A test vendor has approached the vice president of HR in your company with a new test of conscientiousness. The test vendor claims that the new conscientiousness test is at least as valid as the old test that your company is currently using—but the new test is half the price! As a result, the vice president of HR has asked you to determine whether the company should use this new test of conscientiousness or stick with the old test. This is important, because having a valid test affects hiring decisions regarding hundreds of new employees.
You have decided to examine the validity of the new test and the old test by looking at how well test scores correlate with job performance. This approach, referred to as criterion-related validity, is based on whether there is a significant correlation between a test and job performance.
You have been able to give the new conscientiousness test and the old conscientiousness test to 200 current employees. You also have supervisor job performance ratings on file for each employee regarding their job performance.
In other words, you have a lot of what you need to begin to assess the validity of the new test of conscientiousness in terms of predicting job performance.
The correlations among these different tests and measures are presented in Table 7.7. Note that statistically significant relationships are indicated by an asterisk (*).

Take a few minutes to orient yourself to this correlation matrix.

Questions 

1. What do you think about the validity of the new conscientiousness test?
2. What do you think about the validity of the old conscientiousness test?
3. Would you recommend using the new test or the old test of conscientiousness for hiring workers? Why?

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Table 7.7 1. New Conscientiousness Test Time 1 2. New Conscientiousness Test Time 2 3. Old Conscientiousness Test 4. Achievement Striving Test 5. Verbal Skills Test 6. Job Performance: Supervisor Ratings of Organizational Citizenship 1 .97* .92* .62* .11 .35* 2 .90* .65* .12 .33* 3 58* 12 32* 4 - 25* 5 61 15* 6 1