Employee perceptions of the use of evidence in management

This project explores how employees perceive the use of evidence by their managers or supervisors. A new scale was developed and tested to enable organisations to measure how their employees perceive the use of evidence in their organisation. Both eight and four item scales were found to be robust, reliable, valid and discriminant from other leadership measures (including leader-member exchange and perceived organisational support). While most studies were conducted with employees working in residential aged care, some studies to support and validate the statistical analyses were conducted using an MBA student sample.

Employees notice and are affected by how their managers/supervisors make workplace decisions. When perceived positively, a manager's decision-making can improve employee trust in their supervisor, improve their learning at work, improve their perceptions of the organisation as a whole, and reduce distress. In this information-rich age, supervisors and managers have a lot of information available to them, and how they use that information is a skill with potentially wide workforce implications.

Employee perceptions of evidence use (PEU) are positively related to their relationship with, and trust in, their supervisor. Further, PEU is positively associated with work-based learning and perceptions of organisational performance. Finally, PEU was found in this study to have a negative relationship with employee distress, implying that improved perceptions of managerial evidence use can reduce employee distress.