Work Values and Career Development

Psychological Measurements

Lecture, Chs. 16 & 18

Interest Inventories

nImportance of interest inventories:

nThe Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB)

–Matches interests with career choices

–Criticized by sexist and atheoretical orientation

–Revised versions: SCII and CISS

nThe Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS) - matches interests with career choices and college majors

nOther surveys: Jackson Vocational, Minnesota Vocational, and Career Assessment Inventory

Career Placement with Personality Traits

nDifferent approaches:

–Characterizing people in different occupations

–Relating career satisfaction with vocational maturity

–Personal orientation based on family

nAre personality traits stable?

–Research indicates that traits are not reliable predictors of behavior.

–Attribution Theory: states that behavior may be more a result of situation that traits.

Industrial and Business Testing

nEmployment Interview – primary tool for selecting employees

nOther tools for predicting success in a work environment include quantitative tests.

–Base rate – the proportion of people who succeed on a given criterion

–Hit rate – the percentage of cases in which a test accurately predicts success or failure on a given criterion

Industrial and Business Testing (cont.)

nIndustrial measurements can be assessed for validity using Taylor-Russell tables using the following information:

–Definition of success

–Determination of base rate

–Definition of selection ratio

–Determination of validity coefficient

nThe unique information gained from using a specific test is its incremental validity.

Fitting People to Jobs

nMyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) based on Jung’s theory of psychological types:

–Sensing (knowing through sight, hearing, touch, etc.)

–Intuition (inferring what underlies sensory inputs)

–Feeling (the emotional aspect of experience)

–Thinking (reason)

nWonderlic Personnel Test

Measuring the Job Environment

nThe Social-Ecology Approach involves scrutiny of human behavior in relation to environment, focusing on events that occur in a behavioral setting.

nWork environments can be classified in numerous ways, including with the multiphasic environmental assessment procedure, which creates a resource profile.

Job Analysis

nChecklists can be used to describe the activities and conditions associated with a particular job title.

nPerformance evaluations are conducted to measure a particular person’s performance within a given position.

nCritical incidents are observable behaviors that differentiate successful from unsuccessful employees.

nOther methods for learning about job situations include: observation, questionnaires, interviews, and the Occupational Information Network (Peterson, Mumford, Levin, Green, & Waksberg, 1999).

Person-Situation Interaction

nTo many psychologists, called interactionists, the product of a person’s traits and their setting is largely responsible for performance.

nInteractionists believe that behavior is a function of the person, the situation, AND the interaction between person and situation.

nThe template matching technique involves matching personality to a specific template of behavior.