Gwen Fontenot

Structured interview questions for selecting productive, emotionally mature, and helpful employees.

Behavioral description questions for a structured interview format are provided so that managers can probe an applicants intelligence, emotional intelligence, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Research suggests that the best performing employees are high on intelligence, and the most socially competent employees are high on emotional intelligence. A study was conducted with a nursing department, and results indicate that emotional intelligence is related to organizational citizenship behaviors. Those individuals high on organizational citizenship behaviors exceed formal role expectations and positively influence organization outcomes.

Importance x dissatisfaction = a formula for managerial action.

Management should not only survey employees about their satisfaction with an issue but should also inquire about how important that issue is to them. If the issue is very important to employees and they are very dissatisfied, then management action may be urgent. However, if staff members are dissatisfied with an issue that is unimportant to them, then no management action may be required. Rank ordering the items by importance and then subtracting satisfaction from importance to get a performance-gap score is insufficient. The decision maker still may have to use intuition to determine which items have priority. Rather than gap analysis, it is better to multiply the importance score by the dissatisfaction score. This will yield a clear rank order of the issues to which the management must attend. The authors used the multiplicative method with a health care organization. These results are analyzed, and management actions are recommended.