Evidence-Based Management Assessment of an Organisational Practice

Your frst assessment requires team work. Please arrange yourself into a team as soon as possible, and ideally no later than Week 3. This assessment will centre on the Evidence-Based Management (EBM)

process that is discussed in Unit 2. One organising key concept for your assessment will be the six As of EBM. In the assessment, we will focus on the frst four elements of asking, acquiring, appraising, and aggregating.

Due Date: Friday 5 November 2021 (Week 8) by 3pm Sydney time

1. Managers make decisions about every aspect of an organisation such as strategy, structure, controlsystems, responses to the environment and human resources. Decision-making is therefore a critical aspect of management. Effective managers are able to incorporate evidence-based decision-making

2. capabilities into their practice to optimise outcomes. A hallmark of high-quality decision-making is the ability to combine critical thinking with an evidence-based approach. Assessment 1 will focus on

3. evidence-based decision-making, which is discussed in Unit 2. The assessment will focus on the frst four

4. elements of Evidence-Based Management (Key Concept in Unit 2): Asking, Acquiring, Appraising, and  Aggregating.

5. Assessment 1 is a team-based assessment. We recommend teams of no more than 5 or 6 members.Learning how to contribute to a team environment and how to manage team-based projects are critical

6. skills for managers. This assessment provides your team with the opportunity to practise effectiveTeaming (discussed in Unit 5). As a team, you will prepare a report that provides a relevant

7. recommendation for or against implementing a specifc management initiative, practice, or policy. Yourteam’s objective will be to get to that recommendation, having completed a rigorous search for and

8. evaluation of the available evidence. Your team’s recommendation may be to a specifc organisation(perhaps one where a team member works) or as a more general recommendation to a type oforganisation. What is important is that the team demonstrates the application of the EBM/EBDM process (Unit 2) and incorporates relevant evidence to substantiate and support the recommendations made.

As a team, identify a management practice or policy that is promoted as performance enhancing foreither employees or the organisation . It is important that you select a policy/practice that your team isreally interested in and wants to learn more about. Examples of a management practice or policy youcould consider (but are not limited to) are:

1. forced ranking performance appraisal

2. team diversity for increasing creativity

Task Name: Evidence-based management assessment of an organisational practice

3. diversity for increased performance

4. working from home and telecommuting

5. holacracy

activity-based working

1. Having found the broad practice/policy you are interested in exploring, your team will need to formulate a'focused question'. This will enable you to develop an appropriate recommendation (based on the evidence that your team will subsequently collect). Please see Readings 2.2 and 2.4 on asking critical

2. This stage requires you to look for sources of evidence. Some sources of academic evidence are: UNSWlibrary (login to myLibrary); scholar.google.com, ProQuest, Ebscohost, and Web of Science. (Note: Thefrst two sources should be more than enough. Please also see http://cebma-library.org for EBMA’s collated library of higher quality evidence.)

3. Make sure your team starts with using minimal search terms (i.e. the most important key words). Reading2.4 provides helpful details on this stage. Look carefully at the focused question and then identify key words/terms from the focused question and use them as search terms. To fnd 'meta-analysis' or'literature reviews' or 'literature surveys' (i.e. higher quality academic evidence), try adding such terms (separately) into your search terms and see what results come back.

4. Your team will need to fnd 10 good-quality sources of evidence that can be used to answer the focusedquestion. However, in order to fnd 10 good (i.e. usable and useful for assessment purposes) sources of

5. evidence, your team may have to skim through about 50 articles (share this evenly among the teammembers - so skim through about 10 articles per person).  At this stage, the team is learning how to

6. search for evidence and trying to fnd relevant articles to help your team answer the focused question. Ireading a piece of academic or practice-oriented evidence: look at the title and then read the abstract. If

7. the title and abstract seem relevant for your team’s purposes, skim through the introduction andconclusion. If at the end of this, you and your team decide that it looks promising, then you may need to

8. devote time to do a thorough reading.

How ESG has contributed to the (Productivity Uplift).

Please use an appendix to list the 10 or so articles you have skimmed through. These do not have  to be in your reference list. But would like to have visibility of these list From the list of 10 …use .2  articles to build arguments and answer the focused question should be in the assessment reference list together with course notes and course readings that

have been used – these 2 will need to be referenced.

This report summarises the evidence for the organisations instituting Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices and their relation to financial performance. This has been prepared as a group for the UNSW MBAX program. The first two sections develop the specific question to be asked and the following two sections appraise and evaluate evidence.  

This paper considers the adoption of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices and reporting for mainstream businesses and enterprises within Australia. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices include a wide variety of organisational policies, procedures, regulations and reporting standards (wikipedia.org, 2021). ESG issues encompass climate, sustainability, diversity, human rights, consumer protection, animal welfare, management structure, employee relations, executive and employee compensation. ESG has become one of the most important cross-cutting issues of the decade (Phillips, 2020) and is required for social license to operate, availability of ‘responsible’ finance and a growing number of mandatory legal standards. 

Management policy or practice statement is clearly articulated. Why the particular management policy or practice was selected for analysis is clearly articulated and presented in an insightful and compelling way. 

Problem Statement (PICOC)

Asking -A well framed question 

ESG harnesses a broad range of issues, many centrally relevant to the MBAX course study including diversity, employee relations and management structure. Encompassing all of these, the authors decided to focus on measuring ESG performance via overarching ESG ratings systems. These rating systems are gaining relevance because they are becoming more common, influential, and predictive (Boubaker et al, 2018). The PICOC model introduced by Barends (2014) is used to formalise the scientific question framing process.  

1. Population – Who? The authors decided to research the total population of ESG-rated companies

2. Intervention – What or How? Any intervention that increased their ESG rating

3. Comparison - Compared to what? The comparison population was any company that was not able to increase their rating

4. Outcomes - What are we trying to accomplish / improve? Since ESG is espoused for various outcomes, this was the most important 5. clarification in the PICOC framework. Henisz et al (2019) 

5. Context – In what kind of organisation / circumstances? ESG cuts across many issues however ESG rating systems are used to simplify organisational comparisons