Situating Ethical Behavior in the Nomological Network of Job Performance

Purpose

Our objective was to generate, define, and evaluate behavioral dimensions of ethical performance at work that are common across United States occupations.

Design/Methodology/Approach

This project involved three studies. Study 1 involved (a) qualitative review of published literature, professional codes of ethics, and critical incidents of (un)ethical performance and resulted in (b) behavioral dimensions and ethical performance rating scales. The second and third studies used a retranslation methodology to evaluate the ethical performance dimensions from Study 1. The behavioral dimensions were linked to the performance determinants (personal attributes) in Study 3.

Findings

Study 1 resulted in draft dimension definitions and rating scales for 10 ethical performance dimensions. In Studies 2 and 3, retranslation data provided strong support for 10 behavioral dimensions of ethical performance at work. Results from Study 3 shed light on possible relationships among the performance dimensions based on their underlying performance determinants.

Implications

Communicating an organization’s ethical standards to employees is important because some ethical breakdowns can be attributed to simply failing to recognize an ethical matter (in: DeCremer, Managerial ethics: Managing the psychology of morality, Routledge, New York, 2011). Definitions of ethical behavior in the workplace provide a tool for researchers, employers, and employees to communicate about ethical situations and a foundation for folding ethics into employee training and performance management.

Originality/Value

These studies provide a taxonomy of ethical performance at work that generalizes to a diverse array of occupations and industries, and dimensions and rating scales have value for performance management, training/curriculum development, job analysis, predictor development and/or validation, and additional research.

     

A test of expectancy theory in a field setting using female clerical employees

Female clerical workers were rated on seven dimensions of job performance using behaviorally based rating scales, these 266 subjects responded to questionnaire items concerned with their expectations dealing with (1) whether their job effort resulted in effective performance (Expectancy I), and (2) whether job performance leads to reward outcomes (Expectancy II). These Expectancies were found not to be highly related to the measures of job performance in contrast to expectancy theory predictions. Satisfaction with reward outcomes was found to be differentially related to individuals' expectations that performance results in the attainment of particular outcomes.     

Differentiation of occupational perceptions among different age groups

The perception of occupations plays a key role in many vocational behaviors and in theories of vocational development. This study hypothesizes that occupational perceptions are more specific for older age groups than for younger age groups.This hypothesis was tested by using latent root analysis and minimum residual factor analysis to analyze the intercorrelations among six Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) scales for five large and diverse samples-elementary school students, rural high school seniors, college freshmen, employed salesmen, and employed women.Both analyses supported the hypothesis. The results are discussed in relation to those of Cureton (1970) and the implication is drawn that occupational perceptions may be used to estimate a person's level of vocational development.     

Agreement of parent and teacher rating scales with comprehensive clinical assessments of attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity

Forty-one clinic-referred children were given the DSM-III diagnosis of attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADD/H) based on structured diagnostic interviews of the child and mother and on two teacher and two parent rating scales. The degree of agreement between diagnostic classification of ADD/H based solely on criterion scores on each rating scale and classification based on the comprehensive clinical assessments that included use of the same rating scaleswas assessed by comparing the ratings of the 41 children with ADD/H to those of 47 clinic-referred children given other diagnoses or no diagnosis. The accuracy of classification was highly similar across scales. Increasing the cutoff score increased the acing true positives. Using the point of intersection of these two curves to choose the optimal cutoff scores resulted in 70–75% accurate classification and 25–30% misclassification of children given clinical diagnoses of ADD/H. This rate of misclassification suggests that rating scales alone should not be used to classify ADD/H for most clinical and research purposes, especially because the method of comparison used in this study favored finding a high degree of correspondence.     

The stability of child behavior disorders: A one year test-retest study of Adelaide versions of the Conners teacher and parent rating scales

The stability of children's disorders was studied, using Adelaide versions of the Conners teachers and parent rating scales, with 5- to 12-year-olds. Of the 20 scales, 14 had high or moderate test-retest stability over the 1-year interval. Most scales also showed discriminant validity over this time. All but 2 of the 14 stable scales gave moderate stability coefficients at each of three age levels. Three teacher scales (Conduct Problem, Socially Rejected, and Antisocial) gave very low stability for the youngest group. Stability was not generally affected by teacher practice. Little effect of subject selection or repeated-rating bias on scale means was evident. There was a general reduction of some scale means on the second assessment, and the contributions of practice, age, and study-entry effects were examined.This work was supported in part by a grant to Professor P. H. Glow from the Nuffield Foundation, England. The authors are grateful to the staff, parents, and children of Walkerville Primary School, South Australia, for their participation in this study.     

Effectiveness of the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale with Older Generalized Anxiety Disorder Patients

To expand the collection of instruments available for assessment of anxiety in the elderly, this report examined the original and revised Hamilton anxiety scales in a sample of 50 older adults diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and 93 normal community participants (ages 55–82). Although the revised anxiety scale had better discriminant validity (lower correlation with the revised Hamilton depression scale) than the original anxiety and depression scales, a considerable amount of shared variance still existed (41% shared variance, GAD sample alone; 17% control sample alone; 74% shared variance, both samples combined). Near-perfect group classification was possible using 7 items from the original anxiety scale and 10 items from the revised anxiety scale. Results are discussed in light of their implications for use of the Hamilton anxiety rating scale with older anxiety-disordered patients.     

Further evidence for meaning change in impression formation

Hamilton and Zanna (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1974, 29, 649–654) demonstrated that the meaning of an attribute as rated on connotatively related scales changed as a function of context desirability. This finding was viewed as supporting a meaning change interpretation of context effects in impression formation. Kaplan (Memory and Cognition, 1975, 3, 375–380, Exp. 1) found that similar changes also occurred on scales unrelated in meaning to the test attribute and argued that changes on both kinds of scales were due to halo effects produced by the contexts. Controlling for possible scaling artifacts, the first experiment reported here showed that substantially greater changes occurred on related than on unrelated scales. Kaplan (1975, Exp. 2) also found that the magnitude of context-induced differences in judgments of trait likability was not increased by creating contexts denotatively related to the test attributes. Adding measures of connotative meaning, the second experiment in this paper showed that substantially greater context-induced changes did occur on related meaning scales and, in contrast to Kaplan, on trait likability for the denotatively related contexts. The results of each experiment are consistent with a meaning change position but would not be expected on the basis of the halo effects model.     

Personality types and traits in the Vocational Preference Inventory

The relationships between the six scales on which Holland's (1973) theory is based (viz., Realistic, Investigative, Social, Conventional, Enterprising, Artistic) and the five other scales (viz., Self-control, Masculinity, Status, Infrequency, Acquiescence) of the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) (Holland, 1970) were investigated using canonical analysis. Considering the six personality type scales as one set of variables and the five trait scales of the VPI as the second set of variables, five significant canonical correlations were obtained for a sample of 373 mostly white undergraduate students. In a second study, three significant canonical correlations were found for a sample of 115 black college students at another school. The weights of the VPI scales suggested that three patterns of relationships among the scales are shared by the black sample and the mostly white sample.     

Measured interests versus expressed interests as predictors of long-term occupational membership

This study compared the predictive accuracy of measured versus expressed interests over a 21-year period using as a criterion occupational membership at age 36. Subjects were 83 males whose measured and expressed interests were elicited at ages 15, 18, and 25. The Strong Vocational Interest Blank was used to determine measured interests while expressed interests were determined through a combination of questionnaires and interviews. C. McArthur's (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1954, 38, 346–353) method was employed to determine the predictive validity of subjects' measured interests. The predictive validity of expressed interests was determined by using A. Roe's (The psychology of occupations. New York: Wiley, 1956; Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1957, 4, 212–217) scheme for occupational classification to code occupational preferences and compare them to age 36 occupations. Results indicated that at each point in the study expressed interests were slightly better predictors of age 36 occupational membership than measured interests. Supplementary analyses revealed no relationship between the extent to which subjects' measured or expressed interests corresponded to age 36 occupations and either overall job or career satisfaction.     

Developmental changes in incidental memory as a function of processing level,congruity, and repetition

Second-, fifth-, and ninth-grade students (8, 11, and 14 years of age, respectively) answered acoustic and semantic questions about words which were either congruent or incongruent with the questions. Subsequently, students' free recall of the words was unexpectedly tested. For words presented once in the list, only orienting task and congruity main effects were found. For twice-presented words, grade level interacted with both variables in that older students' recall was better than younger students' only for semantically encoded, congruent words. This finding is consistant with the hypothesis that developmental increases in semantic knowledge enhance the potential for encoding elaboration, but is in apparent conflict with the results of M. F. Geis and D. M. Hall (Child Development, 1978, 49, 857–861) who found no such interaction for second- and fifth-grade children. The different age spans included in the two studies provides one resolution of the discrepancy in results. However, a second experiment tested the importance of a procedural difference between the two studies. M. F. Geis and D. M. Hall (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1976, 22, 58–66; 1978) presented the question after the stimulus word while we presented the question before the word. For ninth-grade students, the question after condition resulted in an attenuation of the recall difference between semantic and acoustic questions compared to the question before condition. It was argued that the pattern of developmental differences in incidental memory that is obtained may be related to which procedure is utilized.     

Timing of reflexive visuospatial orienting in young, young-old, and old-old adults

This study examined adult age differences in reflexive orienting to two types of uninformative spatial cues: central arrows and peripheral onsets. In two experiments using a Posner cuing task, young adults (ages 18–28 years), young-old adults (60–74 years), and old-old adults (75–92 years) responded to targets that were preceded 100–1,000 ms earlier by a central arrow or a peripheral abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the cue remained present upon target onset. Facilitation effects at short cue–target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were prolonged in duration for the two older groups relative to the young adults. At longer cue–target SOAs, inhibition of return (IOR) that was initiated by peripheral onset cues was observed in the performance of young adults but not in that of the two older groups. In Experiment 2, the cue was presented briefly and removed prior to target onset. The change in cue duration minimized age differences (particularly for young-old adults) in facilitation effects and led to IOR for all three age groups. The findings are consistent with the idea that attentional control settings change with age, with higher settings for older adults leading to delayed disengagement from spatial cues.     

Clogs in the bogus pipeline: Demand characteristics and social desirability

Jones and Sigall (1971) have advocated the use of a pseudophysiological monitoring device (the bogus pipeline) as a procedure to measure the “true” feelings of experimental subjects. A comparison of the bogus pipeline and a paper-and-pencil scale as measures of attraction indicated that the monitoring device is affected by experimenter demands among high social desirability (SD) subjects (p < .03) while the simple rating scale is not. Attraction to a stranger was determined solely by attitude similarity for high SD subjects using the paper-and-pencil measure and for low SD subjects in both measurement conditions. Use of the bogus pipeline in the typical attraction experiment thus would seem to be contraindicated. These results were discussed with respect to Ostrom's (1973) criteria of relative sensitivity and functional comparability of measurement techniques.     

Testing the Structured Free Recall Intervention for Reducing the Impact of Bodyweight-Based Stereotypes on Performance Ratings in Immediate and Delayed Contexts

Purpose

This article investigates the efficacy of the Structured Free Recall Intervention (SFRI; J Bus Psychol 15:229?C246, 2000a; Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 82:237?C267, 2000b ) for reducing the impact of bodyweight-based stereotype endorsement on performance ratings, both immediately and when a time delay occurs between the observation and rating of performance.

Design/Methodology/Approach

512 undergraduates participated in a 2?×?2?×?2 between-subjects factorial experiment. A measure of bodyweight-based stereotype endorsement was pre-screened, and participants were randomly assigned to (a) either a no-delay or two-day time delay condition, (b) view either an average bodyweight or overweight ratee, and (c) undergo the SFRI or not.

Findings

Results suggest that (a) bodyweight-based stereotype endorsement predicts performance ratings for overweight ratees, (b) the SFRI is effective at reducing the impact of such stereotypes on performance ratings when conducted immediately after the observation of performance, and (c) the SFRI maintains this efficacy after a two-day delay between the observation and rating of performance.

Implications

These findings suggest that the best real-world application of the SFRI paradigm may be to situations with minimal delays between the observation and rating of performance, such as selection assessment centers or pre-employment interviews.

Originality/Value

Drawing on theories from the cognitive information processing literature, this paper extends previous research regarding the efficacy of the SFRI by demonstrating that short time delays between performance observation and rating??a common organizational phenomena??have minimal observed effects on the efficacy of the SFRI as a performance rating intervention.     

Effects of amphetamine on vigilance performance in normal and hyperactive children

Deficient sustained attention is a symptom of hyperactivity that can be improved by stimulant medication. Recently, amphetamine has been shown to increase detections during a vigilance task in both normal and hyperactive boys. The present study applied signal detection analysis to the vigilance performance of 15 hyperactive and 14 normal boys divided into two age groups (6–9 and 10–12). A computerized continuous performance test was administered under amphetamine and placebo. Overall group comparisons indicated that perceptual sensitivity or d was higher for the normal boys and the older groups, and analysis of drug treatments showed that amphetamine significantly increased d. Interactions between drugs and age groups demonstrated that amphetamine affected the younger boys to a significantly greater degree than the older children for both d and response bias or . It is notable that the results were essentially parallel for both normal and hyperactive children.     

Early Versus Late Onset of Spinal Cord Injury Among the Elderly

The objective of this study is to compare elderly individuals with late (60 years old) versus early (<60 years old) onset spinal cord injury (SCI) across quality of life (QOL) domains for which cross-sectional design was used. The outcome measures selected were secondary medical complications (e.g., pneumonia, autonomic dysreflexia, number of days hospitalized), Functional Independence Measure (FIM), Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), and the Craig Handicap Assessment and Reporting Technique (CHART). Analyses between groups showed that individuals with SCI onset 60 years of age or older were significantly older, had a greater proportion of incomplete lesions, were more likely to have SCI resulting from medical complication, and were less likely to be working. After controlling for differences in demographic and lesion characteristics, the majority of QOL domains were similar between groups. However, overall self-reported handicap (CHART-total score) was significantly greater among elderly with late onset SCI, particularly in the areas of physical independence and social integration. Differences in QOL between elderly with late versus early onset SCI were most prominent in the area of physical independence and social integration. The importance of appropriate statistical control, theoretical implications, and future directions are discussed.     

Judgmental relativism as a validity threat to standardized psychiatric rating scales

Judgemental relativism is a threat to the replicability and validity of measures of client behavior from direct rating scales whenever raters are exposed to different levels of client functioning since the internal standards, or anchor points, used to judge dimensional continua may vary on the basis of prior experience. Traditional interrater reliability indexes fail to identify such effects. The influence of judgmental relativism on summated ratings from the Nurses Observational Scale for Inpatient Evaluation (NOSIE-30) for 1040 adult mentally ill clients was examined with clinical staff raters from 24 treatment units in which the Time-Sample Behavioral Checklist (TSBC) provided full-week objective measures of actual client functioning via hourly direct observational coding (DOC). Regression analyses found that the same level of objective performance received higher or lower ratings across treatment units dependent on the raters'exposure to client groups that differed in level of functioning. Analyses of rating errors found that clients with better levels of functioning relative to others within treatment units were rated even higher than performance warranted. The operation of halo and contrast effects is explored and guidelines are provided for determining when judgmental relativism may produce or nullify significant differences. DOC assessments should be used instead of retrospective ratings to support most decisions in residential settings. Specific recommendations for the application of rating scales and improving data quality are provided.This study was the basis of a master's thesis at the University of Houston by Betty E. Rich under the direction of Gordon L. Paul and Marco J. Mariotto. Richard M. Rozelle, to whom appreciation is expressed for helpful comments, served on the examination committee. This study was partially supported by grants to Gordon L. Paul from the National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service (MH-15353; MH-25464); the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities; the Joyce Foundation; the MacArthur Foundation; the Owsley Foundation; the Cullen Foundation; and the Center for Public Policy, University of Houston.     

An application of Strong's validity criteria to basic interest scales

E. K. Strong, Jr.'s (Vocational interests of men and women, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1943) four propositions for interest-inventory validity andJ. L. Holland's (Making vocational choices: A theory of careers, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973) hexagonal classification system were synthesized in order to adapt a traditional procedure for determining the construct validity of occupational interest scales to the validation of basic interest scales. The procedure was tested using a sample of 4035 males and 3671 females whose interest inventory results as high school students and whose majors as college seniors could be assigned Holland codes. Results of the study indicate that this procedure can be used to assess the construct validity of inventories using basic interest scales.     

Distraction while driving: The case of older drivers

As the impairment of older drivers is especially found in perception and attention, one could assume that they are especially prone to distraction effects of secondary tasks performed while driving. The aim of the study was to examine the effect of age on driving performance as well as the compensation strategies of older drivers under distraction. 10 middle-aged and 10 older drivers drove in a simulator with and without a secondary task. To assess driving performance the Lane Change Task (Mattes, 2003) was used. This method aims at estimating driver demand while a secondary task is being performed, by measuring performance degradation on a primary driving-like task in a standardized manner. The secondary task – a self-developed computer-based version of “d2 Test of Attention” was presented both with and without time pressure. The results show that older participants’ overall driving performance (mean deviation from an ideal path) was worse in all conditions as compared to the younger ones. With regard to lane change reaction time both age groups were influenced by distraction in a comparable manner. However, when the lane keeping performance (standard deviation of the lateral position) was examined, the older participants were more affected than the younger ones. This pattern could be explained by compensation strategies of the older drivers. They focused on the most relevant part of the driving task, the lane change manoeuvres and were able to maintain their performance level in a similar way as did younger drivers. The driving performance of the older participants was not additionally impaired when the secondary task imposed time pressure. Overall, subjective rating of driving performance, perceived workload and perceived distraction was found to be similar for both age groups. The observed trends and patterns associated with distraction while driving should contribute to the further research or practical work regarding in-vehicle technologies and older drivers.     

Continuous Performance Test Performance in a Normative Epidemiological Sample

A 14-min continuous performance test (CPT) requiring a high rate of responding was administered to a probability-weighted random sample of 816 9–17-year-old children drawn from a population of 17,117 children in an ongoing epidemiological and longitudinal study in Western North Carolina. Systematic main effects of improved performance with older age were found in this age range for all variables, including reaction time (RT), RT standard error, errors of omission, errors of commission, and signal detection parameters (d' and ). Significant gender main effects included more impulsive errors, less variability, and faster RT by males, with no interactions between age and gender. There were no main effects of ethnicity or interactions of ethnicity with age and/or gender. Large main effects of interstimulus interval (ISI; 1, 2, or 4-s intervals) and time block were present for most CPT performance measures. The normative data from the CPT should provide a useful framework for interpreting similar data in future studies of child and adolescent psychopathology.