Understandingintuition from the human resource practitioners’perspective
Eugene Sadler-Smith, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey[1]
Abstract
This research aimed to understand intuition from the perspective of the Human Resources’ practitioner. We used a novel linguistic methodology based on de-nominalization to elicit participants’ experiences of intuition (N = 124). Based on our analysis we: refined the construct of intuition through redefinition; interpreted the subjective experience of intuition as comprising three dimensions (‘intuiting’, ‘intuition’, and ‘enacting’); discovered that intuitive affect has two facets (‘bodily awareness’ and ‘cognitive awareness’). We outline the theoretical implications and the relevance of our findings for Human Resourcespractice and make suggestions for further qualitative and phenomenological studies of intuition.
Keywords: decision making; intuition; Human Resources
Introduction
It is well –established that human resource practitioners, in common with other organizational actors, make us of intuition in decision making and problem solving (Miles & Sadler-Smith, 2014). Although there has been a surge of interest in intuition (e.g. Dane Pratt, 2007; Dörfler Akermann, 2013; Hodgkinson Clarke, 2007;Miller & Ireland, 2005; Sadler-Smith & Shefy, 2004; Salas, Rosen DiazGranados, 2010; Sinclair Ashkanasy, 2005) there is a scarcity of qualitative field work and littleintuition research in the area of Human Resources(Akinci Sadler-Smith, 2012; Miles & Sadler-Smith, 2014). Given that intuition is especially relevant in the social and expert judgements that are involved in Human Resource practice the objective this research was to elicitfirst-hand accounts from Human Resource practitionersof their subjective experiences of intuition.
Background
Taking the‘intuitive judgment (the outcome)-versus-intuiting (the process)’ distinction (Dane and Pratt, 2007) as a starting point, we sought a novel way to access subjects’ experiences of intuition;in doing so we turned to linguistics.
In English grammar the term ‘nominalization’ means ‘noun-like’, therefore to ‘de-nominalize’ a noun is to “make it less noun-like, or turn it into a verb, adjective, or some other grammatical category” (Payne, 1997: 94), e.g. ‘intuition’ renders ‘intuit’. Through de-nominalizingwe argue that using theverb (intuit) as the basis for empirical inquiry could render intuition more transparent. This allowsresearch participantstoretrieve and reflect ondirect personal occurrences of the action instantiated in the verb (intuiting), rather thanundertake de-contextualized musings on the meaning of the noun (intuition). So, rather than asking Human Resources practitioners the somewhat dull and de-personalized question ‘what is intuition?’ or ‘what does intuition mean to you?’we instead de-nominalized ‘intuition’ and asked: ‘what happens when you intuit?’formulated as a sentence-completion task: “when I intuit...’.
But why did we choose Human Resources as our research context? One reason is that intuition is relevant for and used in the decision making processes in Human Resources practice (Miles & Sadler-Smith, 2014). However, a problem is that Human Resourcesorganizational decision makers often overestimate the validity of their intuition whilst simultaneously underestimating the validity of paper-and-pencil tests. As Highhouse (2008) noted: one of the greatest achievements of IO psychology has been the development of selection decision aids, whilst one of its greatest failures has been an inability to convince employers to use them. Highhouse also lays some of the blame at the door of popular books which “extol the virtues of intuitive decision making” (2008: 334) such asMalcolm Gladwell’s 2005 best-seller Blink: The power of thinking without thinking.
However, although there is a plethora of knowledge regarding applicant reactions to employee selection procedures (Diab, Pui, Yankelevich and Highhouse, 2011) there is a dearth of understanding about why Human Resources practitioners find intuition so appealing and how they use it in employee selection decisions (Miles & Sadler-Smith, 2014).
Many Human Resources practitionersare generalists involved in recruitment, selection, reward and learning and development, use intuition in selection decisions (as research suggests) then it is also likely that they use in in Human Resource Development(HRD) decision making as well, hence understanding intuition is relevant to HRD research and practice.
Method, Sample and Procedure
We asked our Human Resources’ participants‘what happens when you intuit?’ We did so in the convenient setting of professional development seminars on the topic of intuition. Our participants elected to attenda seminar for personal and professional development purposes. The seminars (five in total, lasting an hour-and-half each) were conducted by the author and held at various locations across the south east of the UK. The total number of participants was 124.
At the beginning of each seminar, following a brief introduction, participants were requested to recollect an occasion (or occasions) during which they had experienced an intuition. They were alloweda short timeduring which to reflect on this experience, and from their recollections and reflections were asked to construct a general answer the question ‘what happens when you intuit?’ They did this by completing, on a pre-printed form, the first-person statement ‘when I intuit…’ Participants were also invited to indicate their gender (58 per cent female, 33 per cent male, and nine percent undeclared). Completed forms were collected-in at the end of the seminar, and responses were typed-up verbatim in MS Word and transferred to MS Excel for further coding, sorting, and cross-tabulating. Participation was voluntary and anonymity was guaranteed.
Data Analysis
The data set was 124 individual responses; these varied in length from six words (e.g. “when I intuit I generate ideas”) to 44 words (i.e. “when I intuit my gut tells me I need to seek more information and ask more questions to better understand a situation. My head starts to question what I am seeing or hearing and I feel I need to do something or take action”). There were 528 different words and 2082 words in total in the data set.
We decomposed participants’ responses into ‘units of text’ which were then analysed and coded. The final coding scheme consisted of 16 1st order concepts which were labelled according to their content, for example ‘Experiences’, ‘Gut reactions’, ‘Anticipating’, etc. The labelling of the concepts was participant-based(Langley Abdallah, 2011)reflecting as closely as possible the words participants used. We then moved from participant-based conceptsto researcher-based themesrepresenting six superordinate categoriesas follows: ‘Antecedents’; ‘Processes’; ‘Bodily awareness’; ‘Cognitive awareness’; ‘Outcomes’; ‘Behaviours’. We then stepped-up the level of abstraction in the analysis one more time and classified the categories into three superordinate aggregate dimensions, i.e.‘Intuiting’, ‘Intuition’, and ‘Enacting’.
Discussion of Findings
The overall analytical approach and the derived data structure is consistent with the method recommended by Gioia, Corley and Hamilton (2013) for inductive research,as implemented in, for example, Nag, Corley and Gioia (2007) and Pratt, Rockmann, and Kaufmann (2006). The data structure is shown in Figure 1and sample units of text for each of the 1st order concepts are shown in Table 1. On the basis of the analysis of our findings we define intuition, as follows: positively- or negatively-valenced feeling states, manifesting cognitively and somatically, arising rapidly and subconsciously, informed by prior learning and experiences, affording proximate evaluations which guide subsequent behaviours.
Figure 1. Data structure (dimensions, themes and concepts)
Table 1. Data structure and sample units of text (numerals in brackets indicate which participant is being quoted)
Dimension / Theme / 1st Order Concept / Sample unit of textIntuiting / Antecedents / Experiences / “Elements of my experience come together to shape my thoughts and actions” (19)
Patterns / “I recognise cues” (31)
Processes / Automatic / “Feel something to be true without analysing it” (22)
Fast / “Make decision quickly” (33)
Subconscious / “Feels as though answer/response appears from nowhere” (77)
Intuition / Bodily Awareness / Feelings / “Whole body feeling” (113)
Gut reactions / “Feelings in my stomach” (10)
Cognitive Awareness / Sense / “Get a sense” (2)
Mental images / “Listen to that small voice in my head” (28)
Enacting / Outcomes / Insight / “Make productive connections between previous unconnected or apparently unrelated ideas” (105)
Negative signal / “I know something is wrong” (56)
Positive signal / “Something clicks inside that I recognize as clearly right” (5)
Behaviours / Anticipating / “Sense that someone is going to say something” (17)
Deciding / “Guides me towards concrete direction, decision or action” (20)
Judging / “Cannot rationalize an absolute decision so I make a casting vote based on intuition” (38)
Questioning / “Ask myself what's really going on here” (50)
What happens then you intuit?
One of contributions of this research is that we are able to arriveempirically at a phenomenological, subjective experience-based definition of intuition. Further contributionsareas follows: (i) as noted above, previous research distinguishes between ‘intuiting’ (process) and ‘intuitive judgement’ (outcome) (Dane & Pratt, 2007), see Figure 2a, but we identify three phases in the process (Figure 2b); (ii) we found that Human Resourcespractitioners’ subjective experience of intuitionhas two facets: ‘bodily [somatic] awareness’ and ‘cognitive awareness’; (iii) This research bridges intuition’s antecedents and its behavioural outcomes, and the subjective experience of intuition is at the mid-point of the process (Figure 2b); (iv) our inductively-derived term ‘enacting’ subsumes Dane and Pratt’s (2007) intuitive judgment and captures a wider range of potential outcomes.
Figure 2a. ‘Intuiting-intuitive judgement’ model (see Dane & Pratt, 2007)
Figure 2b. ‘Intuiting-intuition-enacting’ model
Our model supports existing research; for example, the way intuition is interpreted in our analysis is fully consistent with the view of ‘intuition-as-expertise’, ‘intuitive expertise’ and ‘expert intuition’ (Sadler-Smith & Shefy, 2004; Kahneman & Klein, 2009; Salas et al., 2010) and Klein’s recognition-primed decision model,namely: ‘intuiting’ entails rapid, non-conscious processing based on past experiences and prior learnings.
In the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model (Klein, 1998; 2003; Klein,Calderwood & Clinton-Cirocco, 1988) decision makers recognize salient cues (as one of our participants wrote: “I recognize cues” [Participant 31]) and match these to extant patterns and prototypes of similar situations or people (for example, “what’s likely to happen, what’s likely to work” [Participant 48]). In the RPD model behavioural responses, in the form of ‘actions scripts’, are executed on the basis of a matching process (Klein, 2003).
The process, as far as the intuitor is concerned, appears to be largely automatic involving little in the way of effortful cognition (see Stanovich, 2009). Subjects “understand instinctively without the need for conscious reasoning”(Participant 66),so much so that the experience ofintuiting provides evaluations arrived at with minimal conscious cognition (“it is just right” [Participant 68]). Furthermore, the process is perceived to be fast.
Whether or not the intuitive responseturns out to be effective will depend on the intuitor’ssituational awareness (Klein et al., 1988),her expertise (Ericsson, Prietula & Cokely, 2007) and the validity of the decision making task or environment (i.e. how predictable the actual outcomes are on the basis of the perceived cues, see: Kahneman & Klein, 2009).
Implications
Our research addresses a significant shortcoming in current theorizations by shedding light on the nature and role of not just intuition but also, and specifically, ‘intuitive affect’ in Human Resources practice.
Since intuition “operates at the nexus of thinking and feeling” (Hodgkinson et al.,2009: 278) viewing cognitions and affect as distinct (e.g. Panksepp, 2003) is potentially unhelpful, whereas conceiving the boundary as being more permeable opens the way to a potentially richer conceptualization of the phenomenon of intuition.
Clore (1992) is helpful in this regard: he suggests that feelings can be grouped into three categories: affective feelings: valenced subjective experiences encompassing moods and emotions; bodily feelings: reflections of physical processes such as hunger or pain; cognitive feelings: experiential states that accompany cognitive processes such as feelings of familiarity (Clore, 1992; Greifeneder, Bless, & Pham, 2010).
The experiential state of ‘intuition’ was found to have two elements ‘bodily awareness’(‘gut feel’) and ‘cognitive awareness’ (‘hunch’);these can be mapped broadly on to Clore’s (1992) distinction between bodily feelings and cognitive feelings (although this was not Clore’s original intention). There is supporting evidence for this assertion since cognitive feelings have been found to be related to intuition in that greater reliance on cognitive feelings is associated with higher levels of faith in intuition (Keller & Bless, 2008). Cognitive feelings may be one way in which the products of subconscious processes become registered, articulated, and interpreted (Greifeneder, et al., 2010).
As noted in the Introduction, intuition research in management is characterized by ascarcity of empirical work. Our research is one of a small handful of qualitative studies in this area (e.g. Burke & Miller, 1999; Clarke & Mackaness, 2001; Sadler-Smith & Shefy, 2007). It has several implications for intuition theory and hints at several new directions for intuition research as follows:
(1) The research sharpens and elaborates the definition of intuition, but in contrast with other recent research it has done so directly from the perspective of data and experience rather than indirectly from theory;
(2) Researchers have previously equated intuitions with ‘gut feelings’ (e.g. Burke & Miller, 1999; Hayashi, 2001) however our analysis shows this is insufficient. A more helpful framing is a general category of ‘intuitive affect’ within which bodily feelings (referred to colloquially as ‘gut feel’) and cognitive feelings (referred to colloquially as ‘hunch’ or ‘vibe’) comprise two separate facets of the subjective experience of intuition;
(3)We expand Dane and Pratt’s (2007) ‘intuiting’ and ‘intuitive judgment’ distinction into three elements, ‘intuiting’, ‘intuition’, and ‘enacting’ (Figure 2b)which offers a tentative three-phase process model of intuition.
As far a future directions go, we need to know more about the detailed nature of intuitiveaffect over-and-above mere attributions to ‘gut feelings’, and also explore whether different feeling states arise under different conditions, the possibility of individual differences in the subjective experience of intuition, individuals’ sensitivities to their bodily state (Dunn et al., 2010), variability in the modalities in which intuition presents itself (Miller, 1992; Vaughan, 1979), and the neural correlates of the various facets of intuitive affect (Segalowitz, 2007)
Conclusion
This research has sought to get closer empirically to human resource practitioners’experiences of intuition by applying a novel qualitative methodology based on de-nominalization. By interpreting what Human Resources’ practitioners wrote about their experiences of intuition we have proposed a three phase model:intuiting, intuition, and enacting.
Through replication and extension with different samples in different contexts, by developing and elaborating the method and generating further research questions and hypotheses this research could have important implications for how we understand the subjectiveexperience of a phenomenon which is seen increasingly as pivotalinHuman Resources and organizational practices more generally.
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