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Sidney A. Fine and Steven F. Cronshaw. Functional Job Analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999, 307 pages, $69.95.
Reviewed by Robert J Harvey, Associate Professor of Psychology, Virginia Tech, Department of Psychology, Blacksburg, VA.
There can be no question that Sidney Fine is nothing short of a national treasure for the fields of I-O, HRM, and occupational/job analysis. Since the 1940s, his pioneering work on Functional Job Analysis (FJA) has exerted a tremendous impact, both in guiding the technologies used to analyze jobs, as well as forming a major part of our theoretical foundation. Fortunately for all of us, over 60 years later Fine remains active.
Regarding the technologies used in job analysis, Fine literally wrote the book with respect to how one should go about composing and rating task statements with FJA. In addition to being used by untold thousands of job and occupational analysts in public and private organizations around the world, the worker-function and associated rating scales from FJA formed the basis of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). Generations of graduate students in I-0 and HRM learned task-based job analysis using Fine's works; I still have my well used copy of Fine and Wiley (1971) that Ed Cornelius assigned to us in my first graduate course in personnel psychology, and it has served me well in countless subsequent sessions of writing task statements.
Although it may seem incongruous to use the terms "job analysis" and "theory" in the same sentence, the fact remains that FJA conceptually predated by several decades the so-called "worker-oriented" approach to job analysis popularized by McCormick and associates (e.g., Cunningham, 1964; McCormick, 1976). FJA has at its conceptual core the view that task-dissimilar jobs can be meaningfully compared by describing them in terms of a small number of abstract job dimensions (e.g., data, people, and things), which are theory-driven, hypothetical, work-activity constructs. Although many structured job analysis questionnaires have since been developed, and a large number of empirically defined job dimensions have been identified (e.g., the 32 dimensions measured by McCormick's Position Analysis Questionnaire; the 80 scales of the Common-Metric Questionnaire that...