TOWARD AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF WORK EXPERIENCE

Work experience and related concepts such as tenure and seniority have been and continue to be used extensively in a variety of human resource functions. However, research on experience has proceeded without a clear theoretical orientation, adequate consideration of contextual and individual factors, and appropriate attention to measurement and design. These issues are addressed and a model of the work experience construct is offered. Work experience is described as consisting of qualitative and quantitative components that exist at different levels of specification and which interact and accrue over time. The model provides a nomological net for the experience construct linking it to contextual and individual factors critical for the development of experience and its translation into immediate outcomes of work-based knowledge, skills, attitudes, and motivation, and secondary outcomes such as performance. The model provides a basis for specific research propositions and human resource applications that consider work experience as a multidimensional, multilevel, and temporally dynamic construct.     

MULTI-STAGE SELECTION STRATEGIES: A MONTE CARLO INVESTIGATION OF EFFECTS ON PERFORMANCE AND MINORITY HIRING

This study explores alternative selection strategies available when a firm has two valid predictors that differ in the magnitude of subgroup differences. We examine 14 different selection rules (e.g., select on a composite of the two predictors versus screen on the first and then select on the second versus screen on the first and then select on a composite of the two), and document through a Monte Carlo simulation that the various selection rules can produce markedly different consequences in terms of the level of job performance achieved and the level of minority representation achieved. The selection rules examined include the use of within-group norming, whichwas restricted by the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the study examines how selection rules that do and do not include within-group norming fare in terms of the tradeoffs between performance and minority representation. The study shows that the preferred selection strategy will depend on the relative value the firm places on performance and on minority representation, and that the effects of different screen-then-select selection strategies vary as a result of the selection ratios at the screening and selection stages, thus precluding simple conclusions about the merits of each selection strategy.     

DIVINE CAUSALITY AND THE NATURE OF THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONING

To be alive as embodied human beings in the world means to be both conceptually or ratiocinatively aware, and sensibly or causally aware. However, under a still powerful influence of idealism, theology over the past two centuries has virtually abandoned the causal and sensibly‐embodied attentiveness to its subject‐matter (revelation) as demanded by the incarnation. It has instead often come to comport itself one‐sidedly, in essentially analytical or linguistically self‐guaranteeing ways, and has thereby lost its contingent and genuinely vulnerable incarnational “edge” at the center of life. This essay tries to restore a properly twofold attentiveness through a reinvigoration of the traditional view of revelation as the divinely causal reality of God in the world.