I__. - International Military Testing Association

factor loadings (i.e., where the difference between the primary and
secondary loadings was greater than 0.1). Using these 68 jobs, the
percentages of agreement were 64.7% for the staffing specialists
using job descriptions, 66.2% for the psychologists, and 55.9% for
the staffing specialists using job titles only.
DISCUSSION
The findings of this study are somewhat hard to. interpret.
Agreements of 56 % to 66% are too high to conclude that the holistic
methods have no merit for the purpose of grouping jobs but not high
enough to advocate their replacing traditional job inventory
procedures. The cause of this inability to make a clear
determination may well be the criterion measure itself (i.e., a job
inventory based on work behaviors) since there was extremely high
agreement between holistic and traditional approaches when the jobs
were viewed in terms of ability requirements rather than work
behaviors (Rheinstein, O'Leary, and McCauley, 1990).
There are two factors that should be examined as causing this lack
'of clarity in the criterion. The first is the nature of the jobs
under study. Agreement was consistently higher across all four
methods for some groupings (Groupings 4 and 5) than for others.
The jobs within Group 4 were primarily enforcement jobs, and those
in Group 5 were primarily jobs dealing with claims examining. The
jobs in the other groups were more general in nature. The fact
that there was no clear factor loading for 19 jobs (21.8%) means
that there was much overlap of work behaviors among the jobs and
that they could be equally well grouped in more than one way.
The second factor to consider is the use of generalized work
behaviors. It may be that the 57 GWBls used in this study were not
sufficient to distinguish clearly among the 87 jobs. This
hypothesis is supported by the fact that when the job-specific
duties were grouped to develop the GWB's, there were 42 duties (or
3% of the total number of duties) which could not be classified
into one of the 57 GWB's (O'Leary, Rheinstein, and McCauley, 1990).
The development and use of additional GWB's could add other
dimensions upon which groupings would differ more distinctly,
thereby facilitating the assignment of jobs.
Despite the shortcomings mentioned above, the use of elements such
as the GWB shows promise for grouping jobs on the basis of work
behaviors. An inventory that consisted of truly job-specific
duties (or tasks) would not only be unwieldy but would also not
Permit grouping of jobs because there would be little or no overlap
of work behaviors across jobs.
Until further advances are made in this area, the question of the
efficacy of holistic methods of job grouping remains unsolved.
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