The Impact of Job Complexity and Performance Measurement on the Temporal Consistency, Stability, and Test-Retest Reliability of Employee Job Performance Ratings

Department

Management and Entrepreneurship

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2005

Abstract

Although research has shown that individual job performance changes over time, the extent of such changes is unknown. In this article, the authors define and distinguish between the concepts of temporal consistency, stability, and test-retest reliability when considering individual job performance ratings over time. Furthermore, the authors examine measurement type (i.e., subjective and objective measures) and job complexity in relation to temporal consistency, stability, and test-retest reliability. On the basis of meta-analytic results, the authors found that the test-retest reliability of these ratings ranged from .83 for subjective measures in low-complexity jobs to .50 for objective measures in high-complexity jobs. The stability of these ratings over a 1-year time lag ranged from .85 to .67. The analyses also reveal that correlations between performance measures decreased as the time interval between performance measurements increased, but the estimates approached values greater than zero.

Journal Title

Journal of Applied Psychology

Journal ISSN

0021-9010

Volume

90

Issue

2

First Page

269

Last Page

283

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1037/0021-9010.90.2.269

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