We may want to gauge someone's propensity towards a career
Want to quantify and understand one's level of interests relative to professionals in the field (interest measure)
validity claim - if your interest are similar to someone in the field than you would be interested in that field
How would you create such an instrument?
Write and select a bunch of diverse items intended to distinguish between people in different careers
Administer this exhaustive (i.e. very long) instrument to representatives from various professional fields
Sort out items by interest group and retain only the most discriminative items
Administer the test; tell examinees what professions match their response pattern of interest
Need to make sure the instrument was tailored to your population (e.g. their education level, age, whether they want a nonprofessional career, disabilities, etc)
The same score could be predictive of aptitude for a cluster of jobs
Must be strong overlap and high homogeneity in necessary within a cluster
Removes the need to do a seperate validation study for all the jobs in the GATB (~ 12,000)!
For example, need to only test if you have the aptitude to be a counseling psychologist to find out that clinicial psychology could work for you
Benefits include: don't need to rely on a minimum cut off score but instead can find best-qualified based on their profile; linear relationship between aptitude and job performance; using VG more precise information about examinees' relative standing than an absolute cutoff.
Concern: how can you classify so many jobs into just 5 families?
Meyers-Briggs has been employed a lot!
Based on Jung work, items measure your "preferences" (e.g. Extraversion or Interversion) and from your preferences come your personality type
MB psychometric soundness is questionable
The link between personality is not clear and depends on definition of work performance
However, high conscientiousness and extroversion correlated with high work performance and high neuroticism correlated with low work performance
What do employers' use to screen, select, classify, and place perspective candidates?
Cognitive ability tests often used in selection and placement
Tend to be good predictors of future performance
Present methods often reinforce cultural stereotypes
Computerized tests that minimize verbal content may prove fruitful
Output relative to effort
Tests and tasks are also used for measuring productivity
Often involve comparing individuals to one another
Could create forced dichotomous that are real or unreal
May be measured by supervisor or peers
Could be measured individually or as a part of a team
Is an employee satisfied with their job
Do they feel a sense of commitment to the company
Is there a strong sense of organizational culture
Why might we have interest in these attitudes?
People that are satisfied at work, do a better job
If they are committed to your organization, they will likely stick around and do better
Foster an Apple or Google culture
These are your gut feelings about something
They are not conscious and automatic
What could be the benefit of measuring implicit attitudes in business?
Underlying theoretical framework, physiological correlates of the measures, and whether they are truly not conscious reactions present measurement issues
include focus groups, think alouds, behavior observations, and other methods that do not seek to assign numbers
Great for getting in depth information about something that otherwise would be impossible
Great during the piloting, product development, etc
Expensive, time consuming, validity and reliability don't really exist here
Are these people representative?