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Janet T. Spence (Editor), John M. Darley, and Donald J. Foss (Associate Editors). Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 48, 1997. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, Inc., 742 pages, $55.00. Reviewed by Lynn Summers, Peace College, Raleigh, NC.
Two densely-packed chapters tantalize the student of organizational behavior in the Annual Review of Psychology (ARP), 1997 model. Each chronicles a great amount of activity as well as progress in the two areas reviewed.
Borman, Hanson, and Hedge review what's happening in the field of personnel selection. They note with excitement that I/O psychologists continue to map the performance terrain, with the promise that this erstwhile terra incognito is gradually coming into sharper focus, in line with the more detailed cartography already available for the predictor domain. Continuing research exploring the linkages between the two domains will, the authors claim, help nudge what is now the technology of personnel selection into the exalted realm of science.
Research on predictors continues to give the nod to general mental ability as the best predictor of performance on virtually any job. And-predictably-psychometricians skirmish over a host of issues, such as: Does job knowledge predict performance better than g, in spite of being partly determined by g itself? (An interesting finding is that tests of job knowledge actually out-predict cognitive ability tests when highcomplexity jobs are involved.)
The much maligned interview continues to redeem itself. It turns out that the most structured interviews have validities that rival ability tests. In one interesting study, raters watched videotaped interviews with the sound turned off and made reasonably valid ratings. In the battle of the interview techniques, it looks like behavior description ("Tell me about a time. . . ") is currently running ahead of situational ("Tell me what you would do if. . . ").
The authors point out that increasing attention is being paid to how applicants react to selection procedures-an extension of the old concept of face validity....