Lesson Overview:

• Definition and general information
• Sources of information
• Different techniques and procedures
• Uses of JA information
• Guidelines for legal defense
• Measurement issues

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Lesson Commentary

I. Definition

Job Analysis (JA) is a family of methods for describing a job (tasks and situation) and the human attributes necessary to perform that job.

The goals of job analysis are to capture information about:

1. what gets accomplished;
2. the technology and equipment used;
3. the characteristics of the environment; and
4. the human attributes needed to accomplish the task.

Why is JA important?

Job analysis is useful for identifying the criteria of effective job performance, which become the basis for almost everything else we study as I/O psychologists. Last lesson, we learned a bit about criteria as the dependent variable in a research study. This lesson, we're going to talking about a more specific instance, criteria as job performance. In this context, criteria can be thought of as the evaluative standards used for making a decision on the job. In this way, the results of a job analysis (clarifying the criteria of performance) can be used for everything from deciding pay levels for different employment positions to determining how to fill those positions. In this way, job analysis is the cornerstone of almost all other human-resource practices and all we do as I/O psychologists.

More importantly, one must understand that poor criteria beget poor decisions. Therefore, job analysis should be conducted with care.

Let's be really concrete! Imagine you and your friend are talking about the performance of one of your instructors in class. After a few minutes of discussion, it becomes clear that you and your friend disagree about your instructor's performance. You think your instructor is doing well, but your friend is really upset and thinks your instructor is not doing well at all.

If you both attended the same class, why would you disagree so much? One reason may be that you have different performance criteria in mind. You may be considering how well prepared the lectures are and the clarity of presentation while your friend is thinking about enthusiasm and inspiration (and, this particular instructor, while really clear and well prepared, happens to be a real snooze).

Off hand, this doesn't seem like a big deal. But now imagine you and your friend are CEOs of a major firm and instead of discussing your instructor's performance, you are discussing the performance of a member of your top management team. Your friend is now recommending that this person, who happens to be married with children and a loyal member of the organization for years and years, be terminated from his or her job. If you and your fellow CEO do not get your criteria straight, you could be making a big mistake letting an otherwise valuable employee go. Even worse, you could set yourself up for legal trouble.

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II. Techniques and Procedures

Before we get into some specific techniques, let's take a look at what job analysis entails more generally. Some general ways to collect data about the job (remember, the goal is to get information about the tasks, tools, environment, and attributes needed to complete the task), regardless of the specific technique used, include:

• Performing the job — One can gain insight into what the tasks are, tools needed, environment, and attributes needed by actually trying to do the job for oneself.
• Observing others performing the job (also video monitoring)
• Interviewing others that perform the job on a regular basis (individuals and groups, audio-recording)
• Surveying people who perform the job
• Reviewing records & literature from the organization (such as old job descriptions and handbooks) — These can include technology or equipment design specifications.

It's important to think critically about these techniques, because almost all of the formal approaches to job analysis are based on these techniques or a combination of them.

Think back to what you read in the previous lesson about research methods. These methods all have their own pros and cons. See the examples in the table below.

* Social influence biases can occur when one in the sample withholds information
because a supervisor or more senior employee is present for example.

You should keep these in mind as we learn about some of the more formal methods of job analysis in a minute.

Remember the 4 goals of job analysis mentioned earlier: gathering information about (1) task, (2) tools, (3) environment, and (4) human attributes. Here are some more specific types of data that are often collected during the job analysis process (list taken from Branick & Levine (2002)).

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Where Does All This Data Come From?

The sources of job information for job analysis are often called subject matter experts or SMEs. SMEs are particularly useful for conducting job analysis, because of their familiarity with the job. These can include:

1. Job incumbents: people currently performing the job or people that are "incumbent" to the organization
2. Supervisors of job incumbents or higher-level managers

Job analytic information can also be collected from:

3. Job analysts: professional consultants that direct observation and other techniques to gather knowledge to compare across jobs
4. Customers of the organization who have observed performance through their interaction with the people in the organization

Now, let's move into some more specific types of job analytic methods. All job analysis procedures can be divided into 2 broad categories (McCormick, 1976):

1. task- or job-oriented procedures
2. worker-oriented procedures

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Task-Oriented Procedures

These types of job analyses focus on understanding a job by examining the tasks performed, usually in terms of what is accomplished. This method often includes breaking a job into specific elements

Here's an example of the steps typically taken when analyzing a job from a task-oriented perspective:

1. A Job Analyst develops a list of task statements (typically 300 or 500 per job)

A task statement is a precise statements of the task performed (e.g., "Wipes all surfaces with a clean, damp cloth to ensure a clean and safe work environment.").

Task statements include information about:

• What is the action? (e.g., wipes)
• To what is the action directed? (e.g., counter)
• How is the action done/ with what? (e.g., cloth).
• Why is the action done? (e.g., ensure cleanliness)

2. SMEs rate task statements according to different dimensions, such as:

• frequency of completing that task as a part of the larger job
• importance of the task for the larger job
• difficulty of the task
• consequences of errors made while trying to accomplish the task

Remember what SME stands for? - Subject Matter Expert

   Examples of task-oriented techniques

• Time and Motion Studies
• Task Inventory Approach
• Critical Incident Technique
• Functional Job Analysis

We'll go through some of these techniques in more detail in a moment.

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Worker-Oriented Procedures

Worker-oriented procedures are job analytic techniques that focus on understanding a job by examining the human attributes and worker characteristics needed to perform it successfully.

The types of human attributes can be summarized by the following list:

• Knowledge: body of information about a job
• Skills: groups of observable behaviors that are trainable w/ practice
• Abilities: inherent mental or physical competencies that can be refined w/ training
• Other characteristics: e.g., personality (e.g., willingness to meet goals set by others)

These are sometimes refer to as KSAOs (the first letter in each of the above).

Here's an example of KSAOs that might be required to perform an administrative assistant position within an organization:

      K = knowledge of the organizational structure and products
      S = skill to type 50 words per minute or more
      A = ability to find patterns in information
      O = conscientious personality

Examples of worker-oriented techniques (again, we'll talk about these more in a bit):

• Job Element Method
• Position Analysis Questionnaire
• Common Metric System

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Task-Oriented Job Analytic Techniques in More Detail:

You don't need to know a lot of detail about all of these, so some descriptions will be kept intentionally short. We will focus on the techniques that tend to be used most commonly or have been in the past.

T1: Time and Motion Studies (from Branick & Levine, 2002)

Job analytic method that focuses on measuring the time and sequence of steps involved in different tasks on the job with the aim of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of work.

T2: Task Inventory Approach

1. Task statements are generated by SME.

1. A separate set of SMEs examines the task list, put a check by the statements that describe their job, and rates each task they check off according to (a) the importance of the task, (b) the frequency of completing the task, and (c) the difficulty in completing the task.

Here’s an example of what a task inventory for the job of head restaurant chef might look like:

The key thing to keep in mind here is the focus on the dimensions of task importance, difficulty, and time spent performing the task. Information like this can be very useful when trying to make decisions about how much to pay someone, for instance.

T3: Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1954)

This technique involves interviews or open-ended surveys of SMEs that ask them to provide examples of really good or really bad performance. SMEs recall specific instances of work behavior on the job along with statements about the context (what led up to the behavior) and consequences of that behavior.

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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.