The relationship between performance in dynamic systems and intelligence (original) (raw)
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The relationships between cognitive ability and dynamic decision making
Intelligence, 2005
This study investigated the relationships between cognitive ability (as assessed by the Raven Progressive Matrices Test [RPM] and the Visual-Span Test [VSPAN]) and individuals' performance in three dynamic decision making (DDM) tasks (i.e., regular Water Purification Plant [WPP], Team WPP, and Firechief). Participants interacted repeatedly with one of the three microworlds. Our results indicate a positive association between VSPAN and RPM scores and between each of those measures and performance in the three dynamic tasks. Practice had no effect on the correlation between RPM score and performance in any of the microworlds, but it led to an increased correlation between VSPAN score and performance in Team WPP. The pattern of associations between performance in microworlds and assessments of cognitive ability was consistent with the task requirements of the microworlds. These findings provide insight into the cognitive demands of dynamic decision making and the dynamics of the relationships between cognitive ability and performance with task practice.
Competing tasks as measures of intelligence and predictors of job performance
2012
This series of studies investigated a new measure of cognitive ability, the Multi-Tasks test, its place within the structure of intelligence and its usefulness in predicting job performance. The Multi-Tasks test employed a competing task methodology, being the simultaneous performance of two cognitive tasks, which has been shown to have a significant relationship with intelligence and job performance, particularly for complex jobs. The competing tasks methodology has a long history in psychology research and has recently experienced a resurgence of interest as technological advances (e.g., the Internet) have made it easier to administer these measures within the workplace. In the pilot study (Part A of Study 1) the means, reliability and demographic group differences of the measure were investigated. In Part B of Study 1 and Studies 2 and 3, the reliability and predictive validity of the test was compared to measures of general mental ability (crystallized and fluid intelligence) which have been widely used in personnel selection. Crystallized intelligence measures are language based and influenced by culture and education, whereas fluid intelligence tasks typically draw on non-verbal reasoning and are unaffected by education. These measures feature prominently in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll Theory of Cognitive Abilities, which forms the theoretical basis for these studies. In Study 2 and Study 3, additional cognitive measures were added to further elucidate the place of Multi-Tasks within the intelligence model, including a measure of short-term memory (Gsm in the CHC Theory). Previous research shows short-term memory and a related concept working memory, to be important in performance on the Multi-Tasks test. Further, the reliability and predictive validity of Multi-Tasks was compared to a personality measure (the Big Five model of personality) in Study 2, which is also widely used in job selection. In all studies the Multi-Tasks test had high reliability, and it was found to be a more reliable measure than the general mental ability measures in Study 1 (Part B), Study 2 and
Working Smarter and Harder: A Longitudinal Study of Managerial Success
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1994
We thank Glenn Carroll, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bob Sutton, and James Wade for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We measure the effects of motivation and ability on the early career success of a sample of Master's of Business Administration (MBA) graduates in the early years of their careers. We argue that performance is a joint effect of two important individual characteristics: general cognitive ability and motivation. General cognitive ability, which is representative of the general population, refers to individual differences in tasks or pursuits that demand mental effort, such as abstraction, rule inference, generalization, and manipulating or transforming problems. Motivation is conceptualized as a stable mental state that energizes human behavior. Results show that the combination of high general cognitive ability and motivation is significantly associated with more early career success. MBAs who were both smarter and worked harder were more successful in their job search upon graduation, were earning higher salaries, had more rapid pay increases, and received more promotions in their early careers. These findings add to the mounting evidence that studying enduring individual characteristics is critical to predicting behavior.' In the past several years, organizational researchers have engaged in a rather artificial debate about the extent to which individual differences or dispositions predict job outcomes such as attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Davis-Blake and Pfeffer, 1989). While the debate is provocative, a careful examination indicates that there may be less substance to this debate than it seems. By now, most organizational researchers acknowledge the fundamental importance of situational effects, the existence of stable individual differences, and their interaction as causes of behavior (Wright and Mischel, 1987; Chatman, 1989). The controversy lies in questions about the usefulness of measuring dispositions that are sometimes poorly specified and lack reliability and validity, the absence of well-developed theoretical justifications for constructs for given situations, and the frequent use of cross-sectional research designs that do not permit adequate longitudinal testing of clearly specified hypotheses (e.g., Weiss and Adler, 1984). It is clear that poorly designed studies of dispositions exist, but some stable individual differences may predict important attitudes and behavior. Intelligence, or general cognitive ability (GCA),-has a long, well-documented history of research that reliably predicts important organizational outcomes such as job performance and career success (e.g., House, Howard, and Walker, 1992). Hunter (1986: 340) reported a review of "hundreds of studies showing that general cognitive ability predicts job performance in all jobs." The predictive ability of GCA increases for jobs or situations that require increased information processing. This is consistent with Wright and Mischel's (1987) competency-demand hypothesis, which implies that people with more general cognitive ability are likely to perform better in cognitively demanding situations. General cognitive ability predicts performance across jobs, settings, and careers (Gottfredson, 1986; Dreher and Bretz, 1991; Schmidt, Ones, and Hunter, 1992). 603/Administrative Science Quarterly, 39 (1994): 603-627 Personality researchers have largely ceased to be concerned with the idea of a pure trait or dispositional approach, however, and widely agree that behavior is a function of both individual and situational factors. Kenrick and Funder (1988: 31) reviewed the person-situation debate and concluded that "As with most controversies, the truth finally appears to lie not in the vivid black or white of either extreme, but somewhere in the less striking gray area." Situations may affect people, while people may affect situations and maintain distinctive personal styles across situations (Schneider, 1987). There are several problems here for organizational researchers. First, intelligence or general cognitive ability is a construct that most organizational scholars have not investigated. Instead of building on the massive evidence for the efficiency of GCA as a predictor of job-related outcomes, researchers have pursued other, less well-defined dispositional constructs (Gerhardt, 1987). This has led some experts to raise the obvious question, "If the predominance of the g [general cognitive ability] factor has been apparent to many if not most psychologists ever since mental tests were invented, why should so much time, energy, and creativity have been invested in the attempt to identify and measure more limited abilities?" (Tyler, 1986: 446). Second, some of the earliest models of human performance (e.g., Heider, 1958) suggested an interactional approach, using ability and motivation, of the type called for in recent articles (e.g., Chatman, 1989). Campbell (1976: 64), observed that in industrial and organizational psychology, performance is a function of the interaction between ability and motivation. Pinder (1984), in his review of the motivation literature, made a similar observation and noted that it may be that high levels of one component compensate for low levels of the other. This general approach is the basis for expectancy models of motivation that conceptualize performance as the interaction between ability and effort. Motivation is a person's willingness to expend effort and persist at an activity, while ability is a person's capacity to perform certain tasks. Motivation and ability are both necessary, but neither alone may be sufficient for high levels of performance. A highly motivated person may lack critical abilities for success, while a person with ability may lack the motivation to succeed. More recent research has refined both of these constructs. Ability, at its most global level, can be thought of as general cognitive ability or the underlying general mental abilities that are expressed in the differential performance of individuals on a class of tasks that require cognitive information processing (e.g., Carroll, 1992). This general cognitive ability, or "g," is common to all types of cognitive processing, such as verbal, spatial, numerical, reasoning, and musical performance and appears to be based on underlying neural processes. Motivation has often been characterized as a stable, general trait, labelled "conscientiousness," that varies across individuals (Goldberg, 1993) and reflects attributes such as dependability, attention to detail, carefulness, and responsibility. People who are highly conscientious are 604/ASQ, December 1994 Managerial Success hardworking, persevering, organized, and achievement oriented (McCrae and Costa, 1987). Given the evidence for the importance of general cognitive ability and motivation as stable individual differences and predictors of performance in organizations (e.g., Hunter, 1986; Barrick and Mount, 1991; Carroll, 1992) and the long tradition in industrial psychology of conceptualizing performance as the interaction of motivation and ability (e.g., Ackerman and Humphreys, 1990), it is surprising that there is so little empirical research testing this parsimonious and intuitively appealing proposition. The purpose of this study is to test the interaction of conscientiousness and general cognitive ability as predictors of early career success among a cohort of recent Master's of Business Administration (MBA) graduates. General Cognitive Ability and Job Performance In 1986 the Journal of Vocational Behavior devoted an issue to a controversial topic: the "g" factor in employment, "g" referring to general mental or cognitive ability as characterized by Spearman (1927). In this issue, a number of eminent psychologists addressed a question that has been largely absent from the industrial psychological literature for the past two decades: What is the association between intelligence and job performance? Several factors make this issue both important and provocative. First, up through the 1950s, the use of intelligence or general cognitive ability tests was common in employment. Harrell (1992), for instance, reported that the military used a general mental ability test to classify over 12 million people. During the next decade, they fell out of favor, due to criticisms that these tests were discriminatory and invalid (Cronbach, 1975). Ironically, as Hunter (1986) and Gottfredson (1986) showed, there are hundreds of empirical studies showing that general cognitive ability (GCA) predicts performance for a wide variety of jobs. It appears that psychologists shifted their attention away from the construct of GCA for reasons other than its conceptual importance and empirical ability to predict performance. Some argued forcefully that intelligence and aptitude tests could not predict occupational success or other important life outcomes but that "competencies" might (e.g., McClelland, 1973). But as Barrett and Depinet (1991: 1021) demonstrated, after a careful review of both the empirical evidence and the criticisms of the construct, ".. . McClelland
Human Performance, 2002
Individual differences that have consequences for work behaviors (e.g., job performance) are of great concern for organizations, both public and private. General mental ability has been a popular, although much debated, construct in Industrial, Work, and Organizational (IWO) Psychology for almost 100 years. Individuals differ on their endowments of a critical variable-intelligence-and differences on this variable have consequences for life outcomes. As the century drew to a close, we thought it might be useful to assess the state of our knowledge and the sources of disagreements about the role of general mental ability in IWO psychology.
Personality and Individual Differences, 1996
A laboratory study is reported in which individual differences underlying variations in the performance of a complex task are examined. Differences in fluid intelligence, elementary cognitive components (processing speed and working memory) and cognitive styles (tempo, planfulness and complexity) are measured, with a view to comparing between these three types of variable. It is found that fluid intelligence scores are more closely associated with measures of speed rather than accurate task performance; processing speed and working memory are both predictive of complex task performance; and differences in self-reported cognitive tempo co-vary with speed of problem-solving but not with speed of routine activity. In general, the inclusion of cognitive style variables does not increase the predictive power of intelligence and the elementary cognitive components. It is concluded that cognitive styles will be most reflected in task performance when the activities involved permit considerable variation in the style under investigation. Finally, an explanation is offered of why fluid intelligence is more predictive of some aspects of complex task performance than others, in terms of their degree of emphasis on speeded cognitive processes.
Bringing Together the Psychometric and Strategy Worlds
Attention and Performance XVII, 1999
There are two traditional approaches to the study of individual differences in cognitive skill. One assumes that people differ in the strategies that they we. The other assumes that all people use the same strategies or processes but differ in one or more performance parametersaffecting how the~processes are executed (e.g.. speed memory capacity). This chapter explores another possibility. that people differ in how well they adaptively shift strategies in response to changing features of the task environment. To test this, we examined the performance of 57 participants in a variant of the Kanfer•Ackerman Air Traffic Control Task (Kanfer and Ackerman 1989), a dynamic task in which features of the environment frequently change. We found that. while most participants adap~ed their strategy selections in response to our manipulations of the task environment, not all participants were equally adaptive.-Furthermore, using the CM1 4 (Kyllonen 1993), a cognitive assessment battery, we were able to determine what cognitive subskills were associated with adaptiveness. In this context, we found that inductive reasoning slcill (and not working memory, declarative learning. procedural learning, or processing speed) was associated with adaptiveness to our specific manipulations, and to the general dynamic Character of the air tnffic control (ATC) task.
Personality and information processing speed: Independent influences on intelligent performance
2004
Raven's matrices and inspection time (IT) were recorded from 56 subjects under five arousal levels. Raven's and IT correlated strongly (r = À .7) as predicted by processing-speed theories of g. In line with Eysenck's [Eysenck, H. J. (1967). The biological basis of personality. Springfield, IL: Thomas] arousal theory of extraversion, there was a significant inverted U relationship between Raven's scores and arousal. No support was found for predictions that the IT-Raven's correlation was affected by personality. Likewise, the prediction of Gardner [Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books] that ability measures correlate only because they share linguistic mediation was not supported. Instead, the data are compatible with a model in which processing speed and personality jointly influence performance on intelligence tests via predictable additive effects of processing speed and quadratic interaction effects of arousal and personality.
Since long before Gardner proposed his model of multiple intelligences, an important question has been constantly fueled by both management's theorists and practitioners: " Is the quality of the decision making process linked with the genetic heritage that managers have in terms of intellectual potential? " Each person and (by default) each manager is thought to be born with an almost unchangeable intellectual potential, which can impact the manner in which they execute a specific managerial task. While examining whether a managerial decision was cleverly or foolishly reached, or otherwise the decision was handled intelligently or ineptly, we can find distinctive connotations of the multiple intelligences model, which may feed the assumption that there are certain criteria for a behavior to be considered a managerial intelligence. The main objective of the paper is to reveal a part of the interesting conclusions that were brought to light by a daring research initiative of a Romanian psychometric technologies inventor (Dumitru Grigore), in the field of multiple intelligences. The paper starts from debating on the limitations of the Gardner's model of multiple intelligences and continues with exploring the main principles of analysis that were used for identifying the fractal intelligences and then the managerial fractal intelligences. The discussion leads to a set of well-articulated assumptions, reinforced by concrete results of a research conducted on a sample of over 4500 subjects, tested with the help of modern psychometric technologies, which are based on the GSR concept (galvanic skin response). The authors' approach can represent a fresh perspective on the multiple intelligences theory, which might be of interest to students, researchers, managers or psychologists.
Managerial effectiveness and success is vital for any organization. Competitive organizations are often those, which are led by decision makers who are highly effective in every managerial activity, be it decision making, handling interpersonal relationships, or adapting to changing business environments. Any tool, which would help in predicting workplace success, is thus highly valued in the field of management development. In this context, the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) becomes highly significant. Cognitive intelligence is intuitively considered a valid predictor of occupational success and several decades of psychological assessment research have vindicated the importance of taking social competencies and personality differences into consideration when attempting to predict high performance. Recently however, several claims have appeared in popular literature and in the media about the significant role of EI in the workplace. EI has been claimed to predict a variety of successful behaviors at work, at a level exceeding that of intelligence (Zeidner, Mathews, & Roberts 2004). Critics of EI however, point out a lack of empirical evidence to back these claims and often dismiss it as a construct, which is just a conglomerate of desirable traits. In spite of these criticisms, much of the current interest focusing on EI in organizational settings stems from a desire to explain differential attainment of occupational success, which is not adequately accounted for by cognitive intelligence or personality. In view of this, the present study aims at exploring the impact of EI in predicting managerial success, over and above that predicted by General MentalAbility (GMA) and personality traits. In the field of management development, there is a strong view that there are three overlapping categories of managerial skills, namely, task related, people related and selfrelated. Some empirical evidence shows that people related skills are the most significant ones when it comes to enhancing managerial effectiveness (Analoui, Labbaf & Noorbakhsh, 2000). Yet another view suggests that the manager's job is linked with three major dimensions-technical, conceptual, and human (Katz, 1974). Thus, it is evident that a manager needs several skills and traits to be successful. Some of the important factors considered to predict success in a managerial role are cognitive ability and personality factors. Of late, emotional intelligence is also being considered as essential for managers to be successful.