Handbook of Workplace Assessment

John C. Scott, Douglas H. Reynolds

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470401316
• eBook ISBN: 9780470634608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Handbook of Workplace Assessment

Given the trend for organizations to streamline their workforces and focus on acquiring and retaining only top talent, a key challenge has been how to use assessment programs to deliver a high-performing workforce that can drive revenues, shareholder value, growth, and long-term sustainability.

The Handbook of Workplace Assessment directly addresses this challenge by presenting sound, evidence-based, and practical guidance for implementing assessment processes that will lead to exceptional decisions about people. The chapters in this book provide a wide range of perspectives from a world-renowned group of authors and reflect cutting-edge theory and practice.

The Handbook of Workplace Assessment

• provides the framework for what should be assessed and why and shows how to ensure that assessment programs are of the highest quality
• reviews best practices for assessing capabilities across a wide variety of positions
• summarizes key strategic applications of assessment that include succession management, mergers, acquisitions and downsizings, identification of potential, and selection on a global scale
• highlights advances, trends, and issues in the assessment field including technology-based assessment, the legal environment, alternative validation strategies, flaws in assessment, and the strategic use of evaluation to link assessment to organizational priorities

This SIOP Professional Practice Series Handbook will be applicable to HR professionals who are tasked with implementing an assessment program as well as for the users of assessments, including hiring managers and organizational leaders who are looking for direction on what to assess, what it will take, and how to realize the benefits of an assessment program. This Handbook is also intended for assessment professionals and researchers who build, validate, and implement assessments.

Part One
Framework for Organizational Assessment

CHAPTER 1
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES THAT INFLUENCE PERFORMANCE AND EFFECTIVENESS: What Should We Assess?

Kevin R. Murphy

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 specific tests or assessment methods, for example) or even the use of assessment data. My discussion is general rather than specific, focusing on general dimensions of assessment (whether to assess cognitive abilities or broad versus narrow abilities, for example) rather than on the specifics of assessment for a particular job (say, the best set of assessments for selecting among applicants for a job as a firefighter).

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 specific 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 specific 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 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 shed light on the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes (KSAOs) required to perform the job well. An alternative strategy is to start by examining the individual difference domains that underlie most assessments and to use knowledge about the structure and content of those domains to drive choices about what to assess.

The choice of specific assessments is a three-step process that starts with choosing between a broadly person-oriented or work-oriented approach, then making choices about the domains within each approach to emphasize (for example, whether to focus on cognitive ability or on personality), and finally narrowing down the choice of specific attributes (say, spatial ability) and assessment methods (perhaps computerized tests). As I noted earlier, this chapter focuses on the first two of these steps.

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 define 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.

Table 1.1. O* NET Generalized Work Activities

Information input	Looking for and receiving job-related information
	Identifying and evaluating job-relevant information
Mental processes	Information and data processing
	Reasoning and decision making
Work output	Performing physical and manual work activities
	Performing complex and technical activities
Interacting with others	Communicating and interacting
	Coordinating, developing, managing, and advising
	Administering

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 specifics 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, staffing organizational units, and monitoring and controlling resources) to provide a more detailed picture of the activities that make up most jobs.

In the field 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 definition 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), 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

• Leading and deciding
• Supporting and cooperating
• Interacting and presenting
• Analyzing and interpreting
• Creating and conceptualizing
• Organizing and executing
• Adapting and coping
• 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.

Drilling Deeper

Work can be described in general terms such as the competencies detailed in the previous section. A more detailed analysis of what people do at work is likely to lead to an assessment of more specific ski...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Figures, Tables, and Exhibits
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Editors
• The Contributors
• Part One: Framework for Organizational Assessment
• Part Two: Assessment for Selection, Promotion, and Development
• Part Three: Strategic Assessment Programs
• Part Four: Advances, Trends, and Issues
• Appendix: Example Assessments Designed for Workplace Application
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement