Personnel Assesment from the Perspective

of the Theory of Work Adjustment

by
Rene V. Dawis
University of Minnesota

A shorter version, sponsored by the Great Lakes Assessment Council, was presented at the Fourth Annual
IPMAAC Conference on Public Personnel Assessment, on July 10, 1980, in Boston, Massachusetts.

O
't was Kurt Lewin who said, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory." What I pro-
pose to do is to show how a theory, designed to describe and explain work adjustment, can
be used to address some issues and concerns in the practical area of personnel assessment.
First, a little history. The Theory of Work Adjustment was developed in the context of the
Work Adjustment Project, a continuing research program in the Deparment of Psychology at the
University of Minnesota. In the beginning the project attempted to touch all bases, to include as
many variables as the literature indicated were important, and to collect data on all of these
variables. As you can well imagine, manageability quickly became the problem-how to select
discriminatingly among the large number of potentially significant variables and organize the
selected variables into some meaningful whole that would give direction to the research effort. At
that point, we began to construct what was later to become the Theory of Work Adjustment.
At the heart of the theory is the notion of interaction between the individual and the work en-
vironment. The work environment consists of everything that surrounds the individual: the iriter-
personal, the organizational, the social, as well as the physical. Interaction between individual
and environment comes about because both parties have requirements that potentially can be
fulfilled by the other. We can call these requirements "needs": the individual's needs are his or
her requirements of the environment; the environment's needs are its requirements of the
individual.
In the modem-day work situation, the individual seeks out the work environment primarily
because, through compensation, it can provide the basis for the individual's existence. However,
the modem-day individual seeks work for other reasons than just merely to sustain existence.
Some people will not work except in jobs that will provide them with status or prestige. Others
desire organizations or employers that are well known and have good reputations. Some people
look for good working conditions, or good fringe benefits, or employment security. Others will only
work at jobs that provide them with a sense of accomplishment or that make use of their talents
or that allow them altruistically to serve others. There are a number of these "needs" of in-
dividuals, and one ofthe research objectives of the Work Adjustment Project has been to identify,
measure, and study these individual "needs."
As with the individual, so with the work environment. A work organization is put together for
certain organizational objectives, be this profit or survival or stability or growth or dominance of a
market or field. To attain these objectives, the tasks that need to be performed in order to achieve
the objectives are identified and structured into a system of interrelated and interconnected
parts. No matter how complex the organization, its functioning is describable at its most elemen-
tal level in terms of tasks that are performed and need to be performed. These task requirements,

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then, constitute a set of organizational "needs" that in a sense parallel individual needs. In the
modern-day work situation, the work organization seeks individuals who can perform these re-
quired tasks.
This, then, is the antecedent condition for the individual-environment interaction-that the
individual has certain requirements or needs that, in the individual's perception, the environ-
ment (that is, the work organization) can fulfill, and concurrently, that the environment (work
organization) has requirements or needs that it perceives the individual can fulfill.
The class of whatever the work organization can use to fulfill or satisfy the individual's needs
consists of "reinforcers." Reinforcers are environmental conditions that maintain or increase the
probability of response, that is, that can satisfy an individual's needs. The class of whatever the
individual uses or can use to fulfill the work organization's requirements or needs consists of
skills. Skills are response sequences that can satisfy task requirements. In other words, a skill is
manifested in the performance of a task requirement, and degree of skillfulness can be evaluated
in terms of the degree to which, and the ease with which, the task requirement is fulfilled. Task
requirement fulfillment implies the satisfaction of the work organization. ITthe work organiza-
tion is satisfied with an individual's performance of assigned tasks, that individual is considered a
satisfactory employee. Thus, the term "satisfactoriness," can be used to designate organiza-
tional satisfaction with the individual.
The Theory of Work Adjustment focuses on two aspects of the individual-needs and skills-
and 0I.1 two parallel aspects of the work environment-task requirements (or as we preferred to
call them, skill requirements) and reinforcers. The interaction between individual and environ-
ment results in the two outcomes of interest: the individual's satisfaction and satisfactoriness. In
turn, these two outcomes result in a third outcome: tenure or length of stay on the job.
Tenure is a basic indicator of work adjustment. Staying on the job indicates the achievement of
a minimum level of adjustment to or with the job. A person who stays on a job must be minimally
satisfied; the balance of satisfactions and dissatisfactions must be sufficient to keep that in-
dividual on that job. When the balance tips toward dissatisfaction, the individual will leave the
job.
From the environment or organizational side of things, a person who is kept on the job must be
minimally satisfactory; the balance of pluses and minuses for the individual must be sufficient for
the organization to keep the individual on the job. Otherwise, the organization will find a way to
move the individual from the job, by promotion to a blind-alley job, by transfer, by restructuring
the job so that it no longer is the old job, or by termination.
From the viewpoint of the Theory of Work Adjustment, therefore, there are three important
outcomes of work adjustment that are also indicators of work adjustment: satisfaction, satis-
factoriness, and tenure of the individual. Tenure is the ultimate outcome and indicator. Satis-
faction and satisfactoriness produce tenure and therefore predictors of tenure. Individual-en-
vironment interaction produces satisfaction and satisfactoriness and should therefore predict
these two intermediate outcomes. But how to measure individual-environment interaction?
The construct we devised to meet this need was correspondence. "Correspondence" reflects two
properties of individual-environment interaction. First, it denotes co-responsiveness or mutual
responsiveness-the responsiveness of the individual to the environment and of the environment
to the individual. Secondly, "correspondence" denotes the match-up, or the degree of match or
fit, between individual and environment. These notions led to the propositions that: satisfaction
can be predicted from the correspondence of the environment's reinforcer system to the in-
dividual's needs, and satisfactoriness can be predicted from the correspondence of the in-
dividual's skills to the environment's task or skill requirements.
The preceeding discussion can be recapitulated in the form of the propositions of the Theory of
Work Adjustment, as follows:
Proposition 1. Work adjustment at any point in time is indicated by the individual's satisfaction
and satisfactoriness.

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Proposition II. Satisfactoriness can be predicted from the correspondence of the individual's skills
to the skill requirements of the work environment, provided that the individual is satisfied.
Corollary /la. Knowledge of the individual's skills and satisfactoriness permits the inference
of the effective skill requirements of the work environment.
Corollary lIb. Knowledge of the skill requirements of the work environment and the in-
dividual's satisfactoriness permits the inference of the individual's skills.
Proposition III. Satisfaction can be predicted from the correspondence of the work environment's
reinforcer system to the individual's needs, provided that the individual is satisfactory.
Corollary IlIa. Knowledge of the individual's needs and satisfaction permits the inference of
the effective reinforcers of the work environment.
Corollary /lIb. Knowledge of the reinforcer system of the work environment and the in-
dividual's satisfaction permits the inference of the individual's needs.
Proposition IV. Satisfaction moderates the prediction of satisfactoriness from skill-requirement
corres pondence.
Proposition V. Satisfactoriness moderates the prediction of satisfaction from need-reinforcer
correspondence.
Proposition VI. The probability of an individual's being forced out of the work environment is in-
versely related to the individual's satisfactoriness.
Proposition VII. The probability of an individual's voluntarily leaving the work environment is
inversely related to the individual's satisfaction.
Proposition VIII. Tenure can be predicted from the joint combination of satisfactoriness and
satisfaction.
Corollary VIlla. Tenure can be predicted from skill-requirement and need-reinforcer
corres pondence.
I propose now to examine personnel assessment from the perspective provided by these proposi-
tions and the ideas they em body.
My first application of the Theory of Work Adjustment has to do with the criterion of personnel
assessment. There will be very little disagreement among professional practitioners, researchers,
technicians, and even clients and consumers of personnel assessment services that the criterion
should be job performance. Even the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures
designate "performance on the job" as the criterion. Yet, I submit that it should not be the
criterion because, in the first place, it has never been available as the criterion. What we have ac-
tually used in the past as the criterion have been ratings or evaluations of job performance or, at
best, the products or results of job performance, which then are evaluated-but not job perfor-
mance per se. There is a whole world of difference between job performance and an evaluation of
job performance. .
The Theory of Work Adjustment reflects this distinction in that it advances "satisfactor-
iness," that is, evaluation of job performance, as the criterion. In our research on satisfactoriness,
we found that while "job performance" emerged as the major component in ratings of satis-
factoriness, there were other components. The next most important component was "confor-
mance," that is, conforming to the rules of the organization. This suggests that ratings or evalua-
tions of job performance most likely include extraneous elements that can effectively distort the
evaluation of job performance. This distortion can prove to be a very difficult problem from the
standpoint of fairness in assessment. While rating technology has made great advances in the last
50 years, I know of no method to ensure fairness in ratings of job performance that does not even-
tually devolve on the fairness of the rater.

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 Using the products or results of job performance, that is, using output measures, does not
alleviate the problem, either. This type of criterion has its own set of difficult problems, to men-
tion a few: defining or determining a unit of output; removing artifactual ceilings or floors to
production; equalizing opportunity to produce or perform; eliminating extraneous factors such as
interruptions in flow of supplies, equipment failure, and the like; and maintaining production
records over an "appropriate" period of time (which is not easy to determine). These problems
point up an insurmountable difficulty with the use of job performance-or its products or its
rating-as the criterion of personnel assessment. It is this: that job performance does not depend
only on the individual, on how the individual performs. Job performance depends also on the en-
vironment and on the correspondence between the individual and the environment, as the Theory
of Work Adjustment points out. The old formula that performance equals ability times motiva-
tion is incomplete because it does not include the environment (or opportunity) factor. Yet we in-
sist on advancing "job performance" as the criterion for personnel assessment.
But if job performance is not to be the criterion, what is? What, if not job performance, should
personnel assessment be assessing? The Theory of Work Adjustment suggests an answer. We
should be assessing capability to perform the job or, in the context of the Theory of Work Adjust-
ment, the capability to fulfull the skill requirements of the job. Having the capability is no
guarantee that the job will be performed satisfactorily. However, not having the capability is a
certain guarantee that the job will not be performed satisfactorily. As indicated in the Uniform
Guidelines, personnel assessment is best used "to screen out unqualified candidates" rather than
"for grouping or for rank ordering." It is quite clear, therefore, that the proper assessment
procedure is one that assesses possession of the required skills. It is also quite clear that the proper
determination of skill requirements is of the most crucial importance. Which brings us to the sub-
ject of content validity.
In recent times, content validity has come under severe criticism. No less an authority in the
field of personnel assessment than Robert Guion has been most active in this criticism. In the
winter article of his discontent (Applied Psychological Measurement, 1977), for example, Guion
expresses the fear that content validity can and will be used to justify otherwise poorly construc-
ted tests, that content validation procedures might be used to exempt the test constructor from
having to determine such time-honored test properties as reliability, item difficulty, and item dis-
crimination levels. Guion is very uneasy about the subjective nature of content validity and its
lack of quantification, about how in content validity we are ultimately at the mercy of subjective
judgments (judgments about the adequacy of sampling the job content domain). And further-
more, in Guion's view, content validity is not really validity at all since it refers to the assessment
instrument itself, whereas validity is a property of test scores, not of the test. Therefore, Guion
would prefer to talk about "content-oriented test development" rather than "content validity."
I would like to make some observations about validity in general and content validity in par-
ticular that are drawn from my experience in the Work Adjustment Project.
In the first place, the term "validity" is and is not a technical term. It is not a technical term in
the same sense that reliability is. There is a theory of reliability that dates all the way back to
Spearman. There is no corresponding theory of validity. There are established and distinctive
quantitive techniques for the determination of reliability. There are techniques for the deter-
mination of validity, but they are not distinctive in the same sense that reliability-determination
techniques are.
At the same time, validity is a technical term in the sense that it is understood and used by ex-
perts and technicians to denote specific operations that involve technical knowledge. However, as
the literature abundantly shows, there is disagreement even among experts as to the precise
definition of validity.
My understanding of validity is that it is a conclusion about an assessment procedure with
respect to the purposes of assessment. One does not ask if a test is valid; rather, one asks, valid for
what? The conclusion reached is based on the evidence produced by the validation procedure.

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How much evidence is required can be a matter for dispute. A lenient standard might demand no
more than a demonstration that the measurement is non-chance or non-random; a strict criterion
might require the demonstration of validity beyond any reasonable doubt.
There are essentially two kinds of validity because the purposes of assessment can be
categorized into two: the theoretical and the practical. What I call theoretical validity is what the
literature has been calling construct validity. This type of validity starts with a construct or a
concept in the context of theory. The validity question asks: Does this assessment procedure (or
more typically, the measurement instrument) assess (or measure) the construct or the concept?
To answer the question, a theory is needed that will provide testable hypotheses of the form: If X
is a measure of construct Y, then we should observe Z. We then go out to observe the Zs. But note:
logically speaking, no amount of observed Zs can lead to the conclusion that X is indeed a
measure of Y. We can only disconfirm the hypothesis. However, the more Zs we observe, es-
pecially in the absence of non-Z findings, the more confident we get that X does indeed measure
Y. The distinctive characteristic of theoretical validity, therefore, is that theory is required
beforehand to provide the validation hypotheses. All of the conventional forms of validity (con-
tent, concurrent, predictive, as well as construct) can, as Loevinger points out, serve the purpose
of theoretical validity, provided that the observation is deducible from some theory.
In contrast, what I call practical validity requires only that the use or practical objective be
specified. Where theoretical validity asks: Does this assessment procedure measure the
theoretical construct or concept, practical validity asks: Does this assessment procedure do the
job it is intended to do? In practical validity, the purpose of the assessment predetermines the
criterion of validity for the assessment procedure. Assessment procedures are said to be valid for
specific reasons, such as for selecting employees for a particular job, selecting trainees for a par-
ticular training program, selecting employees for promotion to a particular job, etc. It is empirical
validity in the sense that only try-out and experience with the assessment procedure can answer
the question: Does it work? An even more sophisticated view of practical validity would add the
question: Is it cost- beneficial or cost-effective? Obviously, practical validity is the type of validity
most commonly involved in personnel assessment.
Where does content validity fit into all this? Content validity, as I understand it, is a demonstra-
tion that the job content domain is adequately sampled and represented in the assessment
procedure. If, as suggested earlier, the criterion of personnel assessment should be, not job perfor-
mance, but capability to perform the job, that is, to perform the job's skill requirements, it is ob-
vious that content validity is a must, that it is a necessary condition for practical validity.
Is it a sufficient condition? The question of sufficiency is in one sense a pragmatic matter to be
decided in practice. As such, the criterion of sufficiency can change with changes in assessment
technology, in professional opinion, in legal requirements, and in the societal context of values. In
another sense, the question of sufficiency is answered in terms of the adequacy with which the
job's skill-requirement domain is sampled. Putting aside the question of reliability, a statistically
adequate sampling of the job skill-requirement domain is a sufficient condition for practical
validity.
Incidentally, adequate sampling is a requirement for all types of validity, not just content
validity. Criterion-related validity requires that the validation sample be an adequate sampling
of the target population and the criterion measure incorporate an adequate sampling of the
criterion domain. Construct validity requires an adequate sampling of measurement methods, of
contrasting constructs, of measurement time-points, etc. The point of all this (adequate sampl-
ing) is not just to be able to stay within sampling error limits but rather to ensure consistency of
results in future assessments. Adequacy of sampling in all of these aspects allows us to have con-
fidence that when we repeat the assessment procedure in the future we can depend on obtaining
the same results consistently.
To return to the Theory of Work Adjustment, since skill requirements are the criterion for prac-
tical validity, the definition and identification of skills becomes of utmost importance. A skill is a

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repeatable response sequence with a specifiable beginning, a specifiable end, and usually a
specifiable middle. If a response sequence cannot be repeated, we cannot talk of a skill. For most
skills, we can specify beginning, middle, and end. However, for many human skills, there may be
(all too human) variation in going from beginning to end, hence the middle is only "usually"
specifiable. Beyond this primitive definition, it is difficult to define skills with any greater degree
of precision. One reason for this is the problem of unit or level of abstraction. Most any given skill
can be broken down or decomposed into its component parts or lower-order skills. Conversely,
most any given skill can be combined with other skills at the same level of abstraction to con-
stitute a higher-order skill of which it (the original skill) is now a component part. For example,
interpersonal relationship skill might be composed of listening skill, empathic skill, persuasion
skill, etc. In turn, interpersonal relationship skill can combine with organizational skill, planning
skill, technical skill, etc., to constitute managerial skill. The question often asked in skill (or as it
is often called, task) analysis is: At what level of abstraction (or level of description) do we
operate?
The Theory of Work Adjustment suggests a way of resolving this problem. Our belief is that in
principle there' are basic or elemental components that combine to constitute all skills. These
basic components emerge in the factor analysis of skills as the factors or reference dimensions
since they constitute the commonalities that underlie the covariation among skills. We call these
basic components "abilities." Abilities, therefore, are (a) components that combine to constitute
skills, and (b) reference dimensions that can be used in the description of skills. If we are correct
in this belief and if we can measure abilities reliably, then we can assess potential for a skill, that
is to say, aptitude. An aptitude is different from a skill in that, while both consist of the same
component abilities, for the skill, the abilities have been combined to produce the requisite
response sequence, while for aptitude they have not.
The construct of abilities can be useful in many ways. It can be used to compress the descrip-
tion of jobs in terms of skill requirements by reducing the long list of skill requirements to a much
shorter list of ability requirements. It can be used to determine transfer gradients between jobs,
especially between jobs with seemingly disparate sets of skills. It can be used to develop a more
manageable taxonomy of jobs on the basis of similarity of ability requirements rather than on the
basis of skill requirements. It can be used to redesign training programs to take advantage of
similar constellations of abilities appearing across jobs.
One thing the construct of abilities cannot do, however, is to substitute for skills in the criterion
of personnel assessment. Abilities can tell you what a person's potential for skills is; they do not
tell you what a person's actual skills are. I may have the potential (or aptitude) for accounting,
but I do know I don't have the accountant's skills. In other words, in personnel assessment, there
is no substitute for the actual determination that the skill requirements can be fulfilled. Since
much of personnel testing, especially that based on criterion-related validation, is ofthe kind that
assesses potential for skills rather than possession of skills, it is not surprising that personnel
testing is currently undergoing an agonizing loss of public confidence!
Let me sum up in a few words what I have been trying to say in so many. So what's so practical
for personnel assessment that can be derived from the Theory of Work Adjustment? First: Job
performance is not the criterion for personnel assessment; capability to perform the job is.
Second: Capability to perform the job is addressed by determining if the job's skill requirements
can be met. Third: Content validity is a necessary condition for the validity of the assessment
procedure. It might even be a sufficient condition, given reliable measurement. Fourth: Abilities
are good constructs with which to describe skills and skill requirements parsimoniously. Fifth:
Abilities- can assess potential for skills, that is, aptitude. However, they cannot assess possession
of skills. And finally, there is no substitute for skill assessment.
It all goes back to what I said in the beginning. It all goes to show that what Kurt Lewin said
was right: "There is nothing so demanding of theory as its application in practice."

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