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INTERNAL HOMOGENEITY, DESCRIPTIVENESS, AND HALO: RESURRECTING SOME ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS ABOUT THE STRUCTURE OF JOB PERFORMANCE RATING CATEGORIES
Author(s) -
COOPER WILLIAM H.
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
personnel psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.076
H-Index - 142
eISSN - 1744-6570
pISSN - 0031-5826
DOI - 10.1111/j.1744-6570.1983.tb02231.x
Subject(s) - halo , psychology , halo effect , homogeneous , salient , rating scale , social psychology , mathematics , artificial intelligence , developmental psychology , computer science , physics , combinatorics , quantum mechanics , galaxy
A pair of studies are reported that assess the effects of two rating category attributes on the halo observed in job performance ratings. In Study 1, data obtained from 21 articles published in the 1970s provided indirect evidence that halo is lower when rating categories are more internally homogeneous, but the descriptive richness of the categories did not affect halo. These two factors were then manipulated in Study 2 which showed that student ratings of a faculty member's teaching performance contained less halo when the rating categories were more internally homogeneous and descriptively rich. These results suggest that halo can be reduced by using rating categories that do not force raters to (1) rely on their overall evaluation of the ratee, or (2) use the same salient observations as the basis for rating job performance on multiple categories. These two conclusions are essentially cognitive reformulations of classic advice about the importance of using rating categories that are clear, specific, and non‐overlapping. Extrapolation of the reformulated advice raises a number of interesting theoretical and practical questions about the relationship between rating category attributes and rater responses.