I__. - International Military Testing Association

Introduction
Developing Job Families Using Generalized Work Behaviors
Brian S. O'Leary
Julie Rheinstein
Donald E. McCauley, Jr.
U.S. Office of Personnel Management
This paper describes one phase of a large-scale research project aimed at
developing and refining a list of work behaviors common to approximately 100
different Federal professi&nal and administrative occupations. In this phase
of our research, we were attempting to form job families and to describe how
these job families differ in terms of the relative time spent on yeneral work
behaviors.
Traditional systems for describing jobs have usually focussed on dascribing a
single job rather than attempting to determine the similarity among jobs.
Thus, many of the traditional means of describing jobs, such as task analysis,
are somewhat limited when one tries to compare across jobs.
Since one of the ultimate uses for our research was the development and
documentation of selection tests we needed a method of comparing jobs using
some form of work behavior as a unit of measurement. Our goal was to develop
a method of comparing jobs in such a way as to be consistent witt, provisions
of the Uniform Guidelines. The Guidelines define "work behavior" in the
following manner: "an activity performed to achieve the objectives of the
job. Work behaviors involve observable (physical) components and unobservable
(mental) components. A work behavior consists of the performance of one or
more tasks. Knowledges, skills, and abilities are not behaviors although they
may be applied in work behaviors" (Section 16, 43FR38308).
Develooment of the Generalized
Work Behaviors (GWB's)
First it was proposed that a li st of occupation-specific duties be
constructed. A list of general izable work behaviors could then be generated
by grouping the occupationally specific duties in terms of common underlying
work behaviors.
We extended the work of Outerbridge (1987) in the development of our GWB's.
Outerbridge had developed a list of 32 GWB's. She used duty statements
contained in the occupational definitions in the Dictionary of Occupational
Titles (DOT) for 24 populous Federal professional and administrative
occupations.
A list of 223 duty statements were extracted from the DOT. Each one was
placed on a separate card. These duty statements were then sorted into
categories describing similar work behaviors, first by a group of 10 perSOrlnel
psychologists and later by a group of 10 occupational specialists. Nineteen
sorters provided usable data. The 19 separate sorts were summarized and
compared after transformation into matrix form. Matrix representation allowed
the development of final work behavior categories using cluster analySiS to
discovel- the structure within the summarized data and also allowed the