change behavior and motivation. If the development of the measurement and feedback system are done well, substantial gains occur in productivity, and people report in-creased satisfaction and when it was measured, less stress. ProMES does this by empowering personnel to make decisions that effect them and by giving them the information to be able to do so effectively.