INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES THAT
INFLUENCE ERFORMANCE AND EFFECTIVENESS
What Should We Assess?
Kevin R. Murphy
Handbook of Workplace Assessment
Evidence-Based Practices for Selecting and Developing Organizational
Talent
John C. Scott
Douglas H. Reynolds, Editors
Foreword by Allan H. Church and
Janine Waclawski
Assessment in
organizations can be carried out for a variety of purposes, many with high
stakes for both individuals and organizations.The stakes can be particularly
high when assessments are used to make decisions about personnel selection
and placement or about advancement and development of individuals once they
have been hired. If assessments focus on traits, attributes, or outcomes that
are not relevant to success and effectiveness, both organizations and
individuals may end up making poor decisions about the fit between people and
jobs. If assessments are appropriately focused but poorly executed (perhaps the
right attributes are measured, but they are measured with very low levels of
reliability and precision), these assessments may lead to poor decisions on the
parts of both organizations and individuals. In this chapter, I focus on broad
questions about the content of assessments (for example, What sorts of human
attributes should assessments attempt to measure?) and say very little about
the execution of assessments (the choice of specifi c tests or assessment
methods, for example) or even the use of assessment data. My discussion is
general rather than specifi c, focusing on general dimensions of assessment
(whether to assess cognitive abilities or broad versus narrow abilities, for
example) rather than on the specifi cs of assessment for a particular job (say,
the best set of assessments for selecting among applicants for a job as a fi
refi ghter).
This chapter
provides a general foundation for many of the chapters that follow. It sets the
stage by discussing broad dimensions of individual differences that are likely
to be relevant for understanding performance, effectiveness, and development in
the workplace. The remaining chapters in Part One start addressing more specifi
c questions that arise when attempting to assess these dimensions. Chapter Two
reviews the range of methods that can be used to assess the quality of
measures, and Chapters Three through Eight provide a more detailed examination
of specifi c domains: cognitive abilities, personality, background and
experience,knowledge and skill, physical and psychomotor skills and abilities,
and competencies.Part Two of this book discusses assessment for selection,
promotion,and development, and Parts Three and Four deal with strategic
assessment programs and with emerging trends and issues.
I begin this
chapter by noting two general strategies for determining what to assess in
organizations: one that focuses on the
work and the other
that focuses on the person. The person - oriented approaches are likely to
provide the most useful guidance
in determining what
to assess for the purpose of selection and placement in entry - level jobs, and
work - oriented assessments
might prove more
useful for identifying opportunities for and challenges to development and
advancement.
Two Perspectives for Determining What to
Assess
A number of
important decisions must be made in determining what to assess, but the
first is to determine whether the focus
should be on the person or the work. That is, it is
possible to build assessment strategies around the things people do in
organizations in carrying out their work roles (work oriented) or Individual Differences That Influence
Performance around the characteristics
of individuals that influence what they do and how well they do
it in the workplace (person oriented).For example, it is common to start the
process of selecting and deciding how to use assessments with a careful job
analysis on the
assumption that a
detailed examination of what people do, how they do it, and how their work
relates to the work of others will
Work - Oriented Strategies
Different jobs
involve very different tasks and duties and may call on very different sorts of
knowledge or skill, but it is possible to describe the domain of work in
general terms that are relevant across a wide range of jobs and organizations;
such a wide – ranging description provides the basis for worker - oriented
strategies for determining what to assess. Starting in the late 1960s,
considerable progress was made in the development of structured questionnaires
and inventories for analyzing jobs (for example, the Position Analysis
Questionnaire; McCormick, Jeanneret, & Mecham, 1972). These analysis
instruments in turn helped to defi ne the contents and structure of the O * NET
(Occupational Information Network; Peterson, Mumford, Borman, Jeanneret, & Fleishman,
1999) Generalized Work Activities Taxonomy, arguably the most comprehensive
attempt to describe the content and nature of work. Table 1.1 lists the major
dimensions of this taxonomy.
If you were to ask,
“ What do people do when they work? ” Table 1.1 suggests that the answer would
be that they gather information, process and make sense of that information,
make decisions, perform physical and technical tasks, and interact with others.
The specifi cs might vary across jobs, but it is reasonable to argue that Table
1.1 provides a general structure for describing jobs of all sorts and for
describing, in particular, what it is that people do at work. Each of these
major dimensions can be broken down into subdimensions (which are shown in this
table), most of which can be broken down even further (for example, administering
can be broken down into performing administrative activities, staffi ng
organizational units, and monitoring and controlling resources) to provide a
more detailed picture of the activities that make up most jobs. In the fi eld
of human resource (HR) management, the detailed analysis of jobs has largely
been replaced with assessments of competencies.
The term competency
refers to an individual ’ s demonstrated knowledge, skills, or abilities
(Shippmann et al., 2000). The precise defi nition of competencies and the
similarities and differences between traditional job analysis and competency
modeling are matters that have been sharply debated (Shippmann et al., 2000),
Individual Differences That Infl uence Performance 7 and it is not clear whether competency
modeling is really anything other than unstructured and informal job analysis.
Nevertheless, the business world has adopted the language of competencies,
and competency -
based descriptions of work are becoming increasingly common. Some competency
models are based on careful analysis and compelling data, most notably the
Great Eight model (Bartram, 2005):
Great Eight Competency Model
1.
Leading and deciding
2.
Supporting and cooperating
3.
Interacting and presenting
4.
Analyzing and interpreting
5.
Creating and conceptualizing
6.
Organizing and executing
7.
Adapting and coping
8.
Enterprising and performing
Bartram summarizes
evidence of the validity of a range of individual difference measures for
predicting the Great Eight. Unlike some other competency models, assessment of
these particular competencies is often done on the basis of psychometrically
sound measurement instruments.
Komentar