Academic Self-Concept of Older Adults in Career Transition

The authors investigated the academic self-concept of students age 50 and older who are in career transition to identify their perceptions of their academic abilities and the teaching and learning environment.     

A COMPARISON OF HOLISTIC VERSUS DECOMPOSED RATING OF POSITION ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE WORK DIMENSIONS

Recent studies have attempted to reduce the cost and intrusiveness of the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) by limiting the amount of information provided to the analyst, with consistently negative results. We examined an alternative technique for improving the cost-effectiveness of the PAQ that avoids the need to rate the hundreds of items that constitute the instrument. Three groups of raters (professional job analysts, graduate students in industrial psychology who were familiar with the PAQ, and PAQ-unfamiliar undergraduates) made direct holistic ratings of the PAQ dimensions for four familiar jobs. The holistic ratings were compared with decomposed PAQ dimension profiles obtained from the item-level ratings of the professional analysts. Cronbach accuracy analyses indicated near-zero convergence between the holistic and decomposed dimension ratings, even for the professional PAQ job analysts. We conclude that holistic rating of dimensions is not an effective means of reducing the cost of a PAQ job analyses and that it is likely to be similarly ineffective with task- or ability-based instruments.     

SUPERVISORY AND EMPLOYEE CHARACTERISTICS AS CORRELATES OF EMPLOYEE SALARY INCREASES

Previous research on merit pay has focused on the context in which merit decisions take place and on characteristics of the employee. In the present study it was hypothesized that not only do employee characteristics influence merit increases, but so do characteristics of the employee's supervisor. The results from 175 employees in a midwestern manufacturing plant showed that 11% and 24% of the variance in employee salary increases were attributable to supervisory and employee characteristics, respectively. These results suggest that supervisory characteristics should be included in future research involving correlates of employee salary increases and by organizations when auditing the administration of merit pay plans.     

Counseling and Human Resource Development: Response to “Career Development in Business and Industry”

The author responds to an article by Dorn (1986) on career development in business and industry. Clarification regarding definition, job titles, job roles, and points of entry for behavioral science professionals is provided. Emphasis is placed on human resource development rather than the more generic use of counseling or career development in business and industry.     

Language About People with Disabilities

A decade of rehabilitation literature (a) calls attention to imprecise, stereotypical, and devaluing language that is often used to discuss people with disabilities and (b) offers more appropriate alternatives. Because professional counselors sometimes commit these language abuses, and counselors of all specialities can expect to see some clients who have disabilities, this article seeks to bring these issues to the attention of the counseling profession at large.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUPERVISORY RATINGS AND RESULTS-ORIENTED MEASURES OF PERFORMANCE: A META-ANALYSIS

A meta-analysis was conducted with 23 studies to assess the relationship between supervisory ratings and results-oriented measures of performance. As hypothesized, the corrected mean correlation was higher when a relative (versus absolute) rating format was used and when a composite (versus overall) rating method was used. These differences did not, however, account for all of the remaining variance around the relationship between ratings and results. Suggestions are offered for the direction of future research and practice.     

QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES TO JOB CLASSIFICATION: A REVIEW AND CRITIQUE

Job classification decisions underlie nearly all personnel functions (e.g., grouping for test validity generalization, compensation, performance appraisal, training needs analysis, career path and succession planning). Pearlman (1980) performed a comprehensive review of the job-family literature, paying special attention to the problem of forming job families when generalizing aptitude test validities. This review addresses a more specific topic: selecting among and using the numerous quantitative job-classification procedures, with a focus on the decision-making tasks and practical difficulties that confront users of each.