Frank L. Schmidt

Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: a meta-analysis.

Based on 7,939 business units in 36 companies, this study used meta-analysis to examine the relationship at the business-unit level between employee satisfaction-engagement and the business-unit outcomes of customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, employee turnover, and accidents. Generalizable relationships large enough to have substantial practical value were found between unit-level employee satisfaction-engagement and these business-unit outcomes. One implication is that changes in management practices that increase employee satisfaction may increase business-unit outcomes, including profit.

has the problem of judgment in utility analysis been solved

N. S. Raju, M. J. Burke, and J. Normand (1990) presented a new approach to utility analysis that they claimed has the advantage of circumventing the use of expert judges to estimate the standard deviation of job performance in dollars (σ Y or SD y ). The present authors demonstrate that Raju et al.s approach simply shifts the judgment problem from that of estimating the standard deviation of the criterion (σ Y ) to that of estimating the coefficient of variation of the criterion (σ Y /μ Y , or SD y /Y). They also critique 3 arguments advanced by Raju et al.

CONTROVERSIES OVER INTEGRITY TESTING: TWO VIEWPOINTS

In the August 1993 issue ofJournal of Applied Psychology, Deniz Ones, Vish Viswesvaran, and Frank Schmidt published a monograph on the validity of integrity tests as revealed by meta-analysis. They concluded that integrity tests have substantial and generalizable predictive validity for criteria of both overall job performance and counterproductive behaviors on the job (e.g., disciplinary problems, absenteeism, rule breaking, violence on the job, theft, etc.). During the Fall of 1992, the authors sent a preprint of this study to David Lykken of the University of Minnesota, stimulating the exchange of letters that is reproduced here. The doubts, concerns, and feelings about integrity tests expressed by Professor Lykken are likely to be shared by others. The responses by Professors Schmidt, Ones, and Viswesvaran attempt to show that these worries are unfounded.