PSYCH482:

Introduction

Lesson Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following things:

• Describe what makes work important.
• Describe the criterion problem.
• Describe and categorize work according to different criteria, such as
  • taskwork,
  • organizational citizenship behavior,
  • adaptive performance, and
  • counterproductive work behaviors.
• Describe ways criteria may be measured (i.e., objective versus subjective measures).
• Evaluate criteria according to standards, including relevance, measurability, and variance.

Lesson Readings & Activities

By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Course Schedule.

What Makes Work Important?

The importance of work can be quite subjective. Is your work important? Is your neighbor’s work important?

Work often gives individuals an identity ("I’m a dentist") and can increase or decrease their self-esteem. In general, by knowing what people do for work, we attach a certain value to them, whether that's good or bad. For example, would you treat someone differently if she were the CEO as opposed to the receptionist at a multinational corporation? Perhaps. Regardless, we all want to feel good about what we’re doing, as our work is tied to our self-concept.

The notion of occupational prestige is one indication of the extent to which society values various occupations: high-prestige occupations (physician, professor, etc.) are most often highly valued. On the other hand, many occupations are not as highly valued (laborer, clerk, etc.). Does this mean that people who work in these occupations cannot have a positive self-concept or high self-esteem? Of course not! In these occupations, individuals gain esteem from the knowledge that the work they are doing is important. Additionally, one’s work group may help buffer his or her esteem by identifying valuable aspects of the work that may not be apparent to those outside the occupation. Has anyone ever watched Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and been unimpressed by how incredibly hard-working those men and women are?

Although it may be easy to agree that work is important, it is difficult to define and measure work in clear and easy terms.

The "Criterion Problem"

Let's review from PSYCH 281 (Lesson 4, page 3):

Criteria are evaluative standards that can be used as yardsticks for measuring [work]. Criteria are important for many decisions in organizations. We rely on these standards and measures to appraise employees' performance, validate selection devices and training programs, and make decisions about pay and promotion.  Poor criteria beget poor organizational decisions.

Unfortunately, developing and measuring criteria well is a long-standing challenge for I/O psychologists. Researchers have been writing about this difficulty, called the criterion problem, for decades (e.g., Flanagan, 1956; Austin & Villanova, 1992).

Why is it difficult to determine standards of performance? First, performance behavior is very complex and dynamic; it changes over time. Second, performance behavior is multidimensional. Third, no single criterion measures performance perfectly. More than one criterion can be used, but decisions about how to combine and weigh the individual criteria within the composite criterion create additional complexity. Lastly, criteria may differ across organizations. For example, a service industry may focus on performance related to communicating with customers, while a manufacturing job may measure production numbers.

Note: A composite criterion is a weighted combination of multiple criteria that results in a singular index of performance (Nagle, 1953). For example, weekly activities are weighted most heavily in this class, accounting for almost half of your total grade, while the quizzes account for less than 30%.

What Are Some Sample Criteria That Describe Work?

• Taskwork reflects work-related activities performed by employees that either involve transforming raw materials into goods and services that the organization provides (e.g., completing an assembly task on an assembly line) or directly supporting such processes (e.g., planning coordination or supervision). These activity directly impact the creation of products and services (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993). And, these are behaviors most people likely think of when they hear the word work.
• Organizational citizenship behaviors reflect activities performed by employees that influence the broader social, and psychological environment in the organization (Organ, 1997). These activities can include helping a fellow employee, maintaining enthusiasm about the job, and sharing information even when doing so is not an explicit expectation.
• Adaptive performance reflects an employee's adjustment to change. Pulakos and colleagues (2000) describe this with eight dimensions, including handling stress and solving problems creatively. As you read about these dimensions and other research in this area of the chapter, consider how they might reflect your current work and your performance requirements in courses like this. It is my hope that your college experience will allow you to develop some of these skills, as the purpose of college should be growth. That means it should not always be easy. You should experience frustration at times. When you do, ask yourself, "How can I demonstrate adaptability?"
• Counterproductive work behaviors are negative behaviors that might occur in an organization, including damaging property to purposely produce low-quality work (Sackett, 2002). Your textbook provides some examples.

Why would we consider defining work according to such negative terms? As we learned in PSYCH 281, these behaviors are prevalent and costly in terms of lost work, other damage, and legal costs. But, most importantly, research suggests that employers may be able to control counterproductive work behaviors to some extent if they understand the individual differences and environmental factors that predict them (Elliot & Jarrett, 1994).

Your textbook provides examples and specifics related to these models of work performance. What is important to point out here is the range of different conceptual criteria that can be used to describe performance. Keep in mind that how we define work changes how we choose to measure it and, therefore, what we focus on to predict performance.

Choosing the best criteria on which to focus depends on a number of things, including the data available for measuring performance and how well the criteria meet standards of individualization, relevance, measurability, and variance. We look at these issues in the next pages. In the next lesson, we will look at the ways we can understand work via job analysis.

How Do We Measure Work?

Until now, we have been discussing work on a conceptual level (using conceptual criteria). But, at some point, we need to translate those concepts into actual measures (actual criteria). For example, a restaurant server's performance may be described according to a conceptual criterion like customer service. Customer service can be measured in a number of ways. The measure (such as customer ratings) is the actual criterion.

As you learned in the PSYCH 281 lesson on performance management, there are a number of ways to measure performance. These methods range from objective to subjective. An objective (actual) criterion is one that is unaffected by subjective human biases. Examples include number of sales, number of products produced, and number of days absent from work. Objective criteria work best when the employees' performance levels are within their control. For example, it is inappropriate to compare metrics like parts per hour between two employees when one is using outdated machinery and the other is not. In addition, some complex processes cannot be thoroughly reflected in a single score. Depending on the complexity of one's research methods and topics, publishing research articles could take months or years. Comparing researchers solely on the total number of articles published quarterly would not adequately assess their impact on the field.

Subjective criteria are those that are based on human judgement. Supervisory ratings are a common example. Subjective criteria are necessary because some jobs cannot be easily reflected or measured objectively. Imagine trying to measure the performance of a therapist in objective terms. We could try to design indices of mental health and assess improvements in patients' mental health post therapy. But, because the mental health of a therapist's patients depends on a large number of factors, including the patient's diagnosis and environment, it would not be fair to measure and rank therapists based solely on indices like this. Subjective actual criteria give us an opportunity to reflect performance using complex dimensions. Unfortunately, they are affected by human biases and can be difficult to interpret.

In summary, measuring performance adds yet another layer of difficulty onto the already difficult criterion problem we described earlier.

Evaluating Criteria According to Standards

Individualization
 

Earlier, we mentioned that one of the concerns regarding the use of objective criteria is that some indices may not be in control of the individual they are intended to reflect.  This standard is referred to in your text as individualism.

Relevance

When it comes to psychological measurement in employee selection, an employer needs to know what work must be done and what is considered to be successful performance on the job.  We start by thinking about this in conceptual terms.  This is known as the conceptual conccriterion, i.e., a statment of the behavior that the selection process is meant to predict.  In the workplace, most often the criterion discussed is general job performance.  This can include anything from errors made, to widgets produced weekly, to days absent per month.

An actual criterion is operational, and it is the measure intended to reflect the conceptual criterion.  For example, a test score on a history test is an actual criterion, which measures the conceptual criterion of knowledge of history.

Ideally, the actual criterion would reflect the conceptual criterion well.  The degree to which this occurs is called criterion relevance (Muchinsky, 2012).  But often the match is not perfect.  The lack of match between the measure (i.e., actual criterion) and the conceptual criterion can be described in two terms:

• criterion deficiency – the degree to which conceptual criterion is not captured by the actual criterion measure.  For example, a supervisor's rating of one's job performance may be deficient if the supervisor is unable to observe all or a large range of that employee's behavior on the job.
• criertion contamination – the degree to which the actual criterion measure reflects information not relevant to the conceptual criterion (Messick, 1989).  For example, if the criterion for passing a driver’s test was the number of times the test taker smiled at the test giver, this criterion would be contaminated because smiling has nothing to do with whether or not someone is a good driver.  With regard to a restaurant manager, contamination occurs if customers base their ratings of satisfaction on the attractiveness of the individuals working at the restaurant, since this has nothing to do with successful performance on the job .

Measurability

Remember, we need to translate the conceptual criteria into actual criteria or measures.  If we cannot reflect performance in a quantitative way, it becomes impossible to make decisions.

Included in this standard is practicality.  It may be possble to measure performance in a certain way, but it's not practical in terms of time and cost.

Variance

A criteria is useless if every employee performs at the same level.  Criteria should reflect meaningful differences between employees.  This standard is sometimes described as sensitivity.  This is not referring to people's feelings, but rather the ability to sense differences between low and high performers.

Summary

The nature of work is complex, and a number of factors affect how work is structured and how jobs are designed. Occupations have been categorized professionally since the 1930s, and this classification system has been continually improved upon in an effort to aid employers, employees, and job-seekers alike.

Employee selection is extremely important when it comes to the nature of work—it influences decisions about whom to hire into a flat, team-based organization; whom to send overseas as an expatriate; and who is capable of adapting to a pattern of rotating shifts.

References

Austin, J. T., & Villanova, P. D. (1992). The criterion problem: 1917–1992. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 836–874.

Borman, W. C., & Motowidlo, S. J. (1993). Expanding the criterion domain to include elements of contextual performance. In N. Schmitt and W. C. Borman (Eds.), Personnel selection (pp. 71–98). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Elliott, R. H., & Jarrett, D. T. (1994). Violence in the workplace: The role of human resource management. Public Personnel Management, 23(2), 287–299.

Flanagan, J. C. (1956). The evaluation of methods in applied psychology and the problem of criteria. Occupational Psychology, 30, 1–9.

Muchinsky, P. M. (2012). Psychology applied to work: An introduction to industrial and organizational psychology. Summerfield, NC: Hypergraphic Press.

Nagle, B.F. (1953). Criterion Development. Personnel Psychology, 6, 271-289.

Organ, D. W. (1997). Organizational citizenship behavior: It’s construct clean-up time. Human Performance, 10, 85–97.

Pulakos, E. D., Arad, S., Donovan, M. A., & Plamondon, K. E. (2000). Adaptability in the workplace: Development of a taxonomy of adaptive performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(4), 612–624.

Sackett, P. R. (2002). The structure of counterproductive work behaviors: Dimensionality and relationships with facets of job performance. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 10, 5–11.