Criteria: Standards for

Decision Making
The Criterion Problem
 Evaluation standards
 Evaluation of teachers’ performance
 Yardstickof effectiveness
 Workers or organization?

 Personnel Psychology
 Determining the criteria
 Making decisions based on the criteria in many
facets of the work environment
 Criteria
Types of Criteria:
 Conceptual Criteria (Ultimate Criteria) – abstract
idea or construct
 cannot be measured
 Ex: knowledgeable of subject, conscientious, hardworking, etc.
 Actual Criteria – Measurable factors that substitute for
conceptual criteria
 Select actual criterion that comes closest to conceptual criterion
 Ex: Knowledge of subject – test scores
 Ex: Conscientious – all assignments turned in on time
 Hard criteria – units produced, # of errors, absences, etc.
 Soft criteria – supervisory ratings, self assessment
Criterion Contamination
 Bias – extent to which actual criterion
consistently measures something other
than the conceptual criterion
 Error – extent to which actual criterion is
not related to anything known (random
variations)
Criterion Development
When do you need the data and for what decisions?
 Proximal Criteria – for short term decisions
 Ex: Training performance
 Distal Criteria – for long term decisions
 Ex: Job performance
 Criteria Developed
 Deductively – theory to data
 Inductively – data to theory
 Construct validation – process of establishing
criteria
Five Steps to Criterion
Development
1. Job or Needs Analysis
2. Develop measures of actual behavior relative to
expected behavior
3. Identify criterion dimensions underlying
measures (factor analysis)
4. Develop reliable measures to overall factors –
various types of reliability
5. Determine predictive validity (correlate predictor
with criterion)
Purpose of Criterion
Development

 Theoretical – Helps us understand a concept

better.
 What are the characteristics of good performance?
 Practically – Use information to make
personnel decisions.
 Selecting job applicants
 Determining what and who needs to be trained
 Determining salaries
 Job Analysis

Job Analysis - Tool for identifying job-related criteria.

 Systematic breakdown & description of a job in terms of:
 What is accomplished

 How it is accomplished

 Knowledge, Skills, Abilities & Others (KSAOs) required

to perform job
 Task statements

• Tasks, position, job, job family

 Job orientated and worker orientated
Task Statements
 What?
 To whom or what?
 How?
 For what purpose?
Example: College Professor:
 Presents information to college students by way
of oral presentation to teach course subject
matter.
 Other ways to deliver information (an additional
task)?
 Job Analysis
Sources of Information
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
 Job Incumbents – someone currently
performing job
 Supervisors to Job Incumbents –
individuals who used to perform job
 Trained Job Analysts – understands
differences among various jobs
Job Oriented Job Analyses
 Job Oriented
 Task Analysis –
 Dissection of human work into “tasks”
 Descriptions of the performance of the tasks
 Forms of task statements – Table 3.2, p. 62
 Often used in Human Factors work
 Cognitive task analysis focuses on types of
decisions made on the job
 May be used to determine function allocation
(what done by machine or by human)
Job Evaluation

Job Evaluation – Method for determining

the value and worth of a job within the
organization
 Makes use of Job Analysis information
 What is job position worth (not person)?

 Pay too little – can’t recruit best applicants

 Pay too much – org. puts self in financial

difficulty
Fair Wages
Fair wages determined by:
 External Equity – what are other orgs
paying?
 Wage surveys
 Internal Equity – people at similar jobs
within org receive similar pay (fairness)
 Equity issues
 Gender, regionally concerns
Equal Pay Act
 Equal Pay Act (1963) – requires that men & women
performing the same job receive equal pay (other
aspects being equal).
 Covers private, state, and local federal employees;
NO minimum number of employees
- problem: rarely are 2 jobs equal
 Comparable Worth – Jobs that are equivalent or
comparable should receive same pay
 Gender and wages: AAUP survey, Martocchio (1991)
– females 75 cent to males dollar
 Job evaluation used to determine comparability of
jobs.
 Legal: Lemons v. City of Denver (1980), Christensen
v. Sate of Iowa (1977), AFSCME v. State of
Washington (1983)
How are criteria determined?

Criteria must be:

 Appropriate – relevant to the job
 Stable – consistent over time and situation
 Practical – should be possible to measure
 Types of Criteria
 Objective (hard)– taken from personnel records
 Productivity – error analysis, output
 Sales – type of product/service issue
 Turnover – termination, layoff, downsizing
 Absenteeism – many factors affect
 Accidents, thefts, others
 Subjective (soft) – judgments about worker
performance
 Rating scales, assessed by supervisors, peers, subordinates
 Criterion bias study – Bass & Turner (1973)
 Dynamic – job performance not expected to be
stable over time
 Performance expected to increase, accidents decrease