A multi-level perspective on personnel selection: When will practice catch up?

We cluster the issues raised by Ostroff and Schmitt and respond to these clusters rather than to the more detailed ways in which each raised them. These issues concerned: (1) the collection of job analysis information at higher units of analysis (e.g. teams), (2) the analysis of such job analysis information, (3) the use of such job analysis information as a basis for the selection of people to be team members, especially when different selection procedures might be appropriate for different team tasks, (4) the nature of the linkage of criteria internal to organizations and those external to organizations, and (5) how decision makers might weight different criteria of effectiveness as guides to hiring decisions when the criteria exist at different levels of analysis. We note that these are all important issues but spend the most time on the first three having to do with team/group issues in personnel selection psychology. We conclude with a call for researchers to identify the “architecture of organizations” through the use of multi-level computational models. These models would require detailed specification of critical variables at different levels of analysis to permit preliminary exploration of hypothesized relationships. Through such careful explication and model testing, we envision considerable future progress in cross-levels personnel selection practice.

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