Personnel Selection

Our research in the area of personnel selection focuses on selecting job applicants on important psychological characteristics: e.g., job knowledge, conscientiousness, motivation, interest. All of this is done to serve the practical goals of helping organizations improve the accuracy of selection (i.e., correctly selecting qualified applicants and correctly rejecting unqualified applicants), the productivity of selection (i.e., increasing the expected value or utility on outcomes such as increased performance and decreased turnover, as measured on selected applicants), and the fairness of selection decisions (e.g., mitigating adverse impact related to hiring minority and majority applicants , and broader contextual forms of fairness).

Personality 

Our research also focuses broadly on personality theory and understanding how personality affects people’s behavior in organizational settings, where key personality traits can be selected for and perhaps can be developed.

Psychometrics 

Tying all previous work together, we are broadly involved in methodological research that examines issues surrounding the theory, modeling, and measurement of psychological variables, and the practical implications of these issues on the use of psychological measures in applied settings (e.g., workplace, education, military).

 

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Ock, J. (2020). “How satisfied are you with your job?” Estimating the reliability of scores on a single-item job satisfaction measure. International Journal of Selection and Assessment.

Ock, J., McAbee, S. T., Mulfinger, E., & Oswald, F. L. (2019). The practical effects of measurement invariance: Gender invariance in two Big Five personality measures. Assessment. 

Ock, J., & Oswald, F. L. (2018). The utility of personnel selection decisions: Comparing compensatory and multiple-hurdle selection models. Journal of Personnel Psychology, 17, 172-182.

Ock, J. (2016). Construct validity evidence for multisource performance ratings: Is interrater reliability enough? Industrial Organizational Psychology, 9, 329-333.

Hough, L. M., Oswald, F. L., & Ock, J. (2015). Beyond the Big Five: New directions for personality research and practice in organizations. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2, 183-209.

Ock, J., & Oswald, F. L. (2015). Managing the interpersonal aspect of performance management. Industrial Organizational Psychology, 8, 111-119.

Oswald, F. L., Ercan, S., McAbee, S. T., Ock, J., & Shaw, A. (2015). Imperfect corrections or correct imperfections? Psychometric corrections in meta-analysis. Industrial Organizational Psychology, 8, e1-e4.