Problem 8: Job Performance

Question 1

How can Job Performance be assessed?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What can be assessed?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Integrity Tests

Answer 3

= 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

Question 4

Self-Reports

Answer 4

= 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)

Question 5

Observation Data

Answer 5

= 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

Question 6

Test Performance

Answer 6

–> maximum performance: power, timed, ability test
–> typical performance: preference, untimed, personality tests

–> tests differ in administration, length, objective vs. open-ended

Question 7

Physiological Evidence

Answer 7

–> medical check up blood tests/saliva samples

–> detecting whether a person is more likely to get a debilitating mental or physical disease

Question 8

Personal History/Biography

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Interview

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Personal References

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Cognitive and Mental Ability Tests

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Personality Tests

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Relationship between Personality Traits and Job Performance

Answer 13

• C across all contexts
• ES also predicts overall
• X, A and O in some conditions

Question 14

Relationship between Personality Traits and Work Motivation

Answer 14

work motivation: direction, intensity, and duration of work behavior

• N strongly negative
• C strongly positive

Question 15

Relationship between Personality Traits and Job Attitudes

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

Relationship between Personality Traits and Leadership

Answer 16

• X, C, O, ES: correlations with leader emergence and effectiveness

Question 17

Relationship between Personality Traits and Stress, Coping, and Adaptability

Answer 17

• N: perceive greater amount of stress
• X: opposite patterns

Question 18

Relationship between Personality Traits and Deviance and Counterproductive Work Behavior

Answer 18

• C, A and ES: negatively related to CWB

Question 19

Relationship between Personality Traits and Conflict and Negotiation

Answer 19

• X and A: most strongly influences because negotiation is form of social interactions

Question 20

Socially Desirable Responding

Answer 20

= 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

Question 21

Moral Hypocrisy

Answer 21

= 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

Question 22

Objective Self-Awareness

Answer 22

= 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

Question 23

Lie Scales

Answer 23

= self-report measures that are sometimes used to try to detect and measure socially desirable responding in personality assessment

Question 24

Faking

Answer 24

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

Question 25

Methods for reducing/detecting faking

Answer 25

• 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