Selecting employees in the 21st century: predicting the contribution of industrial-organizational psychology to Canada

Canadian Psychology, Feb-May 1998 by Latham, Gary P, Sue-Chan, Christina

Abstract

The changes that will occur in the workplace as Canada enters the 21st century are contrasted with those that occurred when this country entered the 20th century in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) required of employees, and the contribution of psychologists to predicting them. The present emphasis on job analysis, validity, reliability, freedom from bias and practicality will continue in the 21th century. There will be a shift in emphasis from predicting organizational commitment to commitment to one's profession. Issues regarding validity generalization will be called into question as the concept of KSAs is broadened to include the ability to adapt to various cultures. Concerns regarding workforce diversity on the basis of race, sex, and age will be replaced by those due to cultural differences among three distinct civilizations, namely Western, Islamic, and Confucian. There will be a shift in emphasis from criterion-related validity of selection procedures to finding evidence of construct and content validity.

Arguably there are at least four strategic thrusts that will differentiate the successful from the unsuccessful organization in the 21st century. First, the global rather than only the local environment must be taken into account in terms of external factors that will enhance or threaten an organization's existence. Second, strategies must be developed in terms of a vision or a superordinate goal as well as a series of specific proximal goals that will enable the attainment of the distal goal. Third, an organization must take the necessary steps to enhance its financial strength so that it is capable of implementing its strategy. Fourth, and, most importantly, an organization must select individuals who are capable of implementing all of the above. And this must be done in a legally and ethically defensible manner with regard to workforce diversity. The purpose of this paper is to predict the contribution that industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists can make to Canadian organizations in addressing selection issues in the 21st century.

The global turbulence that is likely to transform Canadian work settings in the 21st century will be no greater in magnitude than those that confronted Canada at the dawn of the 21st century. During the 1880s, the agricultural society employed more people in North America than all other sectors combined. In the United States, the percentage of workers employed by the industrial sector increased from 14% in 1860 to only 19% in 1890, and the average number of workers per manufacturing enterprise increased from 7.8% in 1869 to only 10.4% in 1899 (Jacques, 1996).

The industrial revolution transformed the nature of Work as Canada entered the 20th century. Mass production technology, such as meat packing lines, mechanical grain transportation and cigarette rolling machines had just been invented. Industries were centralized in the early 1900s to capture the benefits of large-scale production. The outcome was a shift of employment from the farming sector of Canada to large mass production enterprises. It was, Bridges (1994) argued, the era of the demise of work and the birth of the job. Technology suddenly required more than mere brute force from farm labourers; knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) critical to the operation of the newly invented technology was now needed. Ongoing technological breakthroughs enabled organizations to increase market demand for their products. Their success in creating a consumer society meant that organizations had to hire vast numbers of employees to keep up with growing consumer demand. To ensure that consumer demand for products would be met, organizations created "standing armies" of relatively permanent employees to perform tasks that would be ongoing for as long as there was product demand (Smith, 1994). The implicit contract between the employer and employee was job security for as long as the employee put forth effort. Employees repaid this security with their commitment to the organization.

Prior to the 1960s, 90% of immigrants to Canada were from Europe (Belcourt, Sherman, Bohlander, & Snell, 1996). These immigrants were not only the target of organizations' attempts to create a consumer society, they were the supply source of those organizations' growing demand for employees. At the turn of the 20th century those people came to Canada with few skills, and even less education. Nevertheless, they had a high need to achieve a standard of living that they could not hope to attain had they remained in Europe.

It was at the beginning of this century of business turbulence that Taylor (1911/1967), an industrial engineer, developed a systematic approach to work analysis to identify what a person must do on the job to be effective. Taylor's work analysis, labelled scientific management, was the first attempt in the 20th century to "engineer" the work-place.