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Restraining Golem and Harnessing Pygmalion in the classroom: a laboratory study of managerial expectations and task design

In seeking to enhance teaching effectiveness, educators and trainers are demonstrating a growing interest in understanding positive expectations and the resulting Pygmalion effect. Unfortunately, the true impact of the Golem effect - Pygmalion in reverse - has gone unproven and the potential negative effects are not wholly understood. Furthermore, the literature largely fails to address the extent to which Pygmalion-related effects may differ based on task design. This study examines the effect of an instructor's verbalized expectations - both negative and positive - on the performance of 351 business-school undergraduate students. Analyses using pre- and post-treatment data collected during controlled-laboratory experiments indicated, most notably, that negative expectations of students' performance on cognitively based tasks tend to degrade that performance. The effects on non-cognitively based tasks were, however, positive. Positive expectations had the opposite effect. Implications for management-education research and related applications are discussed.Printed journal

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