In the Wason-Selection Task debate it has been suggested that people may be able to detect cheaters but not co-operators or altruists. This position has been challenged. Here we focus on a scenario that is more ecologically valid with regard to different strategies for detecting workers who negatively interact with others (here ‘egoists’) and positive interactors (here ‘altruist’). The results on altruist detection in two-level personnel evaluation tasks (T-PETs), with information on individual and team performance, suggested a disregard of the team performance and a resulting “Tragedy of Personnel Evaluation”. Experiment 1 transfers the idea of altruist detection in a personnel evaluation and personnel selection task (von Sydow & Braus, 2016) to egoist detection and explores whether there are analogous problems for egoist detection. Experiment 2 explores egoist and altruist detection in more realistic settings where individual and group-selection may affect our sampling of the interactor.

In social-dilemma situations (public-good games) people may pursue their local, egoistic interests and thereby lower the global, overall payoff of their group and, paradoxically, even their own resulting payoff. One may also speak of intra- individual dilemmas, where people pursue local goals at the expense of their overall utility. Our current experiments transfer this idea to the context of personnel evaluation and personnel selection. In our experiments, participants were put in the position of a Human Resources manager, who should for instance select workers who optimize the overall payoff of the company, rather than those who optimize only their specific payoffs. The results of the experiments, however, suggest that most, albeit not all, participants tended to focus on directly comparing individuals without considering the overall contribution to a group. Thus employees with the best overall effects for a company or organization may be evaluated the most negatively. This possible ‘tragedy of personnel evaluation’ may be linked to maladaptive incentive structures (personnel evaluation), advancement of employees (personnel promotion) and job offers (personnel selection), and may have a substantial negative impact on the effectiveness of companies or organizations.

Social dilemmas conceptually suggest distinguishing direct individual and group-level effects (also involving indirect effects on others). Furthermore, the success of organizations appears to rely on identifying not only individual excellence but positive impact on others as well. In ‘Two-Level Personnel Evaluation Tasks’ (T-PETs) participants as human resource managers evaluate employees when individual and group contributions are dissociated. Von Sydow, Braus, & Hahn (2018) have suggested a potential ‘Tragedy of Personnel Evaluation’: A group-serving employee with the smallest individual contribution but by far the greatest po- sitive effect on the group’s overall earnings was often rated the most negatively. Here we investigate, in two experiments with conflicting information, whether emphasizing the group can avert the ‘tragic’ outcome. Our results suggest that the tragedy is not as complete as suggested, and that contextual information can mitigate the tragedy. Nonetheless, the results also corroborate the stability of underestimating the impact of team players.

Human beings are essentially – by nature or second nature - members of groups. They contribute to these groups not just as isolated individuals but also through their interaction with others. Consequently, personnel evaluation in companies and organizations requires assessing not only evaluating indivi- dual performance but also the overall direct and indirect effect one has on a team. Others’ work may be improved or ham- pered by the presence of a particular employee. We investi- gate Two-level Personnel-Evaluation Tasks (T-PETs) with information on individual and group earnings, where an individual focus may lead to evaluate the overall best employee as being the worst. We have previously found a Tragedy of Personnel Evaluation where focus on direct individual impact did have such systematic effect. In two experiments, one on team size, the other on kinds of information provided, we explore the boundary conditions of this effect and suggest how it may be overcome.

Co-operation and group-serving behaviour of group members has increasingly been acknowledged as essential to theflourishing of groups in general and the success of teams in organizations or companies in particular. Studying this,however, presupposes dissociating individual-level and group-level effects (involving a Simpsons Paradox). We havestarted investigating settings where true individual- and group-level effects could be dissociated in a learning paradigmconcerned with individuals in changing teams. Our results show that participants often evaluated the overall most effectivegroup-serving team-player much more negatively than all less effective non-interacting workers. This suggested a potentialTragedy of Personnel Selection, when personnel managers, relying on number-based outcomes, tend to ignore even strongand crucial group-level effects of team-players. Here we briefly summarize some findings and present an experiment,where we tried to improve participants ability to dissociate individual- from group-level effects, by explicitly providingthem with hypotheses about a team player.