Page 302 - Cultures and Organizations

Yesterday, Now, or Later? 271

Short-Term Orientation in Africa

Around 1970 Geert was a manager of personnel research in IBM’s Europe,
Africa, and Middle East area. One of his responsibilities was the develop-
ment of tests for employee selection. One day he received a call from the
regional manager for Africa, an American to whom all English-speaking
African countries, except South Africa, reported. The regional manager
had a problem with IBM’s Programming Aptitude Test, at that time the
instrument used to select persons able to learn computer programming. In
Africa, the manager said, nobody could pass the test, so they had no way of
selecting candidates, neither for IBM itself nor on behalf of its customers.
It so happened that the U.S. designer of the original Programming
Aptitude Test, Dr. Walter McNamara, had just retired, and he agreed to
make a three-month study trip through a number of African countries and
to try to resolve the problem. Upon his return, McNamara reported these
conclusions:

■ It wasn’t true that nobody passed. Some African candidates did pass,
but the percentages were lower than elsewhere.
■ The original test existed in two versions, one for college graduates
and one for high school graduates. IBM offices in Africa had been sup-

plied with only the college-level test, while the majority of candidates
came straight from high school and should have been given the other
version.
■ Most candidates had no experience with forced-choice tests and
should first be instructed on how they worked.

■ The tests used American English; some words were unknown in the
local English varieties.

■ The time limits used applied to native speakers; for those with Eng-
lish as a second (or third or fourth) language, a wider limit existed,
but the administrators of the test were not aware of this option.

McNamara had run a trial with an adapted version of the test among
graduates of a number of high schools in Zambia, and the results obtained
were almost equivalent to those in the United States. Thanking McNamara
for his excellent work, Geert had the new version printed as “Program-
ming Aptitude Test for Countries with English as a Second Language.”