Hospitality News
Dr. Dennis Reynolds finds empirical evidence for harnessing Pygmalion while restraining Golem.
In response to educators and trainers' growing interest in understanding the effect of verbalized positive and negative expectations, Dennis Reynolds recently completed a study of such effects on 351 business-school students. Analyses using pre- and post-treatment data collected during controlled-laboratory experiments indicated, most notably, that negative expectations of students' performance on cognitively based tasks tend to degrade that performance. The effects on non-cognitively based tasks were, however, positive. Positive expectations had the opposite effect. Implications for management-education research and related applications are discussed. The paper, which was named "Best Paper in Management Education and Development" at the 2005 Academy of Management meeting, will appear in an upcoming issue of Academy of Management Learning & Education.