TheProMESsenger
Professor Robert D. Pritchard
University of Central Florida

• ProMES Homepage
• Values Guiding
  the Research Program
• Major Research Findings
• Description of ProMES
• Advantages of ProMES
• ProMES Meta-Analysis
• History of ProMES
• Computer Program
  for ProMES
• Technical Questions
• Publications on ProMES
• ProMES Researchers'
  Contact Information

• Robert D Pritchard

Values Guiding the Research Program

The overall values that have guided the work on ProMES has been to do high quality work on problems important to society and that helps people in their lives. Within this overall value, there were several objectives that guided the work. The basic idea was to try to take what we had learned and to develop a practical method to measure productivity and use this measurement as feedback for people doing the work. The assumption was that developing good feedback from good measures would lead to productivity improvement. The word practical is stressed because in order to have an impact on this significant problem, we had to develop techniques that would actually work in ongoing organizations. They had to be cost-effective to develop and maintain, and people had to be able to use them to improve their own productivity. In addition, since there was clear evidence on the power of feedback to improve performance, it seemed that a reasonable approach was to focus on feedback as the primary mechanism for making this behavior change. While productivity improvement was a major purpose for developing this approach, it was not the only purpose. Because of the overall value guiding the work, it was important to develop something that would help people doing their work. In other words, we wanted to avoid developing techniques that simply squeezed more work out of people, while making their working lives more difficult. The objective was an approach where everyone benefited. Thus, it was important that the approach not only lead to increased productivity, but also to things like improved job satisfaction, reduced stress, and the development of individuals' skills and potentials. Another objective was to develop approaches to performance/productivity improvement which were based on a sound conceptual background and evaluated with empirical research. There are many approaches which are not based on sound theory, do not have quality empirical findings to support their claims, or both.