CONTEXT OF PSYCHOLOGICALASSESSMENTS IN INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL SETTINGS
Psychologists have been active in the assessment of individuals in work settings for almost a century. In light of the apparent success of the applications of psychology to advertising and marketing (Baritz, 960), it is not surprising that corporate managers were looking for ways that the field could contribute to the solution of other business problems, especially enhancing worker performance and reducing accidents. For example, Terman (1917) was asked to evaluate candidates for municipal positions in California. He used a shortened form of the Stanford-Binet and several other tests and looked for patterns against past salary and occupational level (Austin, Scherbaum, & Mahlman, 2000). Other academic psychologists, notably Walter Dill Scott and Hugo Munsterberg, were also happy to oblige.
In this regard, the approaches used and the tools and techniques developed clearly reflected prevailing thinking among researchers of the time. Psychological measurement approaches in industry evolved from procedures used by Fechner and Galton to assess individual differences (Austin et al., 2000). Spearman’s views on generalized intelligence and measurement error had an influence on techniques that ultimately became the basis of the standardized instruments popular in work applications. Similarly, if instincts were an important theoretical construct (e.g., McDougal, 1908), these became the cornerstone for advertising interventions. When the laboratory experimental method was found valuable for theory testing, it was not long before it was adapted to the assessment of job applicants for the position of street railway operators (Munsterberg, 1913). Vocational interest blanks designed for guiding students into careers were adapted to the needs of industry to select people who would fit in. Centers of excellence involving academic faculty consulting with organizations were often encouraged as part of the academic enterprise, most notably one established by WalterBingham at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (now CarnegieMellon University). It makes sense, then, that programs such those at as Carnegie, Purdue, and Michigan State University were located in the proximity of large-scale manufacturing enterprises. As will become clear through a reading of this chapter, the legacy of these origins can still be seen in the models and tools of contemporary practitioners (e.g., the heavy emphasis on the assessment for the selection of hourly workers for manufacturing firms).
The practice of assessment in work organizations was also profoundly affected by activities and developments during the great wars fought by the United States. Many of the personnel and performance needs of the military during both the first and secondWorldWars were met by contributions of psychologists recruited from the academy. The work of Otis on the (then) new idea of the multiple-choice test was found extremely valuable in solving the problem of assessing millions of men called to duty for their suitability and, once enlisted, for their assignments to specific work roles. The Army’s Alpha test, based on the work of Otis and others, was itself administered to 1,700,000 individuals. Tools and techniques for the assessment of job performance were refined or developed to meet the needs of the military relative to evaluating the impact of training and determining the readiness of officers for promotion. After the war, these innovations were diffused into the private sector, often by officers turned businessmen or by the psychologists no longer employed by the government. Indeed, the creation of the Journal of Applied Psychology (1917) and the demand for practicing psychologists in industry are seen as outgrowths of the success of assessment operations in the military (Schmitt & Klimoski, 1991). In a similar manner, conceptual and psychometric advances occurred as a result of psychology’s involvement in government or military activities involved in winning the second World War. Over 1,700 psychologists were to be involved in the research, development, or implementation of assessment procedures in an effort to deal with such things as absenteeism, personnel selection, training (especially leader training), and soldier morale. Moreover, given advances in warfare technology, new problems had to be addressed in such areas as equipment design (especially the user interface), overcoming the limitations of the human body (as in high-altitude flying), and managing work teams. Technical advances in survey methods (e.g., the Likert scale) found immediate applications in the form of soldier morale surveys or studies of farmers and their intentions to plant and harvest foodstuffs critical to the war effort. A development of particular relevance to this chapter was the creation of assessment procedures for screening candidates for unusual or dangerous assignments, including submarine warfare and espionage. The multimethod, multisource philosophy of this approach eventually became the basis for the assessment center method used widely in industry for selection and development purposes (Howard & Bray, 1988). Finally, when it came to the defining of performance itself, Flanagan’s (1954) work on the critical incident method was found invaluable. Eventually, extensions of the approach could be found in applied work on the assessment of training needs and even the measurement of service quality.Over the years, the needs of the military and of government bureaus and agencies have continued to capture the attention of academics and practitioners, resulting in innovations of potential use to industry. This interplay has also encouraged the development of a large and varied array of measurement tools or assessment platforms. The Army General Classification test has its analogue in any number of multiaptitude test batteries. Techniques for measuring the requirements of jobs, like Functional Job Analysis or the Position Analysis Questionnaire, became the basis for assessment platforms like the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) or, more recently, the Occupational Information Network (O*Net; Peterson, Mumford, Borman, Jeanneret, & Fleishman, 1999). Scales to measure job attitudes (Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969), organizational commitment (Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979), or work adjustment (Dawis, 1991) found wide application, once developed. Moreover, there is no shortage of standard measures for cognitive and noncognitive individual attributes (Impara & Plake, 1998). Afinal illustration of the importance of cultural context on developments in industry can be found in the implementation of civil rights legislation in America in the 1960s and 1970s (and, a little later, the Americans with Disabilities Act). This provided new impetus to changes in theory, research designs, and assessment practices in work organizations. The litigation of claims under these laws has also had a profound effect on the kinds of measures found to be acceptable for use as well.
RICHARD J. KLIMOSKI AND LORI B. ZUKIN
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