Human Performance, v23 (3)

Three interesting articles in the most recent issue of Human Performance:

Kanar, et al. studied the impact of organizational reputation on applicant attraction with a sample of college-level job seekers and found that negative information had a greater impact than positive information on attraction to the organization as well as recall, and this effect persisted for one week. Implication? Recognize that negative information about your organization may be processed differently than positive information, and thus not easily balanced. Also reinforces keeping an eye out for negative remarks and addressing them.

Second, a fascinating study by Kell, et al. on how Big 5 personality factors differentially predict various aspects of performance within a single job. Specifically, the authors found (as judged by raters) that emotionally stable and conscientious actions were more effective in task situations and open and agreeable actions were more effective in interpersonal situations. Implications? Not only does it seem that different assessment types predict different general aspects of performance (i.e., personality measures usually are better at predicting contextual performance), there appears to be prediction differences within the same job such that there is value in considering each facet of the Big 5 and its relationship to different aspects of performance.

Lastly, if you're looking for a way to predict performance in jobs that require "multi-tasking", you'll be interested in Poposki & Oswald's description of the development of the Multitasking Preference Inventory. In addition to the development, the authors describe a study of its convergent and discriminant validity as well as initial criterion-related validity. I found it interesting that this is not an ability test but rather a preference inventory, which actually makes sense since the brain doesn't actually focus on multiple things very well!