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A STUDY OF MINDSET AND MANAGEMENT DECISIONS Robert Wood and Albert Bandura did a fascinating study with graduate students in business, many of whom had management experience. In theit study, they created Earon-type managers and Wurtzel-type managers by putting people into different mindsets
Wood and Bandura gave these budding business leaders a complex management task in which they had to run a simulated organization, a furniture company. In this computerized task, they had to place employees in the right jobs and decide how best to guide and motivate these workers To discover the best ways, they had to keep revising their decisions based on the feedback they got about employee productivity
The researchers divided the business students into two groups. One group was given a fixed mindset. They were told that the task measured their basic, underlying capabilities. The higher their capacity, the better their performance. The other group was given a growth mindset. They were told that management skills were developed through practice and that the task would give them an opportunity to cultivate these skills
The task was hard because students were given high production standards to meet, and especially in their early attempts-they fell short As at Enron, those with the fixed mindset did not profit from their mistakes
But those with the growth mindset kept on learning Not worried about measuring or protecting-their fixed abilities, they looked directly at their mistakes, used the feedback, and altered their strategies accordingly. They became better and better at understanding how to deploy and motivate their workers, and their productivity kept pace. In fact, they ended up way more productive than those with the fixed mindset. What's more, throughout this ather grueling task, they maintained a healthy sense of confidence. They operated like Alan Wurtzel.
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