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The Maturation of Validity Generalization for Defending Ability Assessment

Industrial psychologists in the US have been defending employment tests in Federal court since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The regulations burdening defenders of employment tests and assessments were issued under the lead of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1978 and are known as the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (Uniform Guidelines).  As encouraged in the Uniform Guidelines, employers began comprehensive, industry-wide cooperative criterion-related validation studies aggregating test and criterion data for jobs in common across organizational lines.  Early sponsors included the American Petroleum Institute, the Edison Electric Institute, and the American Bankers’ Association.  The validity information from these cooperative validation studies was analyzed using meta analysis – the study of validation studies.  The cumulative knowledge gained through hundreds of peer-reviewed meta analyses has been incorporated in five revisions of professional Standards and Principles while EEOC’s 1978 Uniform Guidelines remain frozen in the “situational specificity” and “single-group validity” mindset of the early 1970s.  As Jim will illustrate, over the last quarter century, industrial psychology has progressed from the technology of reliably measuring individual differences to the science of prediction stating the general case:  measures of cognitive ability are the best predictor of job performance; the more complex the job, the better the prediction. 

PDF of Sharf Handout

  

Jim Sharf advises employment attorneys, HR managers, and fellow industrial psychologists on developing, implementing and defending selection, licensing & certification, and appraisal systems that minimize the risk of employment litigation.  Jim brings three decades’ of regulatory experience in dealing with EEO liability involving:

Age (ADEA) discrimination challenges to downsizing and reengineering decisions involving corrective actions & terminations; 

Race and gender (Title VII) discrimination challenges to selection, assessment, performance appraisal and promotion systems; 

Disparate impact claims challenging minimum education & experience requirements, licensing & certification assessments and employment tests; and 

Class certification arguments under both Title VII and the Dept. of
Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ enforcement of Executive Order 11246.

As EEOC’s Chief Psychologist in the mid-1970s, Jim drafted the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures and later served as Special Assistant to EEOC’s Chairman for whom he drafted the “race norming” prohibition in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.  He was awarded the M. Scott Myers for Applied Research in the Workplace by the Society for Industrial / Organizational Psychology for designing the prerequisite screening criteria and selection tests used by the Transportation Security Administration to hire over fifty thousand airport security screeners nationwide.  Jim has successfully defended validity generalization (VG) in lower courts - his VG reasoning having been affirmed by the Fifth Circuit.  An author of over 50 articles and chapters on fair employment, he has conducted dozens of EEO seminars and workshops with employment attorneys nationwide.  His most recent text is a risk-management analysis of contemporary trends in employment class action litigation.   Jim is a Fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the American Psychological Association.