Pygmalion Effect: Setting high expectations improves performance.

Pygmalion Effect: Setting high expectations improves performance.

The effect of setting high expectations on people, coined the Pygmalion effect, was first postulated in a study of teachers’ impact on students (Rossenthal & Jacobson, 1968). In the study, students at an elementary school took intelligence pre-tests. Rosenthal and Jacobsen then informed the teachers of the names of twenty percent of the students in the school who were showing “unusual potential for intellectual growth” and would bloom academically within the year. Unknown to the teachers, these students were selected randomly, with no relation to the initial test. When Rosenthal and Jacobson tested the students eight months later, they discovered that the group of randomly selected students scored significantly higher.
In the workplace, a study on the Israeli defence forces (Eden, 1992) revealed two effects of setting expectations:

1. Leadership mediates the Pygmalion effect. Raising manager expectations improves leadership, which in turn promotes subordinate performance.
2. Managers allocate leadership resources to subordinates in proportion to their expectations.

The implications of the first effect are that setting expectations, and setting them high, improves our leadership capabilities and our people’s performance.
The implications of the second effect were reported as, “Evidently, high expectations bring out the best leadership in a manager. This suggests the hypothesis that if managers would treat all their subordinates to the same quality leadership that they lavish upon those of whom they expect the most, all would perform better”.


Source: http://www.changefactory.com.au/our-thinking/articles/managing-performance-pygmalion-effect-leadership/?utm_content=buffer0b3f6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer