Dr. David Allen published in Personnel Psychology

For release:  January 7, 2015

Dr. David Allen, FCBE professor of Management, was recently published in Personnel Psychology, a journal focusing on people at work. His research concentrated on addressing one of the most important issues in staffing organizations: identifying potential high performers while avoiding adverse impact. The article was coauthored with Dr. Frank Bosco, former FCBE doctoral student and assistant professor at VCU, and current FCBE doctoral student Kulraj Singh. Additionally, their research was funded by the SHRM Foundation.  

Dr. Allen’s research discussed the validity-adverse impact tradeoff associated with the relationships among general mental ability (GMA), ethnicity, and employee performance and how it represents one of the most pressing concerns in organizational staffing. The researchers conducted four studies with 273 bank employees and 197 university students designed to assess the extent to which executive attention (EA) and GMA predict simulation performance and supervisory ratings of performance. They also assessed the extent to which measures of EA and GMA are associated with subgroup differences. Results indicated that, like GMA, EA positively predicts managerial simulation and supervisory ratings of performance. In addition, although reaching statistical significance in only one of our four studies, EA was generally associated with smaller subgroup differences than GMA, and meta-analysis across their samples supported this reduced subgroup difference. Moreover, advantages of EA tended to increase as studies moved from the laboratory with undergraduate students to a concurrent validation organizational setting with employees. They discussed implications for a theory-based view of cognitive ability in employee selection and implications for managerial practice.

To read the entire article, please visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/peps.12099/abstract?campaign=wolacceptedarticle.