Session 9

Types of criterion validity

• Concurrent Validity
• Extent of correlation between selection and performance scores when
measured at the same time (among existing employees)
• Predictive Validity
• Extent to which selection scores correlate with performance scores,
when performance is measured at a later time
• Concurrent validity can be established quicker and easily compared
to predictive validity
• But it is not necessarily the best method because
• It is based on performance of existing employees, who don’t necessarily
possess the necessary skills or competencies required for future performance
• The company may end up recruiting the same kind of people over and over
again, ignoring selection blind spots, particularly with respect to diversity
• Existing employees aren’t motivated enough to perform well on the test,
which could lead to rejecting an otherwise valid test
• In some cases such as mathematical ability, older employees may not
perform well on the test, once again leading to rejection of a valid test
Tests of validity
• All attempts at establishing validity of a test or selection mechanism
require that the manager be actively involved in asking the right
questions, and be logically coherent in their approach, because in
most cases validity is established through some form of elimination
rather than hard evidence. This is because hard evidence ( predictive
validity) takes time and effort, and sometimes may even prove to be
elusive.
Exercises
Session 10
Mad Men
• Video
The civil rights movement
• The 1960s were a decade of major cultural and political change
in America and around the world
• The decade also brought several equal rights legislations,
particularly with respect to equal opportunity in employment
• Along with racial justice movements, feminist movements also
reached their zenith particularly with respect to equal
opportunity at work.
The suffragette movement
• The advent of democracy did not automatically mean political
representation for women
• Women gained the right to vote in 1920 in the U.S., and in 1946
in France, after years of political struggle
• Today, the right to vote is taken for granted, as part of the
‘normal’, and to suggest that women should not be allowed to
vote would be considered absurd.
• The suffragette movement formed the first of the three waves of
feminism.
The condition today
• Corporate America has Failed Black America
• “Glass Ceiling”
• Unequal pay for equal work between men and women
Diversity as competitive advantage
• Lack of representation of members of society in organizations,
has also meant that the organizations have lost out on being able
to maximize sales
• In a competitive environment, having members of staff from all
social groups has often resulted in better outreach, and better
sales for the organization.
• IBM demonstrated this, by going out of their way to recruit
under-represented groups and were consequently able to
maximize their sales as they were able to better reach and
communicate with the un-tapped market
Example of an undesirable consequence
of lack of diversity
• Advertisements from the 60s
Cricket South Africa
• CSA implemented a quota system in their national cricket team, such that a
few places out of the starting 11 were reserved for black and colored players
• This has resulted in SA not performing to the best of their ability in world
cricket
• This was done to tackle the popular perception that Cricket is a white man’s
sport, leading to its lack of popularity among the black people, who form
85% of SA’s population.
• For the sport to survive in South Africa, cricket needed to change how it
was perceived, and for black people to believe that it is a sport for them too.
• It made business sense for CSA to sacrifice efficiency in the short term to
preserve sustainability in the long term.
Summaries
• The rights we take for granted today are a result of years and
decades of political and social struggle
• Yet, we have a long way to go in terms of eliminating discrimination
and prejudice in terms of how we deal with employees within and
prospective employees outside our organizations
• If, we do not address some of the systemic issues that manifest in
our selection processes, we stand the risk of ‘believing our own lies’;
e.g., believing that women are not good at mathematics, or believing
that black people are not good at cricket.
• It makes business sense to address these systemic issues.