Andrew Caleb Loignon

Justifying Aggregation With Consensus-Based Constructs A Review and Examination of Cutoff Values for Common Aggregation Indices

Management researchers often use consensus-based composition models to examine the antecedents and effects of higher-level constructs. Typically, researchers present three indices, rwg, ICC(1), and ICC(2), to demonstrate agreement and consistency among lower-level units when justifying aggregation. Nevertheless, researchers debate what values for these indices are sufficient. This study examines the distributional characteristics of ICCs and rwg values from three sources: the multilevel literature, a large multinational sample of student teams, and a large sample of randomly generated “pseudo teams.” Our results support existing cutoff criteria for ICCs but suggest that generally accepted values for rwg may, under certain circumstances, reflect pseudo-agreement (i.e., agreement observed among two raters not attributable to the same target). Thus, when there is minimal between-group variance (i.e., low ICCs), it is difficult to determine whether high rwg values reflect agreement or pseudo-agreement. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to help researchers interpret aggregation indices.

Social Class in the Organizational Sciences: A Conceptual Integration and Meta-Analytic Review:

Social class has become increasingly popular in the organizational sciences. Despite the burgeoning interest in this topic, there remains a great deal of ambiguity concerning the conceptualization and operationalization of social class. For instance, scholars have used income, education, and subjective ratings to measures one’s social class. In order to improve the conceptual clarity of social class, we develop and present a model that draws on the dominant theories of social class from both sociology and psychology while organizing their key principles to explain how social class influences an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By using this model as a framework, this study attempts to refine the conceptualization of social class by testing core research questions pertaining to the construct validity of this construct. After a comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature search, which yielded over 4,000 effect sizes, we conducted a meta-analysis to test the proposed model. The findings offer clear support for two distinct components of social class (i.e., objective and subjective) that are both highly related to one another and associated with other microlevel constructs (i.e., job attitudes). Given the timeliness and importance of social class, the findings of this conceptual review and empirical meta-analysis offer a means of summarizing this large, interdisciplinary literature while guiding future management research on this critical topic.