Case study 5

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Develop Your Skills Exercise: This chapter’s Develop Your Skills feature gave you some tips on assessing job candidates. Based on what you read in this chapter, what are three additional tips that you would add to the list? (Additional exercises are available at the end of this chapter’s supplement that will enable you to build additional computational and decision-making skills when using data.)

Opening Vignette Exercise: The opening vignette described how Xerox developed an assessment system to improve the performance and retention of its call center workers. Reread the vignette and answer the following questions:

a. What other assessments do you think could be considered for the job given the company’s high–service quality goal? Why?

b. If you applied to this company and were denied a job due to your personality assessment results, how would you feel? Would you think that these methods were fair?

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Case Study

You just became the head of staffing for BabyBots, a manufacturer of small robots. You were surprised to learn that the company had never validated the manual dexterity test it uses to assess job candidates for its manufacturing jobs. You decided to do a concurrent validation study and administered the test to thirty manufacturing workers. Their scores are reported in Table 8-4 , along with their ages, sex, race, and job performance ratings. You also calculated the correlation between the manual dexterity test and job performance to assess the test’s validity. You then examined the relationship between employees’ test scores and their performance ratings. The results of this analysis are shown in Tables 8-5 and 8-6 .

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Table 8-4 Validation Data for the Manual Dexterity Test

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Table 8-5 Correlation Table

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Table 8-6 Above a Cutoff of 43

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Questions

1. What kind of relationship exists between employees’ scores on the manual dexterity test and their performance ratings?

2. Suppose a candidate scored 44 on the manual dexterity test. The regression equation predicting job performance using the manual dexterity test is

What is the candidate’s predicted job performance? 3. Assume that only candidates with predicted performance above 85 are to be hired.

This translates to a score of at least 43 on the manual dexterity test. Assume only those with scores above 43 were hired (20 of the 30 people in this sample). Would the use of this test have led to evidence of adverse impact based on sex or race? The relevant data on the 20 people exceeding the cutoff were presented earlier in the table.

4. Given the validity results you found, would you recommend use of this test as a selection device? If so, how would you use it?

Semester-Long Active Learning Project

Finish the assignment for Chapter 7 and begin researching, describing, and critically analyzing the alignment between the position you chose and the firm’s existing assessment practices. Devise a series of assessment methods (interviews, assessment centers, work samples, and so forth) for evaluating job candidates. Using what you learned in Chapter 4 , identify how your assessment plan will enable the company to be compliant with equal employment opportunity (EEO) laws and other legal requirements.

Case Study Assignment: Strategic Staffing at Chern’s

See the appendix at the back of the book for this chapter’s Case Study Assignment.

32.465 + (1.234 × Manual dexterity test score)

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Chapter Supplement

Attenuation Due to Unreliability

Because correlations are an important tool for determining the strategic usefulness of a particular assessment tool and for legal defensibility, it is important to recognize that observed correlations can be influenced by some important factors that may exist in organizational contexts. Attenuation is the weakening of observed correlations. No measure is perfect, and unreliability of measures can attenuate correlations.

Consider Figure 8-8 . In the first scatter plot we have depicted a perfect correlation along with arrows indicating the addition of random error. In the second scatter plot you can see the impact of the added measurement error (unreliability). You can easily see how unreliability adds “noise” or error to the system, attenuating the correlation. The observed correlation has moved from being perfect, +1.0, to about +.67. In the most extreme case, a correlation with a random variable (a completely unreliable measure) will hover around zero. The impact of error is another illustration of why it is important to be systematic in your staffing system and procedures. If different interviewers are affected by noninterview factors then they cannot be reliable and their scores will not be as strongly correlated with later job performance. Observed correlations can be corrected for attenuation if you know the reliability of the measure(s). The formula is

where r represents the correlation between X and Y and r and r represent the reliability of measures of X and Y, respectively.

Correction for Range Restriction

Another factor that can influence correlations in organizations is range restriction. Organizations do not hire randomly and they keep only the best performing employees. This reduces

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Corrected rXY =   Observed  rXY

√rXX × rY Y

XY XX YY

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