Improving Performance Management Interviews Between Managers and Professionals: A Longitudinal Study on Talking About the Development of Complex New Social Behavior

The aim of this study is to investigate whether it is possible for a manager to get a professional to become conscious of his or her thoughts during a complex new social experience. In all, 19 managers from organizations in the Netherlands were trained to use the Episodic Memory Interview (EMI), a method to retrieve thoughts intertwined with episodic memory. The managers conducted interviews with professionals immediately at the end of training sessions and after some time at the workplace. In this quasi-experimental longitudinal study, we analyzed 104 interviews in a deductive way. We found that managers often succeeded in using EMI after training, and even more often back at the workplace. We conclude that it is possible for managers to get professionals to retrieve thoughts that occurred during a complex new social experience and become conscious of them. Hence, EMI can contribute to research on the conscious competence learning model on how to advance to the conscious incompetence stage.