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4 Assessing Intrapersonal Skills
Pages 63-92

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From page 63...
... identified two broad skills that fall within this cluster: Adaptability: The ability and willingness to cope with uncertain, new, and rapidly changing conditions on the job, including responding effectively to emergencies or crisis situations and learning new tasks, technologies, and procedures. Adaptability also includes handling work stress; adapting to different personalities, communication styles, and cul tures; and physical adaptability to various indoor or outdoor work envi ronments (Houston, 2007; Pulakos et al., 2000)
From page 64...
... Intrapersonal skills support volitional behavior, which Hoyle defined as discretionary behavior aimed at accomplishing the goals an individual sets for himself or herself. Examples of intrapersonal skills include attributes such as planfulness, self-discipline, delay of gratification, the ability to deal with and overcome distractions, and the ability to adjust one's strategy or approach as needed.
From page 65...
... For example, some behaviors are contingent on cues in the environment and are simply habits. The individual performs a habit when he or she links a behavior with some cue in the environment, Hoyle explained, and thus can accomplish the behavior without having to draw on selfregulation.
From page 66...
... , 33 percent of deaths were attributable to obesity, physical inactivity, and tobacco use. In addition, 8 percent of deaths were attributable to a cluster of behavioral causes including alcohol consumption, motor vehicle crashes, incidents involving firearms, sexual behaviors, and use of illicit drugs.
From page 67...
... In terms of economic productivity, the Perry Preschool Program partici pants were 15 to 17 percent higher than children who did not participate. Heckman argues that from an economic perspective there was a nine-fold payoff in what it costs to operate the Perry Preschool Program versus the payoff in economic productivity down the line.
From page 68...
... Executive function is a set of cognitive processes and propensities that originate early in life (Goldman-Rakic, 1987; for a review, see Best and Miller, 2010)
From page 69...
... . Variability in executive function is expressed as individual dif ferences in temperament, which Hoyle said is defined as individual differences in emotional and motor reactivity and in the attentional capacities that support self-regulation (Rothbart and Hwang, 2002, p.
From page 70...
... Hoyle said a critical aspect of performance is self-observation or self-reflection, when the individual assesses the effectiveness of his or her performance and re-engages the process for subsequent attempts at goal pursuit. This model assumes a cyclical pro cess whereby the individual repeatedly moves from forethought to performance to self-reflection, realizing progress toward the goal with each successive cycle.
From page 71...
... A third approach is behavioral task performances, which, Hoyle said, are designed so that they require only the capacity or skill of interest. Hoyle noted that these tasks are most often used to assess constructs in the foundations (see Figure 4-1)
From page 72...
... The disadvantages of this approach, Hoyle said, are that the tasks must be tailored to the age of the respondent and they often tap more than one skill or ability. Hoyle described some examples of behavioral tasks performances intended to measure each of the foundational skills (see Figure 4-1)
From page 73...
... The test taker rates him/herself on statements such as those shown below: 4-21 • "Play sick to avoid doing something" (avoid work) • "Make a grocery list before going to the store" (organization)
From page 74...
... Paul Sackett, professor of psychology with the University of Minnesota, made the first presentation and covered a variety of strategies for assessing integrity in employee selection settings. The second presentation, made by Candice Odgers, assistant professor of 4-22 psychology, social behavior, and education with the University of California at Irvine, focused on strategies for assessing antisocial behaviors and conduct disorders in K-12 and counseling settings.
From page 75...
... Gerald Matthews, professor of psychology with the University of Cincinnati, discussed research on assessing emotional intelligence. Assessing Integrity in Job Applicants Sackett began by talking about the origin of assessments like tests of integrity.5 He noted that for employers, the goal has always been to hire people likely to be good job performers.
From page 76...
... But within any one situation, individual differences influence who does and does not engage in these behaviors.
From page 77...
... ) • Ruminations about theft • Perceived ease of theft • Rationalizations about theft • Assessments of one's own honesty • Admissions Sackett explained the final category, "Admissions," is actually a constructed-response item that asks the job candidate about his or her own theft behaviors, such as "what is the dollar value of cash and merchandise you have taken from your previous employer in the last six months?
From page 78...
... Developed by Larry James at Georgia Institute of Technology, the theory is that people who are prone to engage in counterproductive work behavior will tend to be also high on a construct called "hostile attribution bias." A sample item appears below: American cars are now more reliable than they used to be 15 to 20 years ago.
From page 79...
... The objective of more recent research has been to investigate why integrity tests work and to understand the underlying mechanisms by which they predict counterproductive work behaviors. Much of this work has centered on the self-regulation literature.
From page 80...
... . Research shows antisocial behavior in children is a robust predictor of a number of problematic behaviors in adults, including poor physical health, school failure, and economic problems (Moffitt et al., 2002; Odgers et al., 2008)
From page 81...
... Early intervention ultimately reduces the persistence of antisocial behaviors and subsequent involve ment with the juvenile justice system. Fortunately, Odgers noted, antisocial behavior is relatively easy to diagnose.
From page 82...
... Odgers said that they are finding that conduct disorder, particularly persistent conduct disorder across childhood, is one of the most accurate signals of future problems across a wide array of domains, including mental health, physical health, economic functioning, and job prospects. Odgers presented the graph shown in Figure 4-2 that displays the incidence of conduct problems for the males in the sample, following them from ages 7 to 26.
From page 83...
... Figure 4-3 compares health outcomes for males with life-course-persistent conduct disorders versus those who scored low on conduct disorders. Figure 4-4 compares health outcomes for males with childhood-limited conduct disorders ver sus those who scored low on conduct disorders.
From page 84...
... More over, by age 32, 59 percent of this group had no educational qualifications8 as compared to an average of about 7 percent in the population at large. Only 24 percent of the males with childhood-limited conduct disorders had no educational qualifications, which Odgers noted was higher than average but half that for the males with life-course persistent conduct disorders.
From page 85...
... Odgers noted that children who have both antisocial behavior and this lack of empathy seem to have particularly poor outcomes. There are con siderations to adding this characteristic to the conduct disorder diagnosis to help improve prediction of outcomes.
From page 86...
... it is done by medicine. Knowing about the parents' levels of antisocial behavior can help considerably in the diagnosis and prediction of longterm outcomes.
From page 87...
... . Event measures are assessment tools that target self-regulated learn ing as an event, behavior, or cognition that may vary across contexts and tasks.
From page 88...
... In one recent study with college students, the authors examined the extent to which the microanalytic self-regulation questions accounted for unique variance in student course grades over and above that accounted for by the most commonly used self-report measure of self-regulation, the Motivated Strategies Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ; Cleary et al.,
From page 89...
... Assessing Emotional Intelligence Gerald Matthews began by cautioning the audience that the field of psychology is still in its infancy in terms of defining and assessing emotional intelligence.11 On one hand, no one would want to be referred to as low on emotional intelligence. As he put it, "Saying that somebody has low emotional intelligence is now a pretty standard insult in various public domains." On the other hand, research on emotional intelligence has not yet yielded a single conception of what it entails or how best to assess it.
From page 90...
... As Matthews put it, "If having good self-awareness of your emotional functioning is central to emotional intelligence, then if you lack emotional intelligence, how can your questionnaire responses be very meaningful? " The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (the MSCEIT)
From page 91...
... Matthews closed by restating that emotional intelligence remains a nebulous and ill-defined construct. The field has not yet come to consensus on a definition or conceptualization of the construct, and findings from research examining its malleability -- that is, the extent to which is it trainable -- are inconclusive.


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