Yellow Blaze Candle Shops provide a full line of various types of candles and accessories such as candle holders. There are 150 shops located in shopping malls around the country. There are over 600 salespeople staffing these stores, each of whom has a full time manager. Staffing the manager's position, by policy, must occur by promotion from the sales staff. The company is interested in improving its identification of sales people most likely to be successful store managers. It has developed a special technique for assessing and rating the suitability of salespeople for the manager's job. To experiment with this technique, the regional HR department representative met with the store managers in the region to review and rate the promotion suitability of each of the manager's salespeople. They reviewed sales results, customer service orientation, and knowledge of store operations for each salesperson and then assigned a 1 to 3 promotion suitability rating (1= not suitable, 2= suitable in the future, and 3=suitable now). A total promotion suitability (PS) score ranging from 3 to 9 was then computed for each person. The PS scores were gathered, but not formally used in promotion decisions, for all the salespeople. Over the past year 30 salespeople have been promoted to store manager. Now it is time for the company to preliminarily investigate the validity of the PS scores and to see if their use might lead to the occurrence of adverse impact against women or minorities. Each store manager's annual overall performance rating, ranging from 1 (low performance) to 5 (high performance) was used as the criterion measure in the validation study. Below following data were available for analysis: Using the data Below calculate: 1. Average PS scores for the whole sample, males, females, nonminorities, and minorities. 2. The correlation between PS scores and performance ratings, and its statistical significance (r = .37 or higher is needed for significance at p < .05). 3. Adverse impact (selection rate) statistics for males and females, and nonminorities and minorities. Use a PS score of 7 or higher as a hypothetical passing score (the score that might be used to determine who will or will not be promoted). 4. Average performance rating scores for the whole sample, males, females, nonminorities, and minorities. For each group, evaluate whether the performance rating scores are different for subgroups of employees. Also evaluate if the magnitude of these differences is sizable enough to warrant concern for Yellow Blaze. Using the data, results, and description of the study, answer the following questions: 1. Is the PS score a valid predictor of performance as a store manager? Do you see any potential reasons why either the customer service orientation or knowledge of store operations measures might be problematic? In answering, consider issues related to reliability and validity. 2. With a cut score of 7 on the PS, would its use lead to adverse impact against women? Against minorities? If there is adverse impact, does the validity evidence justify use of the PS anyway? 3. What limitations do you see in the current study design? Do you think that the conclusions you would reach based on this sample of individuals who were promoted to store manager would generalize to the population of all salespeople who are being evaluated for promotion potential? Do you think that the method of rating performance is sufficient as a criterion, and if so, why? If not, what additional steps would you take to ensure that performance is measured adequately? 4. Would you recommend that Yellow Blaze use the PS score in making future promotion decisions? Why or why not? If you do think the company should use the PS score system, can you think of anything they could do to make these measures even better than they are already? If you do not think the PS score system should be used, can you think of any ways that this system might be improved? 5. One employee has raised questions regarding whether the performance ratings themselves are biased. This employee has not made a formal legal complaint against Yellow Blaze yet, but the organization wants to evaluate whether there is reason for concern. Based on the calculations you made regarding the differences for performance evaluation ratings for women relative to men, and for minorities relative to non-minorities, do you believe that there is reason for the organization to be concerned regarding this issue? In other words, do the data suggest that there is, in fact, a substantial difference in performance evaluation ratings for different groups of employees? How should the organization respond to this individual employee's concerns? Employee ID 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 PS Score 9 9 9 9 8 8 8 8 8 8 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 4 4 3 Performan ce 5 5 1 5 4 5 4 5 3 4 5 3 4 3 3 4 5 4 4 2 3 3 5 5 3 3 2 2 1 4 Sex M F F M F F M M F M F M M F F M M F M F F M M F M F M F M F Minority(Minorit y=1/ Nonminority=0) 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0