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orm_ch01.qxd 9/26/02 2:59 PM Page 6 6 Stability and Change in Industrial and Organizational Psychology educational requirements, etc.), and how those jobs fit into families of similar jobs. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Labor convened a panel of industrial and organizational psychologists to plan the development of a database that would eventually replace the Dictionary of Occupational Titles as the primary information source for jobs in the U.S. economy. This panel designed a plan for a content model that could describe jobs according to both person and job requirements (Advisory Panel for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 1993; Campion, Gowing, Lancaster, & Pearlman, 1994). The content model is depicted in Figure 2.1. The idea was to build taxonomies of descriptors in each of these areas and then to score each target occupation on each of the descriptors. As an example, in the abilities domain, the plan was to develop a comprehensive model of all abilities relevant to work and then to get ratings for an occupation on each of the abilities regarding how much each ability was required to accomplish work in that occupation. After the ratings were obtained for every descriptor in the content model—the occupation’s ability, skill, generalized work activity, and so forth—requirements would be numerically defined, making possible a variety of practical applications. In fact, the ultimate goal was to obtain content model ratings on all occupations in the U.S. economy to make the O*NET maximally useful. Anticipated applications included (a) supporting educational policy and skill standards, (b) informing school-towork transitions, (c) helping dislocated workers find jobs, (d) helping employers select employees, (e) identifying job families, (f) linking job requirements to disability or medical standards, (g) identifying training needs for target occupations, (h) developing wage and salary systems, and (i) serving as input dimensions for performance appraisal systems. The content model descriptors have been developed (Peterson, Mumford, Borman, Jeanneret, & Fleishman, 1999; Peterson et al., 2001). The taxonomies in most of the domains build upon earlier model development efforts. For example, the abilities model is based on Fleishman’s research on the Functional Job Analysis System (F-JAS; Fleishman & Mumford, 1988). The skills taxonomy borrows from the work done on the Secretary of Labor’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS; Peterson, 1992) project and from the National Skill Standards Board. The generalized work activities model took as a starting point job components emerging from work on the Position Analysis Questionnaire (McCormick, Jeanneret, & Mecham, 1969), and supervisory dimensions represented in several models of supervisory behavior, including those of Hemphill (1960), Mitchell (1978), and Borman and Brush (1993). Finally, the work styles dimensions were derived from a view of personality that collapse the dimensions of personality into five primary ones, referred to as the “Big Five” (Goldberg, 1990), and from work Guion and colleagues (e.g., Raymark, Schmit, & Guion, 1997) did to develop a personality-related job analysis survey. Two additional features of the O*NET content model and database reinforce its flexibility and overall usefulness. The first is that with so many different types of descriptors (i.e., skills, abilities, work activities, etc.), multiple windows to the world of work are available to the user. Different applications are likely to require different sets of descriptors, and this condition can be met with O*NET. Second, the content model is organized hierarchically so that users can enter the database at the level appropriate for their applications. At the most specific levels the user can obtain fine-grained occupational information. If more general information about occupations is required, users can enter the database at a more generic, aggregated level. Additionally, O*NET provides a common nomenclature for describing different jobs. The cross-job descriptors essentially place all jobs on the same metric, thus avoiding the necessity to develop a new descriptive system for each job. Work is continuing to refine the descriptors and obtain job incumbent ratings on as large a population of occupations as possible. The hope is that the O*NET database will become sufficiently populated such that all of the applications described previously can be realized. Advances Through Extension Project A and O*NET both represent large-scale developments in industrial and organizational psychology that were incremental advances in thinking or practice. In some sense they were new solutions to traditional problems historically addressed by the field. In this section we highlight breakthroughs that might be characterized as extending into new directions for the field. We shall begin with what is often referred to as the levels issue. Levels of Analysis The historical focus of theory and practice in our field has been the individual. Indeed, many early industrial psychologists thought of themselves as differential psychologists whose attention was focused primarily on individual differences in knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes that were then related to critical behavior in organizational settings. As industrial and organizational psychology attempted to deal with the broader organizational environment in which individuals are imbedded to include work teams and larger units, it became necessary to recognize that important behavioral
orm_ch01.qxd 9/26/02 2:59 PM Page 7 constructs occur at different levels in the organization. The multilevel nature of the relevant behavioral phenomena raised many conceptual and measurement issues. Some constructs are meaningful at multiple levels, and the nature of the meaning must be carefully specified. Consider the case of cognitive ability. At the individual level, cognitive ability is a construct that represents a person’s ability to accomplish some specified domain of behaviors. However, if cognitive ability is considered at the team or group level, it also may be meaningful, such as the case in which there might be interest in the level of cognitive ability of members of a classroom or a team in a team-based organization. Yet at the team level, each individual possesses some level of cognitive ability and the members are likely to differ in it. Assuming they do differ, what best represents team ability? Is it the average of all members, the ability level of the highest member, the lowest? The answer to this question is not clear. What is clear, however, is that variance among team members which had no analogue at the individual level exists at the team level and cannot be ignored. The best representation of team cognitive ability will depend on the theory in which its use is imbedded. Thus, if team ability is something that is to be related to performance on a task in which all members can put forth their own ideas, work relatively autonomously, and pool their work, then the average of all members may be appropriate. If, however, the task is one in which a good idea from one team member can carry the team, then the cognitive ability of the brightest member may be more appropriate. The previous example was one in which the construct could have meaning at both the team and the aggregate level. In other cases, constructs are only meaningful at one level even though multiple levels are involved. Returning to teams, individuals comprise teams and have individual-level characteristics, but some constructs only occur at the team level. Cooperation is one of these constructs. Individuals can create conditions of cooperation that vary from low to high, but cooperation is a between-person phenomenon. Thus, as levels are introduced, how behavior is observed, measured, and studied when considered as activity embedded in multiple levels requires a perspective different from that taken by industrial and organizational psychology in its early development. Increasingly—by chance or by design—people work in groups or teams. This level of analysis enjoys great status in the field today. Although the literature on social collectives— like that on groups—is well developed and has been evident for some time (e.g., Forsythe, 1999; McGrath, 1984), the research on work groups and teams represents a distinct breakthrough because it has integrated group dynamics with task work, work flow, and work procedures. This literature is well Industrial and Organizational Psychology in the 1990s 7 represented in this volume and details the distinction between what might be called individual-in-team behavior (i.e., as a result of the social forces operating on an individual in a social context) from truly team-level phenomena (Klimoski & Zukin, 1999; see chapter by Kozlowski & Bell in this volume). Although they are less common in today’s scholarship, still other levels of description have found favor. At a macrolevel, a number of investigators have found it important and useful to acknowledge and measure societal-level phenomena. Arguably, these phenomena represent both the context that the worker (or applicant) experiences and the environment in which the organization must operate. Similarly, macroforces stemming from developments in popular culture (including the entertainment media) and the educational system are known to affect parameters of interest to those doing research on personnel selection, recruiting, training, or work motivation. Indeed, even specific trends in industry sectors (e.g., consumer products, transportation) can represent a contextual (boundary condition) or might be transformed into a variable of interest. This trend to use alternative levels of analysis has several implications; two are noted here. The first is the need for specificity. As never before, researchers are required to be clear about the levels in which they are interested and the ones to which they wish to generalize.Aversion of this point is the possibility that we may get the best models or the best prediction if we presume that more than one level is operative to produce an outcome of interest. Thus, Hofmann and Stetzer (1996), in attempting to understand workplace safety, found—as tradition would have it—that individual differences were important in the prediction of unsafe behaviors. But it was also true that the safety behavior of the supervisor (e.g., wearing safety gear) and the risk-taking norms of the work group were involved. Because these different aspects of the problem are usually intertwined, one must think not only of the effects of multiple but also those of interpenetrating levels. Similarly, Zaccaro and Klimoski (2001) chose to focus on senior organizational leadership as a way of capturing the effects of individual and executive team factors on the organizational level of functioning, but they also recognized that phenomena at that level would have first- (e.g., structural design) and second-order (e.g., communications-information flow) effects. A second implication is the need for the clear articulation of explanatory mechanisms—that is, we must specify the processes that we believe are operating. Clearly, when characterizing individuals, we can and often do invoke subcognitive (e.g., habitual), cognitive, and affective processes. It is also likely that these processes will be relevant at most higher levels of analysis. For example, the behavior of organizations is largely the result of sets of individuals for whom such processes are controlling. The challenge, however, lies in
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