Unit 1. Job Analysis I N D U S T R I A L -­‐ O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L P S Y C H O L O G Y : P A R T S I S E M – V Essential Details — Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) — Industrial-­‐Organizational Psychology: Parts I — Code: UAPS503 — Sem: V — Course Title: Industrial-­‐Organizational Psychology (Part I) — Credits: 3.5 — Marks: 100 ( 80+20) What is Industrial /Organizational Psychology? — I/O psychology involves the scientiRic study of the human side of organizations, i.e. research. — I/O psychology includes the application of the principles and Rindings of I/O research. — I/O psychology is an evidence-­‐based Rield, meaning that the things practitioners do are based on scientiRic methods and principles. Industrial v/s Organizational — Industrial psychology It tends to take management perspective of organizational efRiciency through the appropriate use of human resources or people. ¡ It is concerned with issues of efRicient job design, employee selection, employee training, and performance appraisal. — Organizational psychology ¡ It is developed from the human relations movement in organizations. ¡ It is concerned with understanding behavior and enhancing the well-­‐being of employees in the workplace. ¡ Organizational topics include employee attitudes, employee behavior, job stress, and supervisory practices. ¡
Unit 1. Job Analysis a) What is job analysis? Purposes of job analysis; How job analysis information is collected b) Methods of job analysis; Reliability and validity of job analysis information; Job evaluation Job Analysis — It is method for describing jobs and/or the human —
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attributes necessary to perform them. Three elements of a formal job analysis (Brannick, Levine, and Morgeson 2007, p. 8): 1. The procedure must be systematic. This means the analyst speciRies a procedure in advance and follows it. 2. A job is broken into smaller units. We describe components of jobs rather than the overall job. 3. The analysis results in some written product, either electronic or on paper. No one method of job analysis. Many methods provide different information about jobs and human attributes needed for it. Job-­‐oriented Approach of Job Analysis — provides information about the nature of tasks done on the —
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job. Some methods describe the tasks themselves others provide information about characteristic of tasks. Characteristics is not speciRic task but describe features that cut across tasks, example: writing Task description= picture of what people do on the job Characteristics used to compare the nature of the task across different kinds of jobs, example: police ofRicers and teacehrs both write Job-­‐oriented Approach of Job Analysis — Tasks can be divided into hierarchy in which higher level descriptions are broken down into smaller and smaller pieces — Example: one of the major task of a police ofRicer is apprehending suspects. This police function can be broken down into smaller steps….. — Brannick et al (2007) discussed a hierarchy that contains Rice levels of speciRicity 1. Position 4. Activity 2. Duty 5. Element 3. Task Job-­‐oriented Approach of Job Analysis 1. Position: a collection of duties performed by a single individual 2. Duty: major component of the job. Duty is accomplished by performing one or more tasks 3. Task: a complete piece of work that accomplishes some objective. 4. Activities: Each task is divided into activities which are individual parts that make up the task. 5. Elements: to accomplish an activity, a number of very speciRic actions or elements need to be performed Person-­‐oriented Approach of Job Analysis — provides a description of the characteristics or KSAOs necessary for a person to successfully perform a particular job. — KSAOs are the employee’s knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics necessary for a job. Person-­‐oriented Approach of Job Analysis Knowledge: what a person needs to know to do a particular job. 2. Skill: What the person is able to do on the job 3. Ability: person’s aptitude or capability to do job tasks or learn to do job tasks, a persons potential to develop skills 4. Other personal characteristics: anything relevant to the job that is not covered by the Rirst three The Rirst three elements focus on job performance whereas the last one relates to job adjustment, satisfaction as well as performance. 1.
Purposes of Job Analysis — What is the purpose or use of job analysis information? — Serves as the foundation on which many other activities and functions are built — Ash and Levine (1980) have outlined 11 common uses of job analysis — Out of which 5 will be discussed and 2 which are not on their list will be discussed — 6th use of job analysis information for setting salary comes under ‘Job Evaluation’ later in the chapter Purposes of Job Analysis — 1. Career Development ¡ career ladder: A progression of positions is established for individuals who acquire the necessary skills and maintain good job performance. E.g. military. ¡ Not everyone can climb up the career ladder due to limited opportunities and inability to achieve necessary KSAOs ¡ competency systems: A system to reward employees for acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to both improve performance and be promoted (Levenson, Van der Stede, & Cohen, 2006). ¡ Such systems require identiRication of critical competencies, availability of the means of learning and developing competencies and a procedure for evaluating progress Purposes of Job Analysis — How does Job analysis help in Career Development? — 1. provides a picture of the KSAO requirements for the job at each level of the career ladder and identifying key competencies — 2.Knowledge of KSAO requirements can be incorporated into employee development and training programs — 3. beneRits employees as they are told what they exactly need to be eligible for promotion — 4. beneRits organization as they develop a readily available supply of candidates for upper-­‐level positions Purposes of Job Analysis — 2. Legal Issues ¡ Basic idea is that decisions affecting people should be fair ¡ Fairness means decisions about hiring people should be based on job performance or potential rather than irrelevant personal characteristics. ¡ essential functions: actions that must be done on a job ¡ E.g. In the United States, an organization might be able to legally deny employment to a person with a disability who cannot perform essential functions under certain conditions ¡ Job analysis provides a list of relevant KSAOs as the basis for hiring rather than irrelevant personal characteristics and can help ensure that decisions about actions that affect people are based on personal factors that are job relevant. Purposes of Job Analysis — 3. Performance Appraisal ¡ Criterion development: process of determining the major components of job performance to be evaluated ¡ A job-­‐oriented analysis provides a list of the major components of a job, which can be used as dimensions for performance evaluation. ¡ critical incidents: instances of speciRic behavior that represent different levels of job performance from outstanding to poor, and they become an important part of the assessment of performance. ¡ Example of Good incident and poor incident Purposes of Job Analysis — 4. Selection ¡ The Rirst step in deciding who to hire for a job entails determining the human attributes or KSAOs necessary for success on that job ¡ A person-­‐oriented job analysis produces a list of the KSAOs for a particular job. ¡ once the KSAOs for the job have been identiRied, procedures can be chosen that determine how well job applicants Rit the requirements for the job, which is done using methods such as interviews, psychological tests to assess individual characteristics. Purposes of Job Analysis — 5. Training ¡ The KSAOs that applicants do not have when they apply for a position are areas for training after they are hired. ¡ DeRiciencies on the part of applicants or employees are the areas towards which training efforts might be direfcted if the characteristics can be acquired — 6. Vocational Counselling ¡ to help individuals match their KSAOs to the KSAO requirements of jobs ¡ Job analysis is particularly useful in matching KSAOs of individuals with those of occupations ¡ Example: Purposes of Job Analysis — 7. Research — researchers are interestted in determinign the role of job reuirements or task characteristics on many organizational phenomena such as employee motivation and performance, employee health and safety — Example of the Finnish study How Job Analysis Information is Collected — Use of people who are trained in quantifying job characteristics and the KSAOs necessary to accomplish the different aspects of jobs. — These people either survey the employees who do the job in question or experience the job Rirsthand by doing it themselves or observing it being done. Who Provides the Informa>on? — Most of the Job Analysis information comes from 4 —
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different sources: 1. Job Analyst 2. Job Incumbents 3. Supervisors 4. Trained Observers Who Provides the Information? — Job analysts and Trained observers: They actually do the job or spend time observing employees doing the job and translate those experiences into a job analysis. — Job incumbents or Supervisors: They are considered to be subject matter experts or SMEs, people with detailed knowledge about the content and requirements of their own jobs or the jobs they supervise. They are asked to provide information about jobs either in interviews or by completing job analysis questionnaires. Approaches to Collecting Job Analysis Information — 1. Perform the job: ¡ to actually do some of the job tasks or the whole job as an employee or under simulated conditions. ¡ Advantages: Nature of the job task ÷ How the job tasks interrelate ÷ Provides the context in which the job is done ÷
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Limitations: Is expensive and time consuming ÷ Requires the analyst is trained extensively before they do the job ÷ Can be dangerous to analyst ÷ Fails to show differences among jobs with the same title ÷
Approaches to Collecting Job Analysis Information — 2. Observe employees on the job ¡ Observers are given forms to complete about the jobs they observe. The form could contain a list of activities, and the observer would indicate how often the observed employee does each one. ¡ Advantages: ÷ Provides relatively objective view of the job ÷ Provides the context in which the job is done ¡
Limitations: ÷ Is time consuming ÷ Might cause employees to change their behavior because they know they are being observed Approaches to Collecting Job Analysis Information — 3. Interview Employees ¡ Information about jobs is obtained by interviewing SMEs who are familiar with the job. These SMEs are usually Job incumbents and their supervisors ¡ Job analysts or trained interviewers interview job incumbents and their supervisors to generate lists of all tasks and activities done by everyone who has the same job title ¡ Advantages: Provides multiple perspectives on a job ÷ Can show differences among incumbents with the same job ÷
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Limitations: Is time consuming compared to questionnaires ÷ Fails to show context in which the tasks are done ÷
Approaches to Collecting Job Analysis Information — 4. Administer questionnaires to SMEs ¡
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the most efRicient means of collecting job analysis information Advantages: Is efRicient and inexpensive ÷ Shows differences among incumbents in the same job ÷ Is easy to quantify and analyze statistically ÷ Is easy to compare different jobs on common job dimensions ÷
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Limitations: Ignores the context in which the job is done ÷ Limits respondents to the questions asked ÷ Requires knowledge of the job to design the questionnaire ÷ Allows job incumbents to easily distort answers to make their jobs seem more important than they are ÷
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multiple ways are often used so that the limitations of one are offset by the strengths of another Methods of Job Analysis — Many methods have been developed to collect job analysis information — These methods use different sources of information and different ways of collecting information — Some focus either on the job or on the person or both Methods of Job Analysis — 1. Job Components Inventory (JCI): developed in Great Britain to address the need to match job requirements to worker characteristics (Banks, Jackson, Stafford, & Warr, 1983) — It allows simultaneous assessment of the job requirement and a person’s KSAOs — Listinng of job requirement and KSAOs are done — The degree to which the 2 lists correspond helps to determine whether the person is suited for the job or requires additional training Methods of Job Analysis — Five components of job features are represented in the JCI: ¡
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1. Use of tools and equipment 2. Perceptual and physical requirements 3. Mathematics 4. Communication 5. Decision making and responsibility An existing database of job requirements for many jobs can be used with people who wish to know how well their own skills match those of a chosen career Methods of Job Analysis — 2. Functional Job Analysis (FJA): uses observation and interviews with SMEs to provide both a description of a job and scores on several dimensions concerning the job and potential workers. — Dimensions are applicable to all jobs so that the procedure can be used to make comparisons among jobs. — FJA was the job analysis method used by the U.S. Department of Labor to produce the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) (U.S. Department of Labor, 1977, 1991). Methods of Job Analysis — Occupational Information Network (O*NET): a computer-­‐based resource for job-­‐related information on approximately 1,100 groups of jobs sharing common characteristics (Peterson, Mumford, Borman, Jeanneret, Fleishman, Levin, et al., 2001). — Launched by the U.S. Department of Labor in the 1990s — its development and reRinement are an ongoing process Methods of Job Analysis — 3. Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ): 189 items dealing with the task requirements or elements of jobs. — A KSAO proRile for a job can be developed from the elements. — The elements of the PAQ are general and allow comparisons of different jobs on a common set of dimensions or KSAOs. — The use of percentiles to compare elements of different jobs Methods of Job Analysis — 4. Task Inventory: a questionnaire that contains a list of speciRic tasks that might be done on a job that is being analyzed. — The inventory also contains one or more rating scales for each task — Ratings are made on dimensions such as 1. Amount of time spent doing the task 2. Criticality of the task for doing a good job 3. DifRiculty of learning the task 4. Importance of the task Reliability and Validity of Job Analysis Information (1) — Reliability ¡ Dierdorff and Wilson (2003) used meta-­‐analysis which allowed them to summarize the results of 46 studies that reported reliabilities for various job analysis methods. ¡ mean test-­‐retest reliability of .83 ¡ Inter-­‐rater agreement was somewhat lower, depending on the types of raters (e.g., analysts vs. SMEs) and the dimensions being rated. ¡ Correlations among ratings by different rater types ranged from .
48 to .81. ¡ Care should be taken in deciding which scales to use for rating tasks when job incumbents are the SMEs Reliability and Validity of Job Analysis Information (2) — Validity ¡
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Spector, Brannick, and Coovert (1989) summarized the results of nine studies that reported correlations among methods or sources that ranged from .47 to .94. J. E. Smith and Hakel (1979) compared the PAQ ratings of trained job analysts with the ratings of college students who were given only job titles. The students’ ratings correlated very well with the ratings of the analysts. Smith and Hakel wondered if the analyst ratings reRlected preconceived notions about the job rather than the information gathered with the job analysis procedures. If this is the case, then job analysis ratings might be less valid than I/O psychologists usually assume Reliability and Validity of Job Analysis Information (3) — Validity ¡ Green and Stutzman (1986) conducted a job analysis in which they had job incumbents complete a task inventory. The task inventory included tasks that no one did on the job the researchers were analyzing. Over half of the incumbents indicated that they did at least one fake task. This Rinding suggests that many people are either careless or not completely honest when they complete task inventories. ¡ Hacker (1996), compared incumbents who endorsed fake tasks with those who did not. He found that both groups of people did not differ in their ratings of all other tasks or in the reliability of their ratings of all other tasks. His results suggest that this phenomenon does not affect job analysis results. Job Evaluation (1) — It is a family of quantitative techniques that are used to scientiRically determine the salary levels of jobs (Morgeson, Campion, & Maertz, 2001). — It has the speciRic purpose of determining the relative salaries for different jobs by mathematically combining job information. — The most popular job evaluation method is the point method (Treiman, 1979). Job Evaluation (2) — four steps involved in conducting a point method job evaluation – 1.
Compensable factors like Consequences of error on the job, Responsibility, Education required, Skill required 2.
The degree to which each job has each compensable factor determined on the basis of quantitative scale The points for the factors are summed for each job to provide a total score. To plot the actual salaries for each job in an organization against the point totals for each job. 3.
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Job Evaluation (3) — other factors like the market wage for a job — comparable worth means that different but comparable jobs should be paid the same. If jobs that are held predominantly by women contribute as much to the organization as jobs held primarily by men, the jobs should be paid the same.