How Thinking Styles Impact Employee Retention Rates

In some of my previous blog posts about employee retention, I described how employee turnover rates have become pervasive and extremely damaging to both the bottom-line and service quality of organizations.

I described how by creating a software solution with performance profiling and performance appraisal integrated into an adaptive system, it has proved possible to reduce employee turnover[1].

We learned, why personality testing has significant limitations when it comes to the screening of job applicants in recruitment situations and how performance profiling overcomes these limitations.

Performance Profiling Helps with Employee Retention

The data collected through the deployment of performance profiling has revealed that there are two predominant styles of thinking. The style of thinking of any employee can be identified through the use of the performance profile questionnaire and it was found that managers who used this tool to become knowledgeable regarding the thinking styles of their direct reports and who used this information to tailor the way in which they managed each team member were more able to retain talented employees.

In this part of this series of blog post, I will be discussing each of these two styles of thinking in depth.

You will learn how to use this knowledge to improve employee management and how this can impact employee retention. In what follows, I’m going to describe each of the two most predominant styles of thinking and show how these each evolve.

What are Intrinsic and Extrinsic Thinking Styles?

Have you ever noticed that highly creative people are not particularly good listeners and people who are great listeners are less likely to come up with new ideas? The data collected through the deployment of Talent Chaser indicates that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, falls within one of these camps. The data also shows that, as people age, their style of thinking becomes more pronounced.

By mining the Talent Chaser data, it has become clear that there is a motivational underpinning to this process and that this has a fundamental relationship to the employee retention problem. Study of performance appraisal ratings and related task action planning documentation collected through Talent Chaser shows that employeeslike doing more of those things that they can do well.

This fundamental human motivation, which is at the heart of human behavior, drives the self-reinforcing processes that result in people adopting a bias towards greater reliance on either their creative or listening skills.

Understanding the concept of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Thinkers can help you use this concept to improve employee retention.

The Intrinsic Thinker

As depicted in the diagram at left, creative people start out with an initial, but very small bias towards the use of their creative problem-solving skills in preference to their listening skills as the way to solve problems.

As such individuals rely more on their creativity, they become more adept, through practice, at creative thinking. Because employees prefer doing things they can do well, this drives a process that is self-reinforcing. As time goes by, they become more and more reliant on their own ideas and much less interested in the ideas of other people.

In this series of blogs, we’re going to refer to such people as Intrinsic Thinkers and constantly remind ourselves that they will be likely to talk more and listen less.

The Extrinsic Thinker 

In a mirror-image process, some people start out with an initial, but very small bias towards the use of their listening skills as a way to solve problems.

In a process that is also self-reinforcing, these people end up relying much more on their listening skills and much less on their own creative problem-solving skills.

We’re going to refer to these people as Extrinsic Thinkers and keep in mind the fact that they will be likely to talk less and listen more.

In my blog posts, I’m going to show you the strengths and weaknesses of each style of thinking and introduce you to the third, less prevalent style which I call Prime Thinking –A style of thinking with many advantages. I’ll then move on to describe how you can use this knowledge to change recruitment screening, team building, and day-to-day-management practices in ways that will improve employee retention.

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Is your organization using personality tests to predict employee performance? Read our white paper to learn why personality tests cannot predict employee performance.

[1] Data generated through the deployment of Talent Chaser within Volunteers of America showed an increase in days-in-job by over 100% over a six year period. This result was independently verified by Dr. Richard Feinberg, Professor of Consumer Science at Purdue University.