Industrial Psychology chapter 6 - 10 PDF

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INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER 6: EMPLOYEE SELECTION: REFERENCES AND TESTING Best predictor of future performance is PAST PERFORMANCE. To verify the QUALITY of previous performance Employer must obtain information about the quality of previous performance relying on an REFERENCES or LE...

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INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

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CHAPTER 6: EMPLOYEE SELECTION: REFERENCES AND TESTING

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 Best predictor of future performance is PAST PERFORMANCE.  To verify the QUALITY of previous performance  Employer must obtain information about the quality of previous performance by relying on an applicant’s REFERENCES or LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION from previous employers.  REASONS FOR USING REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDATIONS:  CONFIRMING DETAILS IN RESUME  Is to confirm the truthfulness of information provided by the applicant.  RESUME FRAUD - Not uncommon for applicants to engage. - Lying on their resume  CHECKING FOR DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS  To determine if the applicant has a history of discipline problems.  NEGLIGENT HIRING - Are typically filed in court as common-lawcases, or torts. - If an org. hires an applicant without checking his references, he laters commits a crime in work, the organization may be found guilty of negligent hiring. 

DISCOVERING NEW INFORMATION ABOUT THE APPLICANT  To understand the personality and skills of the applicants by using the methods of:  References commonly use to screen and select employees. (not successful) - Uncorrected validity coefficient for references and performance is .10 - Corrected validity is .26  Letter of recommendation  LENIENCY - Is clear that most letter of recommendation are positive.  APPLICANTS CHOOSE THEIR OWN REFERENCES. - CONFIDENTIALITY OF THEIR REFERENCES - People have the right to see their reference letters. - Providing references tend to be less lenient when an applicant waives his right.  FEAR OF LEGAL RAMIFICATION

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A person providing references can be charged with defamation of character. Slander – if the references was oral. Libel – if the references was written if the content of the references is both untrue and made with malicious intent. CONDITIONAL PRIVILEGE – which means that they have the right to express their opinion provided they believe what they say is true and have reasonable grounds for this belief. NEGLIGENT REFERENCES – a former employer can be guilty if it doesn’t provide relevant information to an organization that requests it. A former employer can be charged with slander or libel if it say something bad about an applicant that cannot be proven. 3 factors affects lenience: o Gender of the letter writer

o Gender of the applicant o Race of the letter reader.  KNOWLEDGE OF THE APPLICANT - A second problem is that the person writing the letter often does not know the applicant well, has not observed all aspects of an applicant’s behavior, or both.  RELIABILITY - Lack of agreement between two people who provided references for the same person. - Less than .30  EXTRANEOUS FACTORS - Affects their writing and evaluation.  To improve the validity of references -> TRAIT APPROACH - To scoring letters of recommendation is a valid method of predicting future performance. a unique way to make reference letters more useful by focusing on their relevant content rather than on their positiveness. - Useful way to determine the validity of letters of recommendation.  FALLS INTO 5 CATEGORIES:  DEPENTABILITY – RELIABILITY  COOPERATION-CONSIDERATION  MENTAL AGILITY  URBANITY  VIGOR  ETHICAL ISSUES - EXPLICITYLY STATE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PERSON YOU ARE RECOMMENDING - BE HONEST.

LET THE APPLICANT SEE YOUR REFERENCE BEFORE SENDING IT. PREDICTING FUTURE PERFORMANCE:  USING APPLICANT TRAINING AND EDUCATION  Validity of education was only .10  GPA is most predictive in first few years after graduation.  USING APPLICANT KNOWLEDGE  JOB KNOWLEDGE TEST – designed to measure how much a person knows about a job.  USING APPLICANT ABILITY - Tap the extend to which an applicant has the ability to learn or perform a job-related skill.  Cognitive ability - Is the situational judgment test. - Includes such as oral and written comprehension and expression, numerical facility, memorization, reasoning and general learning. - Easy and inexpensive to admininster. - WONDERLIC PERSONNEL TEST o 12 minutes in a group - (MILLER ANALOGIES TEST, QUICK TEST, RAVEN PROGRESSIVE MATRICES)  Perceptual ability - Consist of vision, color discrimination, depth perception, glare sensitivity, speech and hearing. - Machinist.  Psychomotor ability - Includes finger dexterity, control precision, multilimb coordination, response control, reaction time, steadiness. - Carpenter, police, operator, post office clerk, and truck driver.  Physical ability - Requires physical strength, agility and stamina. - Police, firefighters, and lifeguards. - Athletic and Defensive requirements.  3 major points : job relatedness, passing scores, when ability must be present.  USING APPLICANT SKILL  Work samples – performs the actual job related tasks.  Assessment centers: - Takes 2 -3 days to complete and 4 – 7 test. (a) The in-basket technique - In level must be handled. - Out level contains completed homework. -

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Applicant is asked to go through the basket and respond to the paperwork as if he were actually on the job. - Applicant is being observed by group of assessors. (b) Simulation - Real backbone of the assessment center because they enable assessors to see an applicant IN ACTION. - Placing the applicant in a situation that will be encountered on the job. (c) Work samples - When simulation is not involve a situational exercise. (d) Leaderless group discussions - Applicants meet in small groups and are given a job-related problems to solve. (e) Structured interview (f) Personality and ability test (g) Business games - Allow the applicant to demonstrate such attrivutes as creativity, decision making, and ability to work with others.  USING PRIOR EXPERIENCE  EXPERIENCE RATINGS - Is the idea that past experience. - R = .27  BIODATA - Is an application blank or questionnaire containing questions that research has shown measure the difference between successful and unsuccessful performers on a job. - Are easy to use, quickly administered, inexpensive and not as subject to individual bias.  DEVELOPMENT OF A BIODATA INSTRUMENT: - Information about employees is obtained in one of two ways:  File approach – obtain information from personnel files on employees’ previous employment, education, interest, and demographics.  Questionnaire approach – is the information cannot be obtained from employees who have quit or been fired.  Long tenure – who have worked for the company for at least 1 year.  Short tenure - workers who quit or were fired for less than 1 year.  The percentage of a particular response for the low group is subtracted from the percentage of the same response in the -

high group to obtain a weight for that item.  Once weights have been assigned to the items, the information is weighted and then summed to form a COMPOSITE FORM.  To create a reliable and valid biodate instrument it is desirable to have data from hundreds of employees.  Derivation sample – used to form the weights.  Hould-out sample – to double check the selected items and weights.  CRITICISMS OF BIODATA: o Validity of biodata may not be stable. o May not meet legal requirements o Biodata can be faked.  REFERENCE CHECKS  INTERVIEWS  PREDICTING PERFORMANCE USING PERSONALITY, INTEREST, AND CHARACTER.  Personality inventories

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TEST OF NORMAL PERSONALITY Myers-Briggs

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4 dimensions

Personality T. (C. Jung) Edwards 15 dimensions Theory of Psychogenic Needs (Murray) 16 dimensions 16PF (R. Cattell)  The number of dimensions in a statistically based test is determined through a process called FACTOR ANALYSIS. TESTS OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY - To determine if individuals have serious psychological problems. o PROJECTIVE TEST – unstructured task.  RORSCHACH INK BLOT TEST  THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST o OBJECTIVE TEST – structured and respondent is limited to a few answers. o MMPI-2 INTEREST INVENTORIES - Most commonly used is the STRONG INTEREST INVENTORY – to ask the

individuals to indicate wether they like or dislike 325 items such as bargaining, repairing electrical wiring, or taking responsibility.  INTEGRITY TEST - Also called HONESTY TEST. - Tell an employer the probability than an applicant would steal money / merchandise. - Used mostly in retail area. - Overt integrity test are based on the premise that a person’s attitudes about theft as well as his previous theft behavior will accurately predict his future honesty. - by asking the test-takers to estimate the frequency of theft in society. PERSONALITY BASED INTEGRITY TEST - They tap variety of personality traits thoughts to be related to a wide range of counterproductive behavior. - The validity of honesty test has been determined by comparing test scores with these indicators: o POLYGRAPH TEST RESULTS = the researcher is essentially comparing integrity test scores with the scores of a test. o SELF-ADMISSIONS OF THEFT o SHRINKAGE – if this is used, the researcher doesn’t know which employees is responsible for the theft. (the amount of goods lost by a store.) o KNOWN GROUPS o FUTURE THEFT  GRAPHOLOGY - Is handwriting analysis. - The way that people writes reveals their personality, which turn should indicate work performance.  PREDICTING PERFORMANCE LIMITATIONS DUE TO MEDICAL AND PSYCHOLOGY PROBLEMS  DRUG TESTING – usually done in two stages: - Applicants provides urine (Enzymes Multiplied Immunoassay Technique & Radioimmunoassay, thin layer chromatography, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analysis. )or hair samples.  PSYCHOLOGICAL EXAMS  MEDICAL EXAMS -

 COMPARISONS OF TECHNIQUES  VALIDITY - Unstructured interview, education, interest inventories, and some personality traits are not good predictors of future employee performance for most jobs. - Ability, work samples, biodate, and structured interviews do a fairly good job in predicting future employee performance.  LEGAL ISSUES - Cognitive ability and GPA will result in the highest level of adverse impact - Integrity test, structured interviews, and personality test will result in the lowest level.  REJECTING APPLICANTS CHAPTER 7: EVALUATING EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE  STEP 1: DETERMINE THE REASON FOR EVALUATING EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE (increases their performances in workplace) - To determine the reasons your organization wants to evaluate employee performance. - The goals for performance appraisal: - DETERMINING SALARY INCREASES - MAKING PROMOTION DECISIONS  PETER PRINCIPLE – the promotion of employees until they reach their highest level of incompetence. - PROVIDING EMPLOYEE TRAINING AND FEEDBACK  PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL REVIEW – to discuss their strengths and weaknesses. - MAKING TERMINATION DECISIONS – when performance management techniques are not successful, the results of a performance review might suggest the best course of action is to terminate the employee. - CONDUCTING PERSONNEL RESEARCH  STEP 2: IDENTIFY ENVIRONMENTAL AND CULTURAL LIMITATIONS - Is to determine the environmental and cultural factors that could affect the system.  STEP 3: DETERMINE WHO WILL EVALUATE PERFORMANCE - Employee performance has been evaluated solely by supervisors. - 360-degree feedback – the buzzword for using multiple sources to appraise

performance to obtain an accurate view of the people. - Supervisors  most common type of performance appraisal is the supervisor rating.  Though supervisors may not see every minute of an employee behavior, they do not see the end result. - Peers  often see the actual behavior.  Who works directly with an employee.  Employees are more lenient in their peer ratings than are other employees. - Subordinates  Also called upward feedbacks.  Can provide a very different view about a supervisor’s behavior.  Difficult to obtain because employees fear a backlash if they unfavorably rate their supervisors. - Customers  Secret shoppers – current customers who have been enlisted by a company to periodically evaluate the service they receive. - Self-Appraisal  Allowing an employee to evaluate her own behavior and performance is a technique used by only a small percentage of organizations.  STEP 4: SELECT THE BEST APPRAISAL METHODS TO ACCOMPLISH YOUR GOALS  DECISIONS 1: FOCUS OF THE APPRAISAL DIMENSIONS - Focus on traits, competencies, task types or goals. - Trait-focused performance dimensions o Concentrates on such employee attributes as dependability, honesty, and courtesy. o Provide poor feedback and thus will not result in employee development and growth. - Competency- focused performance dimensions o Focus on the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. - Task- focused performance dimensions o Organized by the similarity of tasks that are performed. -

Goal- focused performance dimensions

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Organize the appraisal on the basis of goals to be accomplished by the employee.

DECISIONS 2: USE OF EMPLOYEE COMPARISONS. OBJECTIVE MEASURES, OR RATINGS? - Employee Comparisons  To reduce leniency, employees can be compared with one another instead of rated individually on scale.  Rank order – are ranked by order by their judged performance for each relevant dimension. - The ranks are then averaged across each dimension to yield an overall rank.  Paired comparisons can be used. Comparing each possible pair of employees and choosing which one of each pair is the better employee. - To determine how many comparisons must be made: n (n - 1) --------2  Forced-distribution method a predetermined percentage of employees are placed in each of the 5 categories. (Employee, knowledge, dependability, and Quality.) - Objective Measures  Quantity of Work – counting the number of relevant job behaviors that take places  Quality of work – measuring the quality of work that is done. - is measure in terms of errors which are defined as deviations from a standard. - There must be a standard to compare an employee’s work.  Attendance - 3 distinct criteria: absenteeism, tardiness, and tenure.  Safety – employees who follow safety rules and who have no occupational accidents do not cost an organization as much money - Ratings of performance

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To have supervisors rate how well the employee performed on each dimension.  Graphic Rating Scales - Scales are fairly simple, with 5 to 10 dimensions accompanied by words such as “good” and “poor” anchoring the ends of the scale.  Behavioral Checklist - Consists a list of behaviors, expectations, or results for each dimensions. - Used to force the supervisor to concentrate on relevant behaviors. - Result-focused  concentrates on what an employee accomplished as a result of what she did.  Is that an employee can do everything asked of her by an organization and still not get the desired results due to factors outside her control -> contamination. - Comparison to other employees. - Frequency of desired behaviors - Extent to which organizational expectations are met.  STEP 5: TRAIN RATERs  The effectiveness of rater training also is a function of training format.  Frame-of-reference training –make fewer rating errors and recall more training information than do untrained raters or raters only. - Provides raters with job-related information, practice in rating, and examples of rating made by experts as well as rationale behind those expert ratings.  STEP 6: DOCUMENT PERFORMANCE  Is to ensure that supervisors document employees’ behaviors as they occur.  Critical incidents –formal accounts of excellent and poor employee performance that were observed by the supervisors.  4 reasons why documentation is important: - To focus the supervisor on employee behaviors rather than on traits and provides behavioral examples to use. - Helps supervisors recall behaviors. o First Impression – we remember our first impression of someone (Primacy effect) o Recent Behaviors o Unusual Behaviors o

Behavior consistent with the supervisor’s opinion.

Provides examples to use when reviewing performances ratings with employees. - Help an organization defend against legal action taken against it by the employee - Employee Performance Record – consists of two-color form.  STEP 7: EVALUATE PERFORMANCE  OBTAINING AND REVIEWING OBJECTIVE DATA – supervisors should first obtain and review the objective data.  READING CRITICAL INCIDENT LOGS – supervisors should go back and read all of the critical incidents written for an employee.  COMPLETING THE RATING FORMS – supervisors must be careful not to make common rating erros such as:  Distributing errors  Leniency error – raters tend to rate every employee at the upper end of the scales  Central tendency error – rating employee in the middle of the scale.  Strictness error – rated employees very low end of the scale.  Halo errors – allows either a single attribute or an overall impression of an individual to affect the ratings. - all dimensions are affected by an overall impression of the employee.  Proximity errors -when rating made on one dimension affects the rating made on the dimensions that immediately follows it on the rating scale. - Only the dimension physically located nearest a particular dimensions are affected.  Contrast errors - One person receives can be influenced by the performance of a previously evaluated person. - Assimilation – she observes poor performance by the employee, she will probably continue to give excellent ratings.  Low reliability across raters  Sampling problems  Recency effect – are given more weight in the performance evaluation than behaviors that occurred during the first few months of the evaluation period.  Infrequent observations – occurs when the manager is so busy with their own work.  Cognitive Processing of Observed Behavior  Observation behavior  Just because an employee’s behavior is observed does not guarantee that it will be properly remembered or recalled during the performance appraisal review. -

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Raters recall those behaviors that are consistent with their general impression of an employee.  The greater the probability that halo errors and distortion errors will occur.  Emotional state - the amount of stress under which a supervisor operates also affects her performance ratings. - Stressful situation = more errors - Not under stressful situations = less errors  Bias - Raters who like the person being rated may be more lenient. - The rater’s feeling or affect toward an employee may interfere with the cognitive processing of actual performance information. - Racial bias exist in performance evaluations. - Higher performance ratings to white employees with a white raters. - African raters gives high performance ratings to African americon employees.  STEP 8: COMMUNICATE APPRAISAL RESULTS TO EMPLOYEES  The most important use of performance-evaluation data is to provide a feedback to the employee and assess her strength and weaknesses so that further training can be implemented.  6 months to tell them about scores they received during the most recent evaluation period.  “tell and sell” – “tells” an employee everything she has done poorly and then “sells” her on ways she can improve.  PRIOR TO THE INTERVIEW  Allocating time - Prepares and review interview.  Scheduling the interview - Should be in a neutral place. Ensures the privacy. - Face one another without a desk between them as a communication barrier.  Preparing the interview - Supervisors should review the ratings she has assigned to the employee.  DURING THE INTERVIEW  Should communicate the ff: 1. The role of performance appraisal 2. How the performance appraisal was conducted 3. How the evaluation process was accomplished.

Positive feedback should be given first because employees will likely try to avoid negative feedback to maintain positive selfimage. - To reduce the chance of interpersonal conflict. - Goals should be mutually set for future performance and behavior. Both supervisors and employee should understand how these goals will be met.  STEP 9: TERMINATE EMPLOYEES  the primary use of per.appraisal is to provide feedback to employees about their behavior.  EMPL...