Problem 8: Job Performance Flashcards
How can Job Performance be assessed?
objective records of productivity: count numbers of customers served in an hour
–> strengths: objectivity
–> limitations: may fail to capture important aspects
Obtain others’ evaluation of someone’s performance
–> strength: widely applicable
–> limitations: requires more subjective judgement of the person who assesses performance
What can be assessed?
What a person can do (ability)
What a person will do (motivation)
What a person wants to do (personality preferences)
Other important questions for assessors:
- who is best suited to assess
- when to assess
- why to assess
Integrity Tests
= self-report questionnaires that are intended to assess a potential (or current) employee’s level of honesty and dependability, and thus to predict his or her tendency to refrain from counterproductive behavior, as well as his or her likely level of overall job performance
Self-Reports
= what people say about themselves in interviews, self-reports and on their CV
Limitations:
- dissimulation: impression management
= a person attempts to create a good impression by leaving out information, adding untrue information as well as giving answers that are not strictly correct but, they hope, create a good impression in the interviewer’s mind
- self-deception = a person, in their own view answers honestly, but what they say is untrue because they lack self-awareness
- self-insight (what people can’t say about themselves)
Observation Data
= what other people say about an individual
- organization attempts to get reliable reports from other people
- candidates are often asked to provide observers
Limitation:
- data bank of observer
- extent to wich observers are prepared to tell the truth
- people choose their specific favourite referees
Test Performance
–> maximum performance: power, timed, ability test
–> typical performance: preference, untimed, personality tests
–> tests differ in administration, length, objective vs. open-ended
Physiological Evidence
–> medical check up blood tests/saliva samples
–> detecting whether a person is more likely to get a debilitating mental or physical disease
Personal History/Biography
Biodata:
- where they were born/educated
- family
- present family
- social class of parents
- birth order
- school records
Strengths:
- objectivity
- cost
- checkability
- validity
- favoured form of self-presentation
Limitations:
- homogeneity vs. heterogeneity
- cloning the past
- faking
- fairness in the law
- minorities can’t be treated fairly
- biodata gets less valid over time
Interview
Interviewers of the same person do not agree very much on their assessment and these assessments are not very useful in predicting success on the job
Personal References
References are usually free responses or ratings that an observer report on another
o they are observations by an individual known
to the candidate
- cheap and popular
- unreliable (poor reliability) and of poor validity
- leniency: most references are indiscriminately positive
- idiosyncrasy: people can and do use eccentric language, examples and criteria to describe and evaluate others
- free-form references: reference writers are often offered no guidelines in what they are required to do
Cognitive and Mental Ability Tests
Cognitive ability accurately predicts job performance across all jobs but particularly in complex jobs
–> intelligence is the single best predictor of (senior, managerial) work performance
Support:
- IQ is strongly related with important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes
Personality Tests
Strengths:
- numeric information (comparable)
- explicit and specific results
- fair
- comprehensive
- empically based
Limitations:
- validity of the personality tests depend on the test, criteria and population sample
- not good norms
- people have to be literate
- interpretation takes skills
Relationship between Personality Traits and Job Performance
- C across all contexts
- ES also predicts overall
- X, A and O in some conditions
Relationship between Personality Traits and Work Motivation
work motivation: direction, intensity, and duration of work behavior
- N strongly negative
- C strongly positive
Relationship between Personality Traits and Job Attitudes
- X, C, N are significant predictors of job satisfaction
- X is related to commitment
- N is related to continuance commitment
- A is related to normative commitment
Relationship between Personality Traits and Leadership
- X, C, O, ES: correlations with leader emergence and effectiveness
Relationship between Personality Traits and Stress, Coping, and Adaptability
- N: perceive greater amount of stress
- X: opposite patterns
Relationship between Personality Traits and Deviance and Counterproductive Work Behavior
- C, A and ES: negatively related to CWB
Relationship between Personality Traits and Conflict and Negotiation
- X and A: most strongly influences because negotiation is form of social interactions
Socially Desirable Responding
= tendency to give positive or negative self-descriptions
- person might be consciously engaging in deliberate strategy of misrepresentation to make an impression on others
- can present a problem and must be considered
Moral Hypocrisy
= morality is extolled - even enacted - not with an eye to producing a good and right outcome but in order to appear moral yet still benefit oneself
–> difference to moral disengagement: moral disengagement occurs when individuals deliberately disengage from self-censorship –> they are not interested to appear moral –> they engage in morally lacking behavior
Objective Self-Awareness
= an individual’s attention has to be directed inward, and the individual’s conscientiousness must then be focused on himself or herself
Duval and Wicklund’s theory of self-awareness: focusing one’s attention on the self includes a state of objective self-awareness and this leads to an awareness of the discrepancies between the ideal and the actual self
Lie Scales
= self-report measures that are sometimes used to try to detect and measure socially desirable responding in personality assessment
Faking
Faking Good = impression management that can lead to inaccurate personality assessments
–> people do tend to fake to some extent – or at least tend to be rather generous in giving themselves the “benefit of the doubt” – when taking integrity tests or personality inventories in personnel selection settings
Methods for reducing/detecting faking
- include some items that ask about moral lapses that presumably everyone has committed; persons who claim not to have performed these behaviors are then identified as having faked their responses
- use of time limits on applicants’ responses
- use of items that require respondents to indicate which of several equally desirable (or undesirable) statements describes them most accurately
- use on non-self-report methods of assessing personality –> objective measures
- observer reports from persons who would have little reason to “fake” on behalf of the applicant – e.g., previous employers or co-workers – would show higher levels of validity in predicting job performance
