Amy Gullickson & Wes Martz – Interdisciplinary Evaluation Doctoral Students; Michael Scriven – Professor of Philosophy, Associate Director of The Evaluation Center, and Interdiscipinary Ph.D. in Evaluation Program Director, WMU,

Evaluation Center: October 3, 2006

This session includes abbreviated presentations of papers prepared for the upcoming American Evaluation Association conference.

Strategic Evaluation of Business and Industry: Evaluative Approaches for Improving Organizational Culture (Amy Gullickson)

Employee engagement and satisfaction are integral components for adding value to an organization and its products. Forward thinking corporations are moving away from command-and-control models toward learning organization and complex adaptive systems.
This paper explores how evaluative tools such as needs assessment, after-action review, and minimum specification documents can be used to help increase employee satisfaction and performance and thus, results for shareholders.

Building Shareholder Value Using Formative Evaluation (Wes Martz)

The use of formal evaluation as a tool to drive value from improved operational efficiency presents an opportunity to strengthen an organization’s performance and shareholder value. This presentation explores the application of evaluation outside the scope of human resource development initiatives and considers evaluation as a tool to build shareholder value. Specifically, a case study of a formative evaluation conducted at an operating division of a U.S.-based global manufacturer of industrial products is presented.

The Evaluator's Responsibility for the Consequences of an Evaluation (Michael Scriven)

Evaluations often have consequences, some intended, some unintended. The hard questions concern the extent to which the evaluator is responsible for these consequences. If the evaluation concludes with recommendations, then it's reasonable to suppose, and it's legally likely, that the evaluator will be held (at least partly) responsible for those consequences. But the much more fundamental question is how a typical evaluative conclusion can imply consequences at all. I will examine the traps that evaluatorshave fallen into when too-quickly moving from evaluative conclusions to recommendations, and indicate how and when to avoid the traps – or to avoid making recommendations.