THE EFFECT OF ITEM AND SCALE CHARACTERISTICS ON THE RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF CONSCIENTIOUSNESS SCALES

A contemporary debate by Morgeson, Campion, Dipboye, Hollenbeck, Murphy, and Schmitt (2007) highlighted the fact that personality validity when predicting job performance has not changed since the influential review of Guion and Gottier (1965), who originally determined that utilizing personality validites were too modest to be useful as a personnel selection tool. The goal of this thesis was to test several propositions regarding the low validity of personality to predict job performance. The three issues proposed herein all focus on different aspects of the personality validation issue, and although all three are inter-related they also uniquely focus on a different aspect of the validation methodology that is used in modern psychology. Two of the issues also utilize general mental ability as a comparative tool, due to general mental ability’s continual use as a predictive tool. The first issue addressed whether personality, as defined narrowly as conscientiousness, exhibited a nonlinear relationship with job performance after controlling for general mental ability. The second issue hypothesized that the length of the latent construct in comparison to the latent construct of general mental ability might simply be a shorter metric and this was tested using a three-part criterion taxonomy that was developed for this study. The third issue asked if the creation of personality scales using ideal-point methods instead of the more typical classical construction method would result in higher criterion related validity. The results generally found linearity between the personality – job performance relationship. The personality scale also separated between the tail ends of the criteria better than the measure of general mental ability. The newly constructed alternative scales, on average, ix did not outpeform the classically constructed measure of personality, although in a few instances the alternatives did better.M.S. in Psychology, July 201