Task 9 - Job Assesment

Question 1

Job Assessment

Answer 1

Use some objective record of productivity

• > Count sales, customers served etc.
• > Keep track of counterproductivity aswell
• > Advantage: Objectivity
• > Disadvantage: not easily applied to every job

Obtain supervisors’ evaluations of employee performance

• > Rating scale, ranking system etc.
• > Advantage: widely applicable across jobs
• > Disadvantage: Subjective judgement of persons who asses job performance

Test for Conscientiousness
-> Trait best in predicting overall job performance
Personality traits belonging to Conscientiousness dimension = same traits describing working style

PROACTIVITY
= tendency to identify opportunities, to take initiative, to persevere when taking challenging tasks
Correlated modestly (0.25) with productivity levels

USE INTEGRITY TESTS

Question 2

Integrity Tests

Answer 2

= Self-reports that are intended to asses level of honesty and dependability, and predict tendency to refrain from counterproductive behavior, as well as likely level of overall job performance

OVERT TESTS

• > ask the job applicant to say if they have committed dishonest acts (stealing, shoplifting etc.)
• > Often ask to indicate attitudes and opinions about such acts

PERSONALITY-BASED TESTS

• > More similar to self-report personality inventories
• > Subtler; respondents might not know that employer is attempting to assess integrity
• > Clearly meant to assess socially (un)desirable characteristics

Question 3

Problem of Faking

Answer 3

Likely that job applicant fake their self-responses to make good impression
Moderately levels of faking proven by research

Methods for reducing / detecting faking:

1. Include items that ask about moral lapses that presumably everyone has committed
   - > People who claim not to have performed these behaviors are then identified as faking
2. Use limits on applicants’ responses and the use of items that require respondents to indicate which of several equally desirable statements describes them most accurately
3. Use of non-self report methods of assessing personality
   - > Observer report, little reason to fake

Question 4

The Essential Methods

Answer 4

First 3 are most commonly used

SELF-REPORTS
What people say about themselves in interviews, self-reports and on their CV
Major problems: dissimulation, faking, or lying
-> 2 types of lying: Impression Management & Self-Deception
Second problem is about self-insight (people cannot accurately describe themselves)

OBSERVATIONAL DATA
What others say about an individual (References etc.)
Problem: Limited information of observer
Second Issue: extent to which observer is prepared to tell truth about an individual
Fundamental attribution error

TEST PERFORMANCE
How well people do on tests: power, timed, ability tests -> measure max performance
-Typical performance tests: untimed, preference, personality tests
- Behavioral tests: usually in groups
Tests differ enormously
Everyone can have a bad day

PHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
Employees have to go though medial check which they may have to do on regular basis to keep job
Pilots, fire fighter etc.
Blood tests and saliva samples can be used for diagnosing drug taking and stress levels
Able to detect things like whether a person is more likely to get a mental or physical disease

PERSONAL HISTORY / BIOGRAPHY
Where they were born and educated 
Family from which they came
Present family and address
Social class of the parents
BIODATA: aims to determine the biographical markers of success in very particular jobs

Question 5

Assessment Methods for Jobs

Answer 5

INTERVIEW
Only planned, structured interviews offer good date to really be useful in assessment
Interviewers are susceptible to forming a first impression and ignoring later data
Structures interviews = higher interrater reliability
Biases -> interviewer could have already decided for another person
First impression bias
that’s why: always use more than one interviewer!

PERSONAL REFERENCES
Observer reports
Unreliable and of poor validity
-Leniency: most references are indiscriminately positive
-Idiosyncrasy: People can and do use eccentric language
-Free-form references: reference writers are often offered no guidelines
Peer rating are most useful, valid and reliable

BIODATA
Assumption that past predicts future 
Certain life experiences at and before work have predictive validity 
Advantages:
->Objectivity
-> Cheap
-> Checkable
-> Valid and reliable
--> People prefer to be asked about their experiences more than about their personality 
Disadvantages:
-> if many biographical items are used in selection, the organization inevitably becomes more homogenous, which has both advantages and disadvantages
-> Cloning the past
-> Faking
-> Fairness in the law
-> Cannot easily be identified and treated fairly
-> Doesn't travel well
-> Time-consuming
-> Discriminatory 

COGNITIVE AND MENTAL ABILITY TESTS 
single best predictor of success in complex, changing managerial jobs is intelligence
Smarter people learn faster
Predict work performance well
Low scores hold the whole team back

PERSONALTIY TESTS
Neuroticism and Conscientiousness relevant to all jobs
Successful managers have a clear profile
-> Low on neuroticism and agreeableness
-> Average on openness
-> High on extraversion
-> Very high on conscientiousness
Advantages:
-->Numeric information: individuals can more easily be compared on the same criteria
-> Explicit and specific results
-> Fair: eliminate favoritism and corruption
-> Comprehensive: cover all basic dimensions of personality
-> Scientific 
Disadvantages:
-> Can be fakes
-> invalid
-> not the crucial dimensions measures
-> sufficient literacy is a must
-> not good norms
-> can be unfair / biased
-> interpretation of tests takes skill
-> Freedom of information legislation
-> People could practice giving most desirable answer

Question 6

Evidence of Relationship between personality traits and organizational behavior

Answer 6

JOB PERFORMANCE
Conscientiousness significantly predicts job performance across different performance criteria and organizational settings
Emotional stability also predicts overall job performance
Remaining Big Five factors demonstrate significant validity in certain conditions
Another broad personality trait has been shown to predict job performance
-> Core self-evaluations: higher order factor representing the fundamental evaluations people make about themselves

WORK MOTIVATION
Neuroticism and conscientiousness displayed strong negative and positive correlations with work motivation across measures

JOB ATTITUDES
Extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism were significant predictors of job satisfactions
Traits indicating CSE were significantly related to job satisfaction
->core self-evaluations may be most important to job satisfactions
Extraversion was significantly related to various aspects of commitment including
-> Affective commitment: one’s emotional attachment to the organization: Extraversion
-> Continuance commitment: perceived costs and benefits of remaining an employee of the organization: Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, and Openness
-> Normative commitment: one’s felt obligation to remain within the organization: Agreeableness

LEADERSHIP
Great man hypothesis: history is shaped by the forces of extraordinary leadership - gave rise to trait theory of leadership
-> Trait theory assumed leadership depended on personal qualities
Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness and Emotional Stability had non-zero correlation with the leadership criteria
Big Five framework explains considerable amount of variance in leadership

POWER, POLITICS, AND INFLUENCE
Need for power is positively related to how often one employs influence tactics -> Machiavellianism is positively linked to the flexible use of influence tactics
Extraversion, desire for control, and self-monitoring are positively related to both of these criteria
Conscientiousness, proactive personality, and extraversion as significant predictors of political skill

STRESS, COPING AND ADAPTABILITY
Neurotic individuals perceive greater amounts of stress regardless of actual workload, feel more threatened by stressful events and use maladaptive coping strategies in stressful situations
Extraverts tend to exhibit opposite patterns
Dispositional factors moderate relationships between appraisal of stressors and the coping strategies one employs

TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Each of the Big Five Traits significantly predict team effectiveness
For Conscientiousness, strongest effects occurred when traits were operationalized as the mean of team members’ scores
Agreeableness: most strongly related to team performance

DEVIANCE AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIORS
Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Emotional stability are each negatively related to counterproductive work behavior
Agreeableness: interpersonal deviance
Conscientiousness: deviance directed toward the organization

WORKPLACE ACCIDENTS
Except for openness, Big Five traits were strongly associated with accidents
Those with high levels of openness and neuroticism, and those with low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness
With exception of agreeableness, the variability in the correlation was quite high

CONFLICT AND NEGOTIATION
The two most socially oriented Big Five traits - extraversion and agreeableness - are often hypothesized to be related to conflict and negotiation processes
Extraversion and Agreeableness are liabilities in distributive bargaining, due to the tendency of extraverted and agreeable individuals to be disadvantegeoulsy forthcoming with information
Agreeable individuals are also likely to be more distressed by interpersonal conflict, but are less likely to engage in conflict in the first place
Agreeable and extroverted individuals are more likely to employ an integrative, or problem solving, strategy