Lessons From The Murdoch Scandal — HR Must Monitor Employee Behavior

This public trust is our Company’s most valuable asset: one earned every day through our scrupulous adherence to the principles of integrity and fair dealing… Each of us has the power to influence the way our Company is viewed, simply through the judgments and decisions we each make in the course of an ordinary day. — from News Corp’s code of conduct manual

The News Corp scandal has been an expensive one, tanking the stock valuation by $7 billion in a single four-day period. While it might not be obvious, the scandal will have many serious human resource implications not just for News Corp, but for all large organizations in general.

News Corp will need to replace many key leaders following permanent damage to its employer brand that influences its ability to recruit and retain top professionals (incidentally, Scotland Yard faces the same issues). In both organizations the primary causes of damage appear to be large numbers of employees and managers acting badly.

Undetected employee misbehavior is a common problem at almost all large organizations, so this example should serve as a wake-up call to all in HR that it needs to re-examine its capability for identifying damaging employee behaviors.

What Is HR Accountable for?

One of the fundamental tenants of modern business is accountability, but you would be hard pressed to find any part of the HR function at News Corp accepting responsibility for the recent events. When employees behave badly, you can blame the CEO, but in a massively large organization he/she often pushes oversight off to others (Murdoch has stated publicly that he can’t closely monitor the actions of 53,000 individual employees worldwide). You can also blame corporate culture, but if you do, you must identify who is accountable for maintaining the culture and what systemic actions sustain it.  A third possibility involves blaming whoever is responsible for monitoring and guiding employee behavior.

These last two possibilities bring to mind an important strategic question:

“Who within an organization is responsible for maintaining corporate culture and the processes of monitoring and guiding the behavior of employees? (I think they call that performance management).” While not all would agree, one possible answer is HR!

HR Systems Should Prevent Employees and Managers from Acting Badly?

In all organizations, a key component of governance is establishing responsibility and accountability for managing the people and systems that will produce the organization’s efforts. When the personnel function evolved into the human resource management profession, one of the arguments for the shift was the application of higher-level management to the many human resources that staff the organization.  In short, the human resource profession accepted in theory responsibility for developing systems and processes to govern the performance of humans executing work on the organization’s behalf.

Definition Of Random Sampling - News


Lessons From The Murdoch Scandal — HR Must Monitor Employee Behavior
Lessons From The Murdoch Scandal — HR Must Monitor Employee Behavior

Some of the monitoring approaches to consider include the use of mystery shoppers, random sampling of employee actions, periodic audits, exit interviews to identify bad behaviors, anonymous whistleblowing processes, and random employee and customer



Alcohol and Accidents: Can One Drink Kill?
Alcohol and Accidents: Can One Drink Kill?

They can determine whether two values derived from a random sample are different enough that they cannot be attributed to chance (sampling error). But the FARS data are not a sample of some larger data set; they represent the entire data set of fatal



How accurate is the new Ion Torrent genome, really?
How accurate is the new Ion Torrent genome, really?

This isn'ta function of the raw data quality – it's simply a statistical consequence of sampling error at small sample sizes, that can only be overcome by additional sequencing. It's also an extremely expensive genome: even at this low coverage the



What's Wrong With School “Choice”

While they might not be at 'the top' I doubt highly that you are taking the worst students from those schools, or even a random sampling (so, in effect, 'skimming'). As for other charters in Philadelphia, since education is mandatory in the state until



Job JOLTS - Job Openings for May 2011

The JOLTS takes a random sampling of 16000 businesses and derives their numbers from that. The survey also uses the CES, or current employment statistics, not the household survey as their base benchmark, although ratios are coming from the household




S U R V E Y « NIRWAN'S FILES

1. DEFINITION OF SURVEY

Survey is a systematic method for gathering information from (a sample of) entities for the purposes of constructing quantitative descriptors of the attributes of the larger population of which the entities are members. The word “systematic” is deliberate and meaningfully distinguishes surveys from other ways of gathering information. The phrase appears in the definition because sometimes surveys attempt to measure everyone in a population and sometimes just a sample. According to Masri Singarimbun (1995:3), survey is a research which is taking sample from a population by using questioner as an instrument in collecting data.

Some characteristics of survey:

a.     Information is gathered primarily by asking people questions.

b.    Information is collected either by having interviewers ask questions and record answers or by having people read or hear questions and record their own answers.

c.    Information is collected from only a subset of the population to be described a sample rather than from all members.

  2.  TYPES OF SURVEY

             Investigator must determine the format of survey that is most appropriate for the purposed investigation. Survey are classified to their focun and scope (cencus and sample surveys) or to the time frame for data collection (longitudinal and cross sectional surveys). Becoming a guide to researcher to select method that will provide the most useful data.

a.    Survey Classified According to Focus and Scope

             There are four classifying of survey according to focus and scope:

 1) Census of tangibles

 2) Census of intangibles

 3) A sample of tangibles

 4) A sample survey of intangibles

  b.    Survey Classified According to The Time Dimension

They gather information at different points in time in order to study changes over extended periods of time. For example, studying the development of quantitative reasoning in elementary school children would select a sample of first graders and administers a measure of quantitative reasoning. This same group would be followed through successive grade levels and tested each year to assess how quantitative reasoning abilities develop over time.


Definition Of Random Sampling - Bookshelf

Elements of statistics 2

Elements of statistics 2

In Section 3.18 of Volume 1 we gave a common intuitive-level, nonmathematical definition of simple random sampling from a population: Simple random sampling ...

Basic statistical methods and models for the sciences

Basic statistical methods and models for the sciences

Definition 3.2: Random sampling from a finite population without replacement Suppose that we have a population of n distinct objects, denoted by x.,,x, xn . ...

Person-environment-behavior research, investigating activities and experiences in spaces and environments

Person-environment-behavior research, investigating activities and experiences in spaces and environments

These sampling designs are briefly discussed in the sections that follow. 6.3.1 Simple Random Sampling By definition, simple random sampling implies that ...

Marketing, The Complete Awakening

Marketing, The Complete Awakening

In non-random sampling this is not possible because no such measure exists. ( sampling error is explained shortly). By its definition, the random sampling ...

Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences

Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences

For the preceding definition of probability to be accurate, it is necessary that the outcomes be obtained by a process called random sampling. ...

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Random sample: Definition from Answers.com
random sample Sample group of people to be used in a research testing situation where every person in the area under study had an equal chance of

Sampling (statistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For sampling of pseudo-random numbers according to a given probability distribution, see ... In a simple random sample ('SRS') of a given size, all such subsets ...

Random Sampling Law & Legal Definition
USLegal " Legal Definitions Home " R " Random Sampling Law & Legal Definition ... Devices such as tables of random numbers are used to remove subjective biases inherent in ...

Simple random sample: Definition from Answers.com
simple random samples ( ¦simpəl ¦randəm ′sampəlz ) ( statistics ) Samples in which every possible sample of size n , that is, every

Random Sampling
2. Simple random sampling is the most basic sampling procedure to draw the sample. ... DEFINITION: A simple random sample is a sample of size n drawn from a population of size ...