Page 61 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

40 ability and non-ability predictors of job performance
accounted for, beyond that provided by general mental ability and personality. Cortina
et al. (2000) suggested that structured interviews may tap individual differences in job
knowledge or job experiences. Similarly, Mount et al. (2000), found that their biodata
scale contributed between 2 and 9% additional variance in measures of clerical job
performance, beyond that of tenure, general mental ability, and personality.

PROGRESS, PROBLEMS, AND PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

PROGRESS

Over the past 15 years, research on person prediction of individual differences in perfor-
mance has enjoyed a period of sustained growth. The application of validity generaliza-
tion methods to the ability domain provides abundant evidence for the potential validity
of general cognitive ability in the prediction of job performance across a range of occu-
pations and criterion measures. The demonstration of the predictive validity of general
mental ability tests for performance across a wide range of jobs provides useful informa-
tion for practitioners. However, new research investigating the person–task conditions
that may mediate general cognitive ability–performance relations has important impli-
cations for practitioners considering the value of cognitive ability tests for predicting
different aspects of job performance. In an era of increasing workforce diversity, inves-
tigations of the pathways by which individual differences in cognitive abilities influence
job performance offers substantial promise for better prediction of job expertise and
promise for the prediction of job performance among older workers. For example, con-
sistent with Hunter (1983) and Ackerman (1996), the emphasis on job knowledge as a
mediator of ability–performance relations suggests why older, more experienced work-
ers in knowledge work may outperform younger workers with higher levels of general
cognitive ability, and why younger workers may outperform more senior workers in the
acquisition of novel job skills.
In the non-ability domain, the application of the FFM has provided I/O researchers
with a common framework for organizing personality trait constructs and measures into
meaningful factors and evaluating the predictive validity of each factor for job perfor-
mance. Results in this area provide converging evidence for the validity of conscien-
tiousness as a non-ability trait that predicts job performance across a wide range of jobs
and performance criteria. At the same time, conceptual developments on the criterion
side, delineating the social and contextual aspects of job performance that may come
into play in supervisory judgments of performance, have served to clarify the conditions
under which some personality traits may predict relevant job performance.
The increasingly coordinated mapping of non-ability (FFM) personality predictor
and criterion constructs suggests that the FFM personality constructs may add unique
variance to the prediction of job performance. To date, meta-analytic and incremental
predictive validity evidence most strongly supports the contribution of conscientiousness
as a predictor of job performance. These results are consistent with the long-standing
assumption that dependability, reliability, and an orientation to perform well are critical
components of effective performance in most jobs. In contrast, agreeableness, extro-
version, openness to experience, and neuroticism represent traits that may be more
important in some jobs or situations than others. Agreeableness and extroversion, for
example, reflect individual differences in social functioning that may be more important