HR is WEIRD
By: Ibanga Umanah
Tags: Startup, Technology, Recruiting

Psychology as a discipline has an intrinsic WEIRD problem: it depends, almost entirely, on experiments with people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.

A study of the top journals in six subdisciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries (specifically in North America and Europe). If we are to draw conclusions from psychology for humans as a whole, we would have to assume that people across all of the world’s societies behave pretty much like Americans, Canadians, and Europeans.

Likewise, Human Resources — as a subfield of psychology — shares the WEIRD approach. All of the tools we rely on to make hiring decisions are generated and validated on the same WEIRD group.

However, it doesn’t take a globe-trotter to know that people’s worldviews and behaviors vary from one society to another. So why are WEIRD societies used as a representative sample when they constitute a very thin slice of humanity — more specifically, a mere 12% of the world population?

Canadian Psychologists, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan question the idea that human behavior is homogenous across cultures in their paper, The Weirdest People in the World?. They delineate substantial variations across societies, even in cognitive processes as fundamental as vision.

In other words, we can’t assume that we look at the world the same way — literally. For example, in the 1960s an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists and psychologists evaluated the susceptibility of both children and adults from a wide range of human societies to five standard illusions, including the Müller-Lyer illusion shown below:

Source: The weirdest people in the world? (2010)

Viewers were asked if they see a difference in length between the two lines. Findings among this and the other four illusions showed significant variations ranging from Kalahari South Africans who saw no difference between the lines to American undergraduates from Evanston who saw close to a 20% difference in length.

Source: The weirdest people in the world? (2010)

The authors show the same wide variations in society on topics such as Fairness, Economic Cooperation, Risk Aversion, Conformity, Punishment, Moral Reasoning…the list goes on. Our point is this; the way we see, interpret and make decisions in the world varies. If the way we hire and motivate people is limited to WEIRD-derived models, it’s not a matter of whether or not we’re making mistakes, but rather how many mistakes we’re making.

We all share the same values, but which ones are important differ by culture.

On the other hand, the same authors found that one of the most prevalent similarities across cultures is that we share the same Five Factor structure of personality; the Big Five, as it’s sometimes called.

Whether people are defined as WEIRD or non-WEIRD, we all have values and motivations that drive our actions. Shalom Schwartz, a psychology professor who conducted research on values and motivations across 80 countries found that human values fall under 19 universal categories.

Source: Refining the Theory of Basic Individual Values (2010)

How you prioritize one value over another depends on your life’s circumstances. Some cultures provide people with more opportunities to express certain values rather than others.

For example, a woman who lives in a society where common gender stereotypes reign is likely to be rewarded for pursuing benevolence and be sanctioned for pursuing power. Clearly, this norm could influence her attitude towards seeking a promotion at work.

So what problems do HR’s WEIRD problem and cross-cultural variations in values cause while sourcing talent?

How you hire depends on your scale of operations.

On the one hand, when you’re building a small local team, sourcing talent based on homogenous values and motivations makes sense as it leads to culture fit. This can improve cooperation, reduce friction between people, and predict a higher level of performance as compared to bringing together people with heterogeneous values.

Learning from social scientists studying dating and romantic relationships, couples with similar political opinions tend to have less conflict and more satisfying relationships, which is why dating websites like okcupid added political preference as a criterion for matchmaking. But note that the research focused on an American sample and to reinforce the point we’re making in this article, results might be different in societies where politics don’t play a large part in a person’s life.

On the other hand, if you’re building a large international company, seeking employee homogeneity across countries is not only unrealistic but also quite limiting.

The unrealistic quest for shared values.

As mentioned before, preferences in personal values and motivations vary from one country to another. According to Schwartz’s research, younger people in some non-WEIRD societies seem to prioritize security, tradition, and conformity while their counterparts in Western Europe and North America tend to prioritize hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, and universalism.

Since value prioritization guides the process of evaluating and selecting a person’s professional trajectories, young people who value security might gravitate towards a more traditional, 9-to-5 employment model. Those who value self-direction might want to experiment, diversify their skills, and select a career path that has the form of a mission across companies, jobs, or projects. Assuming you’ll find the same values across countries is unlikely. But even if you can…

Limiting your talent pool to one set of values will limit your creativity and growth as a company.

Diversity plays a massive role in economic (and other) exchanges. As a species, Homo sapiens progressed by cooperating with strangers on a regular basis, allowing for both the accumulation and the passing down of a large pool of cumulative knowledge. In fact, it is our savvy management of differences that have led to humanity’s success.

An interesting initiative that highlights the importance of economic exchanges is the Atlas of economic complexity, which shows the dynamic patterns of economic complexity for different countries and industries, and how every market’s unique comparative advantage advances economic exchange and growth.

So if you want people with shared values at a company’s inception, you would need the exact opposite as it grows. Don’t look for conformity or ignore values. Instead, choose diversity wisely.

Design more attractive work using data on values.

As you open new branches of your company in different cities and countries, there is no one-size-fits-all recruiting solution. Talent acquisition processes put in place at headquarters come laden with culture-specific assumptions and biases, making them ill-adapted to a new environment.

To attract the best talent you need to do at least three things:

Uncover the underlying values and motivations within each culture. This may seem obvious, but the practice is exceedingly rare. In a recent study, Deloitte found that only 9% of companies use data and analysis to understand employee preferences when designing jobs and incentives. Segment potential talent into groups of folks with shared life and work values. Design a compelling Employer Value Proposition to tap into each person’s unique motives for joining your company.

In their book Workforce of One, Susan Cantrell and David Y. Smith outline how to segment people based on their work preferences using the tools at your disposal.

Here’s an example the authors describe: Google Ireland realized that many people in Ireland enjoy cycling, and so, to attract job candidates the company created and marketed a cycling plan. Google will contribute to purchasing a bicycle.

The important point highlighted by the Google Ireland case and the practice of building EVPs is this:

To win, it’s the company who needed to adapt to the talent culture, not the other way around.

Luckily, you can adapt to talent using customer benefits. Gartner talks about an employer value proposition as having at least five levers:

Opportunity: advancement, development, and company growth

People: manager, coworker, and leadership quality and camaraderie

Organization: market position, product/service quality and social responsibility

Work: job-interest alignment and work-life balance

Rewards: compensation, health and retirement benefits, and vacation time

Here’s the dirty secret: the more diverse, global, or simply non-WEIRD a company’s staff is, the more likely their values and motivations for work will differ, even when those people currently live in the same city.

As you grow your company, remember that the best way to thrive isn’t to look for similar people in many places, but to understand your potential employees’ many different underlying motivations, segment them based on common values, and then design your company’s work to attract the best from each group.

Authors

Daniele Orner is a Cofounder and Chief Scientist for Brave, a tool for spotting and ranking talent for companies building product teams in emerging markets.

Ibanga Umanah is a Cofounder and the Head of Strategy for Brave.

Amina Islam has a Ph.D. in engineering and is currently putting her skills and academic background into doing evidence-based research on the impact of informal learning programs.

Get in touch to hire, get hired, or join our team: brave.careers