Assessment, Measurement, and Prediction for Personnel Decisions

A practical view of assessment-based personnel decisions is offered with this book. The author argues that decisions about people in organizations - initial selection, promotion, assignment to special training - are properly based on predictions, literal or implicit, about their probable contributions to the organization; that good prediction requires well-formed hypotheses about personal characteristics that might be related to valued behaviour at work; that these characteristics should be carefully assessed; and that the assessment and their use should be thoroughly evaluated. He also notes that, in his view, the field of assessment-based personnel selection (a prototypical personnel decision) seems not to have fully acknowledged changing situations, methods and theories of measurement. The book presents a variety of questions about the characteristic to be assessed and its definition, the care and thought used in developing a procedure for assessing it, the extent and nature of measurement errors, the defensibility of intended interpretations of scores, and evidence that the scores are related to jobs and organizational needs. It attempts to provide a broader, more comprehensive integrated approach to assessment-based decisions, encompassing both traditions and new ideas.