While analyzing its influence on society, the halo effect is represented not only in the healthcare sector but also in many other spheres of work. To be more specific, the Halo effect means the influence of one personal feature on the future estimation of the other individual’s characteristics (Young & Chen, 2020). For instance, some people believe that if a certain athlete is successful enough in one brunch of it, then they might achieve the same results in the other sphere of the sports industry. Turning to the healthcare sector employees, the main issues resulting from the halo effect are unfair evaluations due to the strong theoretical knowledge base, university prestige, and individual type of behavior.
First and foremost, the main obstacle in front of managers in the medical sphere is connected with the “theory-practice” misleading effect. On the one hand, when a certain employee demonstrates a strong knowledge base concerning any subject, the managers gain a significant amount of risk exposure influencing their decision. In this case, the Halo effect forces managers to think that the beginner medicine who is theoretically prepared for the work can demonstrate the same results in the practical part of the healthcare process. As a result, executives might experience the misleading effect of significant success in one part of the job, which influences the general opinion about other critical parts of the work, so managers should be aware of this tendency.
Secondly, the other critical danger for human resources managers in medical establishments concerns the effect of universities’ prestige and its influence on the ability to fairly estimate workers’ value. More specifically, when managers consider higher education importance, the Halo effect is represented, while workers from highly rated universities should be professionally analyzed on their effectiveness (Mihut, 2021). In this situation, executives in the human resources department might be disorientated by the notion that if a student successfully graduated from a prestigious university, they should have a significant theoretical and practical base to perform on the highest possible level during the workday. However, sometimes university graduates cannot accomplish certain tasks due to misleading theoretical and real-life practice experience, which directly influences their estimation that might be already overvalued. Consequently, managers must not take the university ranking into account owing to its unimportance during the genuine working process.
Last but not least, unfair behavioral estimation is usually one of the most dangerous mistakes that might be made by performance analysts in medical human resources departments. This is due to the specification of the sphere: different people cannot provide the same approach to a common problem. For example, when certain people are good enough to accomplish the work in a specific circle of colleagues, some managers might provide the wrong estimation of the employee’s performance. As a result, they might put them in another medicine team, which will cause a downgrading performance tendency. On the other hand, managers could regularly job effectiveness in different working conditions so that they will have a general psychological portrait of an employee, which enables them to manage the human capital in the best way.
Overall, the Halo effect is present in many industries in society. However, when it comes to the healthcare sector, some managers might face specific issues when determining the right objectives for employee evaluation. Generally, the misleading tendency is spotted when the assessment is influenced by the worker’s strong theoretical base and the presence of a prestigious university diploma. What is more, worker’s effectiveness analysts should be aware of the behavioral tendencies and specifications of certain employees to provide the most valuable workers’ estimation.
References
Mihut, G. (2021). Does university prestige lead to discrimination in the labor market? Evidence from a labor market field experiment in three countries. Studies in Higher Education, 1(1), 1–16.
Young, C., & Chen, X. (2020). Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: The Halo Effect of Hospitality. Social Forces, 99(2), 504–531.