2. Biases that are tarnishing the results of your
employee surveys
• Different psychological bias can creep in the responses to employee surveys
• Common response biases which HR professionals should be careful of and
counter are:
3. Different kinds of bias that can affect the
responses of your employee surveys
1. Positive Negative Asymmetry (PNA) & Negative Bias
2. Social Desirability Bias
3. Acquiescence Bias
4. Demand characteristics
4. Positive Negative Asymmetry (PNA)
& Negative Bias
• Positive Negative Asymmetry (popularly known as PNA) effect, refers to the “difference in
the way that individuals process and attend to positively and negatively valued
information.” This leads to what academia calls ‘Negativity bias’.
• This bias means that one is expected to have a higher negative impact of a stimulus
compared to a positive stimulus which is equitable to the former.
• Research says, “The negativity effect is a reaction to specific stimuli and means the higher
impact of negative than of positive stimuli of the same intensity of behavior, affect and
cognitive representations of evaluated objects.”
5. To understand how it emerges in survey responses
• For a question, one employee has a positive response and another employee has a
negative answer up his sleeve.
• But the individual who has a negative response will be really negative and the positive
response cannot match up to the former for its intensity.
• PNA theory suggests that “personnel who are asked about workplace issues on a survey
should be more mobilized by negative than positive events.”
• “People who experience negative events may be stimulated to respond more strongly than
those who experience positive events,” says the research.
• To give an organization-level example, in a study where employees were asked to recall
workplace interactions that resulted in either positive or negative emotional reactions – the
employees recalled significantly more negative interactions than positive ones.
6. Social Desirability Bias
• In this kind of bias, the respondent selects options or gives responses which present them
in positive light in front of their bosses.
• Employees may deny undesirable characteristics and ascribe to socially desirable traits.
• Jennifer Cullen, Industrial/Organizational Psychologist and Director or People Science at
Culture Amp, calls this approach
“an exercise of “impression management” where employees indulge in managing their
image, instead of giving truthful responses”.
• People do not want to admit if they are having trouble with their work, because it reflects
an uncompetitive image of theirs; hence they give socially desirable answers, such as, “No
challenge at work.”
7. Cullen suggests 2 approaches to counter this bias:
1. Better structure of questions
Shift the focus to the organization and the way their work has been structured by the
organization from the individual and her feelings
2. - ‘We’ questions are more effective than ‘I’ questions
This removes judgment in the statement about an individual and makes it a collective
assessment.
8. Acquiescence Bias
Reasons why people have a tendency to say, “I agree”, as a response to many questions:
i. It may be a “personality disposition some individuals have to be polite”; and to avoid
social friction, they agree to what’s asked.
ii. When people do not have enough knowledge about what is being asked, they feel
inferior to the experimenter, and agree to his “expertise” in the form of an “agreement” in
the survey.
It is the tendency of the respondent to agree to a statement when she has limited knowledge of
the subject. This is what research defines as acquiescence bias.
In an organizational context, this bias can easily creep in employee responses.
Employees may be asked if they feel if they find the leadership team to be inspirational and
role models. The employees may choose agree because of acquiescence bias even if they
haven’t met any of the people in the leadership team.
9. Demand characteristics
• This bias arises when people understand the purpose behind the study and alter their
responses so that the study meets its desired objectives.
• From an organizational perspective, it can happen in engagement surveys.
• There are certain stakeholders who would want the engagement score to be high, hence
they give higher ratings to all the parameters.
An Employee Engagement Survey is a set of survey questions directed towards an
organization's employees such that the survey seeks to understand the level of
engagement of these employees with the organization at large. These surveys are typically
sent to employees using Online Survey Tools.
