8 REASON YOU SHOULD CONSIDER SWITCHING TO ANDROID

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.