I-O Psychology Articles Review Employees

I-O Psychology Articles Review

Employees are the lifeblood of any organization. An organization may have the best product or service on the market, but without the right employees to create, deliver and support this product or service, the organization cannot be successful. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, employee selection becomes even more important to the overall competitiveness of the organization. Industrial-organizational psychology can be useful in this selection process. Following are a review of three articles concerning the employee selection process.

Attracting and Selecting: What Psychological Research Tells Us

Ryan and Tippins (2004) use the misperceptions organizational members commonly have regarding research findings in the area of employee selection as the catalyst for their article. Human resource professionals, in particular, face the challenges of meeting an ever-changing array of organizational recruiting and staffing needs. Their article concludes with three recommendations concerning employee selection. Ryan and Tippins recommends using a professional I/O psychologist to help in the translation of research into effective selection practices. HR professionals should stay current in research concerning recruitment and selection. Lastly, collecting data and performing analysis to understand what is taking place in the organization is also recommended. These suggestions are perfect for implementation into in any organization.

The information from Ryan and Tippins (2004) article can be implemented directly into the HR department of an organization. The authors give very specific tips on this implementation. Contracting an I/O psychologist to help develop organizational selection practices is the most significant recommendation. These new processes can then be utilized to facilitate more effective employee selection. As new tools for employee selection are developed, keeping up with these latest selection methods is also important. Lastly, processes can be implemented to collect and analyze data to see which efforts are the most effective in selecting employees, in order to continually fine tune the process.

Managers Also Overrely on Tests

Martin (2008) surmises that although it is common for personnel managers to not fully appreciate the value of psychological testing and instead rely too heavily on subjective decisions, there are instances when they do over-rely on tests when making employee selections decisions. One of these instances is when a manager was ready to hire a candidate, but then negative test data raised a potential concern. Interestingly, the reverse was not found to be true -- that positive test data affected the decision when a candidate had not been selected for potential hire. Senior level executives also were more prone to over-relying on testing than their junior fellow organizational members. Lastly, Martin notes that an over-reliance on testing occurs more frequently when hiring for more senior positions, as there is an increased cost of a poor hire and managers are less likely to rely on subjective aspects. Knowing these conditions that are prone to over-reliance on testing can be useful in the organization.

Personnel managers need to receive training not only in the implementation of testing procedures for candidates, but also concerning these instances when the results are frequently over-relied upon. If personnel managers are made aware of these tendencies, they can help guard against them. For instance, if there is a candidate who after interviewing appeared to be a good fit for a position, but the testing came back with poor results, there is the tendency to pass up the candidate. However, by making personnel managers aware of this tendency, they can really consider whether the candidate is still a good hire, even if the testing was not as desired.

Protecting the legal and appropriate use of personality testing: A practitioner perspective

Jones and Arnold (2008) explore the issue of legally and appropriately using personality testing. There are risks that must be managed to ensure personality testing doesn't become restricted, or worse outlawed, by state or federal law. The authors note that "I-O psychologists should never get myopic as to where the real threats might come from in terms of the ongoing use of personality testing or other selection tools used in the workplace." For this reason, Jones and Arnold put forth several recommendations. First, it is necessary to remind test users that combined sex norms should be utilized with job-related personality tests and not tests with separate sex test norms. Although there is a movement to increase the use of Big Five testing assessments in more clinical research and interventions, it is recommended that I/O psychologists make a distinction between these tests used for preemployment selection and those for clinical assessment and diagnosis. I/O psychologists need to be careful how these tests are marketed. In Massachusetts, certain personality tests are restricted if they meet certain criteria, such as: marketing themselves as impacting employee theft and shrinkage, testing items that reflect an individual's honest, or link to employee theft criteria. These are important considerations for organizations.