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A COMPARISON OF HOLISTIC VERSUS DECOMPOSED RATING OF POSITION ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE WORK DIMENSIONS
Author(s) -
BUTLER STEPHANIE K.,
HARVEY ROBERT J.
Publication year - 1988
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.1744-6570.1988.tb00652.x
Subject(s) - psychology , dimension (graph theory) , applied psychology , intrusiveness , task (project management) , social psychology , management , mathematics , pure mathematics , economics
Recent studies have attempted to reduce the cost and intrusiveness of the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) by limiting the amount of information provided to the analyst, with consistently negative results. We examined an alternative technique for improving the cost‐effectiveness of the PAQ that avoids the need to rate the hundreds of items that constitute the instrument. Three groups of raters (professional job analysts, graduate students in industrial psychology who were familiar with the PAQ, and PAQ‐unfamiliar undergraduates) made direct holistic ratings of the PAQ dimensions for four familiar jobs. The holistic ratings were compared with decomposed PAQ dimension profiles obtained from the item‐level ratings of the professional analysts. Cronbach accuracy analyses indicated near‐zero convergence between the holistic and decomposed dimension ratings, even for the professional PAQ job analysts. We conclude that holistic rating of dimensions is not an effective means of reducing the cost of a PAQ job analyses and that it is likely to be similarly ineffective with task‐ or ability‐based instruments.