Steffanie L. Wilk

Within-group norming and other forms of score adjustment in preemployment testing.

Various forms of score adjustment have been suggested and used when mean differences by gender, race, or ethnicity are found using preemployment tests. This article examines the rationales for score adjustment and describes and compares different forms of score adjustment, including within-group norming, bonus points, separate cutoffs, and banding. It reviews the legal environment for personnel selection and the circumstances leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. It examines score adjustment in the use of cognitive ability tests, personality inventories, interest inventories, scored biographical data, and physical ability tests and outlines the implications for testing practice of various interpretations of the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

Unpacking Prior Experience: How Career History Affects Job Performance

As individuals change jobs more frequently, it is increasingly important to understand what they carry from their prior work experience that affects their performance in a new organizational context. So far, explanations about the imperfect portability of experience have primarily been about firm specificity of knowledge and skill. We draw on psychological theory to propose additional sociocognitive factors that interfere with the transfer of knowledge and skill acquired from prior related work experience. As we hypothesized, we find that task-relevant knowledge and skill mediates the relationship between prior related experience and job performance and that it acts as suppressing mediator of a negative direct relationship between prior related experience and current job performance. We also find that the positive effect of prior related experience on task-relevant knowledge and skill is attenuated by higher levels of experience within the current firm.

Display rule "regulators": the relationship between supervisors and worker emotional exhaustion.

This field study examined the effect of supervisory regulation of display rules--the rules about what kind of emotion to express on the job (R. Ekman, 1992; A. Rafaeli & R. I. Sutton, 1987)--on the emotional exhaustion of subordinates. On the basis of a sample of 940 call center employees, the authors found that worker emotional exhaustion varied across supervisors within jobs, suggesting that emotion work is influenced at the supervisory, rather than job, level. Moreover, the authors found that the importance supervisors place on interpersonal job demands of their workers was positively related to worker emotional exhaustion. Worker career identity moderated the interpersonal-job-demands--emotional-exhaustion relationship, but self-efficacy did not. Study conclusions and suggestions for future research are provided.

Choosing the Company You Keep: Racial Relational Demography Outside and Inside of Work

Individuals can differ on demographic characteristics, such as race, from those with whom they interact. This relational demography can lead to poor affiliative outcomes at work when individuals are assigned to work together. However, relationships between dissimilar individuals that occur by choice and develop naturally over time may be of higher quality than those that occur due to structural causes, such as being put together in a work group. In this study, we focus on racial dissimilarity in choice relationships both outside and inside of work and find that greater racial heterogeneity in choice relationships outside of work is related to positive affiliative outcomes at work, such as trust in supervisor and extra-role behaviors, through its effects on relationships inside of the workplace. This has implications for the research on choice and relational demography in organizations, suggesting that relational demography that is a function of choice has benefits for affiliative outcomes at work and that relational demography that is a function of assignment or structure does not. This also contributes to the literature on boundary spanning suggesting that ones pattern of relational demography of relationships outside of the workplace can spillover and relate to the relationships one develops inside the workplace.