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.