Browsing by Author "Burnkrant, Steven Richard"

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    Interrater Agreement of Incumbent Job Specification Importance Ratings: Rater, Occupation, and Item Effects
    Burnkrant, Steven Richard (Virginia Tech, 2003-10-23)
    Despite the importance of job specifications to much of industrial and organizational psychology, little is known of their reliability or validity. Because job specifications are developed based on input from subject matter experts, interrater agreement is a necessary condition for their validity. The purpose of the present research is to examine the validity of job specifications by assessing the level of agreement in ratings and the effects of occupational tenure, occupational complexity, and the abstractness of rated worker requirements. Based on the existing literature, it was hypothesized that (1) agreement will be worse than acceptable levels, (2) agreement will be higher among those with longer tenure, (3) agreement will be lower in more complex occupations, (4) the effect of occupational tenure will be more pronounced in complex than simple occupations, (5) agreement will be higher on more abstract items, and (6) agreement will be lowest for concrete KSAOs in complex occupations. These hypotheses were tested using ratings from 38,041 incumbents in 61 diverse occupations in the Federal government. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, agreement failed to reach acceptable levels in nearly every case, whether measured with the awg or various forms of the rwg agreement indices. However, tenure, occupational complexity, and item abstractness had little effect on ratings, whether agreement was measured with rwg or awg. The most likely explanation for these null findings is that the disagreement reflected a coarse classification system that overshadowed the effects of tenure, complexity, and abstractness. The existence of meaningful subgroups within a single title threatens the content validity of job specifications: the extent to which they include all relevant and predictive KSAOs. Future research must focus on the existence of such subgroups, their consequences, and ways of identifying them.
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    Learning, Prove, and Avoid Goal Orientations in Academics and Athletics: Cross-Structure Analysis and Domain Specificity
    Burnkrant, Steven Richard (Virginia Tech, 1999-04-29)
    Despite the growing popularity of goal orientation research, three questions remain largely unanswered: (1) are there 3 factors of goal orientation or only 2; (2) what predicts goal orientation; and (3) is goal orientation domain specific? To help answer these questions, 177 undergraduates were given a questionnaire assessing, in both the academic and athletic domains, (a) learning, prove, and avoid goals, (b) self-perceived ability, ability, and implicit theories, and (c) high-school grade point average, intrinsic motivation, internal motivation, self-efficacy, locus of control, need for achievement, desire to win, and fear of negative evaluation. The results suggest that learning, prove, and avoid goals can be empirically distinguished, that they are domain specific, but that they are not predicted well by ability, self-perceived ability, or implicit theories. Discussion centers on the need for a pattern approach to the prediction of goal orientation and stresses the importance of examining the interactions among learning, prove, and avoid goals. The overriding conclusion, however, is that goal orientation is not a useful construct.