Task-Oriented Job Analytic in More Detail: (continued)
Critical Incident: an example of a behavior that was critical to either really good performance or really bad performance.
Here's an example of a critical incident statement that might have been taken from a telephone service employee:"One time we were having a particularly busy day. I was not able to get up from my desk for hours to get a quick break. After sitting there for so long, I got so tired that I started dozing off as a new call came in. I had to keep asking the customer to repeat herself, and she got really mad. She asked to speak to my supervisor and said she would never do business with our company again, because our service was so poor."
The benefit of this type of job analysis is that it identifies a range of behaviors from good to bad. It also identifies obstacles in the environment that may be either facilitating performance or (as in the case above) inhibiting performance. For example, the above statement for clearly indicates that long hours sitting without breaks may lead to poor performance on this job.
The information from this type of job analysis might be helpful in understanding a range of performance standards for appraising employees.
The drawback of this method, however, is the mass of text-based feedback one receives. If you look at the task analysis example again, you can see how this would lead to numbers that summarize information very clearly. The open-ended statements from critical incidents, on the other hand, must be read carefully and coded in order to make the results usable.
T3: Functional Job Analysis (Fine 1974)
The focus of functional job analysis is on what a worker does and how a task is performed.
SMEs rate task statements (similar to those in the task analysis technique) along 3 dimensions:
- People: the extent to which interpersonal resources are needed,
- Data: the extent to which cognitive resources are needed to handle facts, ideas, info
- Things: the extent to which physical resources are needed
A well-know result of functional job analysis is the Federal Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). You may have come across this if you ever spoke with your high school guidance counselor about what you wanted to be when you grew up. The DOT is a tool developed in the 1930s that describes approximately 12,000 jobs in terms of tasks, duties, and working conditions. The jobs are classified according to 11 traits (including intelligence, verbal ability, numerical ability, finger dexterity, motor coordination). You can review an on-line version of the latest edition of the DOT by going by using the following URL: http://www.occupationalinfo.org/
Due to some limitations of the DOT, the Department of Labor created a new index for classifying jobs called the Occupational Information Network or O*Net. O*Net was designed to improve upon the following limitations of the DOT:
- Very job specific; generating new tasks for each new job became costly & time consuming
- Becoming outdated given the accelerated pace of change in work and jobs over the last 2 decades
- Focusing on the task level did not provide a cross-job organizing structure; made it difficult to compare similarities and differences across jobs
- A task focus did not directly tell what characteristics workers must have to perform the job or the conditions under which the job is performed
List from Peterson, Mumford, Borman, Jeanneret, Fleishman, Levin, Campion, Mayfield,
Morgeson, Pearlman, Gowing, Lancaster, Silver, & Dye (2001). Personnel Psychology.
It's important to note that although the O*Net was designed to address limitations of the DOT, it was not developed using Functional Job Analysis like the DOT. Your reading assignment discusses the development and organization of O*Net. To read more about O*Net, follow the directions at the top of this lesson for the link to the site and one of your reading assignments for this week.