Criteria Modeling In Personnel Selection And Assessment: Validity Generalizability Perspective

Studies on personnel selection and assessment have over almost one century of scientific history. Nowadays, they were widely used in human resource management and played a crucial role. In the early period, the most studies focused on the utility of selection, which paid more attentions to development of predictor domains, and made administrative decision based on scores of predictors. In 1970s, In order to justify the outcomes from selection and assessment, the evidence about quality and effectiveness of selection which named validation was advocated intensively. Although this research was extensive in 1980s, it's far from conclusive. Many predictors were proved to be valid in some extent with differential criterias, but the results from validity generalizability procedure were pessimistic. The most validity coefficients were unstable, which has known as situational specific in personnel selection and assessment. According to the scheme of validation, researchers in industrial and organizational psychology recognized they need more understandings on criteria, and shifted their focus from predictors to criteria domains. In particular, they placed the emphasis on criteria development and construct validation, and hoped to receive an improvement of validity evidence.Based on the outcomes from literature review, the thesis aimed to enhance the validity generalizability of selection. By using semi-structural interview, questionnaire survey and field study, the present study, with five sub-studies, attempted to develop and validate the criteria model, examine the procedural mechanism of criteria measurement, dynamic criteria, analysis the predictors-criteria match, and examine the multilevel framework in criteria nature. More details about result were shown as below.In ChapterIII, we focused on development and validation of criteria model, and exploratory analysis on construct of objective criteria using a managerial sample. Based on the foregoing progress about performance theory, we put forward several hypothesis criteria models and employed a validation by Hierarchical ConfirmatoryFactor Aanalysis method. The result was interesting and differential from the foregoing outcomes, the multimethods-multidimensions combinating model received the promising support when we compared several fit indices, and it gave us more understanding about criteria and supplied several possible interpretations to the situational specific. Further, we developed an exploratory analysis of construct validity of objective criterias by nomological network. The results showed there were low-convergent relationship between behavior based criteria and objective criteria, but the promotion showed more overlap with task performance, the merit related experience and seniority showd more overlap with contextual performance.In Chapter IV, we focused on procedural mechanism of criteria measurement in personnel selection and assessment, and hoped to discover the nature of method variance in the multimethods-multidimensions model. By using a field study and questionnaire survey, we employed a competitive testing between situational specific model and cross-situatinal consisitency model, aimed to classify the procedural mechanism of self-rating criteria, and the recursive solution was compared with supervisory rating criteria. The result showed there was much differential between the two rating criteria, and particularly, the method variance was interpretated as neither bias nor error, but valid performance measurement which named uniqueness in statistical term. The result inspired us to re-evaluate the validity of personnel selection and we'd get a more optimistic opinion about "select validly". Further, the dynamic nature of criteria was examined; we classified three career stages on the time serial which named adaptive period, continuous period, and transformal period, and found that the procedural mechanisms were much differential among three stages. The result confirmed the dynamic nature in critera, and gave us some theoretical clues about criteria sel...