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Chapter 15
Using Tests in Organizational Settings
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History• Walter Dill Scott (1915) “The Scientific Selection
of Salesmen” – proposed that employers use group tests for personnel selection.
• Scott’s influence led to Army Alpha & Beta testing during WW I. Those were discontinued following WWI.
• Employment testing, however, continued when Millicent Pond (1927) studied the selection and placement of apprentice metal workers.
• Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory originated from this early work.
• The Psychological Corporation organized by J. McKeen Cattell began.
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History (continued)
• WW II: Army General Classification Test (AGCT) developed by Bingham (chief psychologist of War Dept.).
• Multiple commercial applications have since been developed.
• 1964 Civil Rights Act stimulated interest in insuring that tests were valid and fair.
• 1978 – Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection were developed.
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Pre-employment Testing
The Employment Interview
Traditional – “getting to know you function.” …Biased by sex, age, race, and physical attractiveness.
-This bias has been attributed more to the interviewer than to the process.
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Pre-employment Testing (cont.)The Employment Interview
Structured – standardized, allows scoring. Higher inter-rater reliability, internal consistency, and concurrent validity.– Focus on behavior – what you have done or can do
rather than how you feel about…
– Each candidate receives the same questions in the same order.
– The questions require a job analysis covering important job functions and duties (content validity); therefore job related.
– E.g, Human Resources Professional Job Interview
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Performance Tests
• High-fidelity tests replicate the job setting as realistically as possible; e.g., flight simulator.– Assessment Centers – large scale replications of the job that
require candidates to solve typical job problems by role playing or demonstrating proficiency.
• Low-fidelity tests simulate the job task using a written, verbal, or visual description.– Video tests – candidates are shown typical job situations and
asked to choose his/her response from multiple choice format.
• Validity of performance tests in predicting job performance =.54
• Have high content validity, and are job related.
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Tests for Specific Types of Jobs
E.g.,
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Personality Inventories
• Examine traits found useful in predicting job success: conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability, etc.
E.g., The 16PF Questionnaire (developed by Raymond Cattell) gives a profile.
• Poor predictors of job success generally.
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Five-factor Model of Personality(NEO Personality Inventory)
1. NEUROTICISM
2. EXTRAVERSION
3. OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE
4. AGREEABLENESS
5. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
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The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI)
• Adjustment• Ambition• Sociability• Likeability• Prudence• Intellectance• School success(Validity key to detect careless or random
responding.)
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The Hogan Personality Inventory Predictive Validity:
• Sociability predicts sales revenue (r=.51)
• Prudence predicts supervisors’ ratings of conscientiousness (r=.22)
• School Success predicts training performance (r=.34-.55)
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Integrity TestingTwo categories:
– Physiological measures– Paper-and-pencil tests
• Physiological – polygraph tests - problem with false positives (mistakenly classifying innocent takers as guilty) and poor predictive validity.
• The Employee Polygraph Protection Act lf 1988 forbids the use of the polygraph as an employment test. Interestingly, employers providing security services and government agencies are exempt from this law!
• Paper-and-pencil integrity tests predict counterproductive behaviors (.29-.39).
• But highly susceptible to faking.
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Legal Constraints
• 1978 Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection catalog “best practices” to promote fairness and legal defensibility of employment practices. (Note: Congress did not pass the Guidelines and therefore they are not federal law.)
• Any process that is used to make a hiring decision is defined as a “test.” Includes application forms, reference checks, letters of reference and tests.
• All employment tests must be job-related and based on a job analysis.
• “Adverse impact” is the exclusion of a disproportionate number of persons belonging to a protected class based on race, gender, age, etc. In these cases, alternative methods for assessing job candidates must be found.
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Performance Impairment Tests• An alternative to chemical analysis for the presence of
drugs.• Can use a simulation to detect impairment in motor
skills or hand-eye coordination (similar to a video game).
• Compare to the individual’s baseline.• Can be done quickly and easily in the workplace as
opposed to taking the employee off the work site for drug testing.
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Performance Appraisal• Ranking employees (best to worst)
– Forced distribution to get a normal curve, using categories such as “outstanding,” “above average,” etc. – prevents the ranker from assigning all people to one category.
• Rating employees– graphic rating scale- each of the scales represents a
dimension, such as quality or quantity of work. Guided by anchors.
– Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) use on-the-job behaviors as anchors for the rating scale.
– Behavioral checklist - rating frequency of important behaviors.
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Performance Appraisal• Rating Errors
– Leniency errors – giving all employees better ratings than they deserve.
– Severity errors – giving all employees worse ratings than they deserve.
– Central-tendency errors – using only the middle of the rating scale and ignoring highest and lowest scale categories.
– Halo effect – when raters let their judgment on one dimension influence judgments on other dimensions (ie.,giving low rating on quality and quantity of work when employee met standards for quantity of work)
• 3600 feedback: ratings from supervisors, peers, subordinates, or customers.