Improving I-O Science Through Synthetic Validity

Jeffrey B. Vancouver

Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2010, vol. 3, issue 3, 360-362

Abstract: The purpose of this comment is to advocate for the development of a synthetic validity database along the lines described by Johnson et al. (2010), not only because of its practical utility but also because of its potential contribution to the science of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology generally. Specifically, one of the core scientific pursuits of psychology is the understanding of individual differences (IDs). Knowledge of the context in which specific IDs matter (i.e., in terms of level of behaviors exhibited) can provide information about the nature of those IDs. For example, if the degree to which a job requires continuous learning of symbolic material is related to the predictive validity of general cognitive ability (g; i.e., learning context moderates the g–performance relationship), it is likely that g has something to do with the acquisition of new knowledge. Alternatively, or additionally, if the degree to which a job requires making decisions among large numbers of multi-attribute options is related to the validity of g as a predictor of job performance, it implies that g involves information processing capacity (and perhaps it is via this mechanism that g is related to learning). That is, evidence of the moderator effects of context (i.e., conditions on which jobs or tasks vary) on ID–performance relationships provides information about the nature of the ID construct, as well as whether the ID construct is likely to be predictive of performance in any particular context. This is another reason to develop a database that indicates what context variables predict the validities of ID constructs.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:inorps:v:3:y:2010:i:03:p:360-362_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().