Pay Attention! The Liabilities of Respondent Experience and Carelessness When Making Job Analysis Judgments

Abstract

Job analysis has a central role in virtually every aspect of HR and is one of several high performance work practices thought to underlie firm performance. Given its ubiquity and importance, it is not surprising that considerable effort has been devoted to developing comprehensive job analysis systems and methodologies. Yet, the complexity inherent in collecting detailed and specific “decomposed” information has led some to pursue “holistic” strategies designed to focus on more general and abstract job analysis information. It is not clear, however, if these two different strategies yield comparable information, nor if respondents are equally capable of generating equivalent information. Drawing from cognitive psychology research, we suggest that experienced and careless job analysis respondents are less likely to evidence convergence in their decomposed and holistic job analysis judgments. In a field sample of professional managers, we found that three different types of task-related work experience moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average ΔR 2 of 4.7%. Three other more general types of work experience, however, did not moderate this relationship, supporting predictions that only experience directly related to work tasks would prove to be a liability when making judgments. We also found that respondent carelessness moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average ΔR 2 of 6.2%. These results link cognitive limitations to important job analysis respondent differences and suggest a number of theoretical and practical implications when collecting holistic job analysis data.