More Than g: Selection Quality and Adverse Impact Implications of Considering Second-Stratum Cognitive Abilities

    Authors

    S. Wee; D. A. Newman;D. L. Joseph

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    J. Appl. Psychol.

    Keywords

    specific abilities; Cattell-Horn-Carroll model; adverse impact; Pareto-optimal weighting; cognitive ability/intelligence; DIVERSITY-VALIDITY DILEMMA; JOB-PERFORMANCE RATINGS; ALTERNATIVE; PREDICTORS; APTITUDE-BATTERY; LINEAR-MODELS; ECAT BATTERY; ETHNIC-GROUP; INTELLIGENCE; METAANALYSIS; MANAGEMENT; Psychology, Applied; Management

    Abstract

    When using cognitive tests, personnel selection practitioners typically face a trade-off between the expected job performance and diversity of new hires. We review the increasingly mainstream evidence that cognitive ability is a multidimensional and hierarchically ordered set of concepts, and examine the implications for both composite test validity and subgroup differences. Ultimately, we recommend a strategy for differentially weighting cognitive subtests (i.e., second-stratum abilities) in a way that minimizes overall subgroup differences without compromising composite test validity. Using data from 2 large validation studies that included a total of 15 job families, we demonstrate that this strategy could lead to substantial improvement in diversity hiring (e. g., doubling the number of job offers extended to minority applicants) and to at least 8% improvement in job offers made to minority applicants, without decrements in expected selection quality compared to a unit-weighted cognitive test composite. Finally, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to examine whether the technique continues to perform well when applied to applicant pools of smaller size. We discuss prerequisites for the application of this strategy, potential limitations, and extensions.

    Journal Title

    Journal of Applied Psychology

    Volume

    99

    Issue/Number

    4

    Publication Date

    1-1-2014

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    547

    Last Page

    563

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000339397300001

    ISSN

    0021-9010

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