I__. - International Military Testing Association

A COMPARISON OF HOLISTIC AND TRADITIONAL
JOB-ANALYTIC METHODS
Brian S. O'Leary, Julie Rheinstein, and Donald E. McCauley, Jr.
U.S. Office of Personnel Management
Washin+on, D.C.
INTRODUCTION
Job analysis is the foundation of many personnel systems including . .
selection, performance appraisal, and training. Most often,
lengthy inventories are developed and administered to job
incumbents. This process can be very time-consuming and costintensive.
Several researchers have looked at methods of reducing the time and
the cost of job analysis. Grouping jobs on the basis of work
behaviors provides one way of reducing the cost of examination
development while not sacrificing test validity. Barnes and
O'Neill (1978) grouped jobs for examination development in the
Canadian Public Service. Rosse, Borman, Campbell, and Osborn
(1984) clustered U.S. Army enlisted jobs into homogeneous groups
according to rated job content in order to choose a representative
sample of MOS's for test validation purposes. Rosse et al.
clustered the jobs by sorting them on the basis of holistic job
descriptions.
Using a methodology similar to that used by Rosse et al.,
Rheinstein, McCauley, and O'Leary (1989) compared sources of job
information (i.e., the people doing the sorts). McCauley, O'Leary,
and Rheinstein (1989) compared the job groupings that resulted when
the sorters received varying amounts of job information. These
studies provided some of the data to be presented below.
The purpose of the present study was to compare a traditional
method of job analysis (administering an inventory to a large
sample of job incumbents) to the more holistic methods described
above.
Data Collection for the Holistic Methods
j
METHOD /
A) Eighty-seven professional and administrative occupations in the
Federal civilian work force were studied. Personnel research
professionals and staffing specialists grouped the occupations into
categories according to similarity of work behaviors. These raters
were given descriptions of the 87 jobs which were taken from the
Federal Government's Handbook of occupational Groups and Series of
Classes (1969). The job descriptions consisted of the job titlr:
and a brief narrative which summarized the major duties of the job.
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