His research interests include work environments for employee performance and well-being, and empirical research methodology. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Gary Goertz and Tony Hak, as well as Ioannis Evangelidis, Roelof Kuik, Erik van Raaij, Daan Stam, Regien Sumo, Wendy van der Valk, and Barbara Vis, for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am grateful to Jeffrey Foster for providing me the data of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) example, and to Hans van Maanen for the data on the storks' example. I wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, and James LeBreton for his helpful guidance as acting editor.
Human factors/ergonomics (HFE) has much to offer by addressing major business and societal challenges regarding work and product/service systems. HFE potential, however, is underexploited. This paper presents a strategy for the HFE community to strengthen demand and application of high-quality HFE, emphasising its key elements: systems approach, design driven, and performance and well-being goals.
Theoretical ''necessary but not sufficient'' statements are common in the organizational sciences. Traditional data analyses approaches (e.g., correlation or multiple regression) are not appropriate for testing or inducing such statements. This article proposes necessary condition analysis (NCA) as a general and straightforward methodology for identifying necessary conditions in data sets. The article presents the logic and methodology of necessary but not sufficient contributions of organizational determinants (e.g., events, characteristics, resources, efforts) to a desired outcome (e.g., good performance). A necessary determinant must be present for achieving an outcome, but its presence is not sufficient to obtain that outcome. Without the necessary condition, there is guaranteed failure, which cannot be compensated by other determinants of the outcome. This logic and its related methodology are fundamentally different from the traditional sufficiency-based logic and methodology. Practical recommendations and free software are offered to support researchers to apply NCA. Keywords necessity, sufficiency, multi-causality, data analysis, software According to David Hume's (1777) philosophy of causation:We may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects, similar to the second. Or in other words, where, if the first had not been, the second never had existed.
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