Evaluate 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, it.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 and 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 - tthe 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 based 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.

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

Variance

A criteria is useles 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.