Title

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

Authors

Authors

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

Comments

Authors: contact us about adding a copy of your work at STARS@ucf.edu

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

Share

COinS