CRITERIA by F. Kuschnereit

Disagreement Among People in Making Evaluations

Since many important decisions are made on the basis of criteria, it would be difficult to overstate their significance in the decision-making process. Because criteria are used to render a wide range of judgments, the author defines them as the "evaluative standards by which objects, individuals, procedures, or collectivities are assessed for the purpose of ascertaining their quality."

Conceptual Versus Actual Criteria

A good beginning point is the notion of a conceptual criterion. The conceptual criterion is a theoretical construct, an abstract idea that can never actually be measured. It is an ideal set of factors that constitute a successful person (or object or collectivity) as conceived in the psychologist's mind. We have to obtain actual criteria to serve as measures of the conceptual criteria that we would prefer to (but cannot) assess.

Criterion Deficiency, Relevance, and Contamination

The relationship between conceptual and actual criteria can be expressed in terms of three concepts: deficiency, relevance, and contamination. Both contamination and deficiency are undesirable in the actual criterion, and together they distort the conceptual criterion. criterion distortion. Standards used to make short-term decisions about quality are called proximal criteria. Standards used to make long-term decisions about quality are called distal criteria. Criteria may be developed deductively (from theory to data) or inductively (from data to theory).

Methods of Job Analysis

The first is a variation of the interview. The second method of job analysis uses structured questionnaires or inventories. The third method is called direct observation. In the final method of job analysis, the analyst asks workers to record their own activities in logbooks or work diaries.

Job-Oriented and Work-Oriented Procedures versus "worker-oriented" procedures.

Job-oriented procedures are geared to the work that gets performed on the job. Such analyses are sometimes called task analyses. Worker-oriented procedure is geared to the human talents needed to perform the job, and jobs are typically expressed in terms of knowledge, skill, ability, and personal characteristics. An example of a worker-oriented procedure is the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ). The PAQ consists of 194 statements used to describe the human attributes needed to perform a job. The statements are organized into six major categories: information input; mental processes; work output; relationships with other persons; job context; and other job requirements. Job analysis is not a way to determine how well employees are performing their jobs nor is job analysis a way to determine the value or worth of a job. The actual process of distilling criteria from job-analysis data thus involves clustering similar work duties or attributes into criterion dimensions.

Job Evaluation

Job evaluation is a procedure that is useful for determining the relative value of jobs in the organization, which in turn helps determine the level of compensation paid. How, then, does an organization determine what is a fair and appropriate wage? One is to determine external equity. A wage survey would be used to determine the "going rate" for jobs in the business community. The second operation is to determine internal equity, or the fairness of compensation rates within the organization.

Methods of Job Evaluation

Most organizations use job-evaluation methods that examine several dimensions or factors of work called compensable factors.

Standards for Criteria

This list might be reduced to three general factors; criteria must be appropriate, stable, and practical. The criteria should be relevant and representative of the job. They must endure over time or across situations. Finally, they should not be too expensive or hard to measure.

Types of Criteria

Objective or hard criteria are taken from organizational records subjective or soft criteria are judgmental evaluations of a person's performance.

Objective Criteria

Production

Salary

Job Level and Promotions

Sales

Tenure or Turnover

Absenteeism

Accidents

Theft

Subjective Criteria

Relationship Among Job-Performance Criteria

The more complex the job, the more criteria are needed to define it and the more skill or talent a person has to have to be successful.

Schmidt and Kaplan (1971) proposed a resolution (of sorts) to the problem of composite versus multiple criteria. They argue that the selection of composite or multiple criteria should depend on their intended use. If the goal is a practical one (as in making personnel decisions), they advocate a weighted composite criterion. The criterion elements are weighted and added together to derive a composite value representing the overall value of the worker. However, if the goal is to understand the dimensions of job performance and how they contribute to job success, then multiple criteria should be used.