Comparable Worth New Directions for Research (1985) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Job Evaluation Research and Research Needs
Job Evaluation Research and Research Needs
Pages 35-52
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Papers
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The discussion of needed research also focuses on issues explicitly evolving from the comparable worth controversy. PERSPECTIVES Job evaluation is generally characterized as an administrative procedure designed to help employers develop and maintain job hierarchies for purposes of making pay differentials.
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Research and research needs consistent with this orientation thus emphasize the importance of accounting for the context and longitudinal elements of job evaluation processes within organizations. AVAILABLE RESEARCH Job evaluation research to date has been most strongly influenced by the applied measurement perspective.
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Average correlations between ratings of pairs of evaluators ranged from .34 to .82 for the individual compensable factors, and the average for the total score was r = .77. When the average ratings of 5 of these raters (randomly chosen)
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(1948) found that just 3 compensable factors were necessary to account for from 86 to 96 percent of the variance in the total scores generated from a system of 11 compensable factors used in three firms.
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That is, the acceptability of job evaluation results are initially determined by the correspondence between the job hierarchy produced by the evaluation system and some existing distribution of wages for those jobs. Sometimes this is done via "policy capturing," wherein the compensable factors are formally weighted to maximize the relationship between evalua
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Advocates of comparable worth have, of course, raised objections to the use of wages as the criterion, because they conclude that existing wage distributions are biased against jobs held mainly by women (e.g., Blumrosen, 1979;TreimanandHartmann, l9811.Ifwagesarebiased,andifwages serve as the criterion for job evaluation, that bias will be reflected in the job evaluation results (Schwab and Wichern, 1983~.2 As a consequence, some analysts have suggested that wages not be used as the criterion or, if used, "corrected" for sex bias (e.g., Ellumrosen, 1979; Treiman and Hartmann, 19811. Although these recommendations are far from universally accepted (see, e.g., McCormick, 1981; Milkovich, 1980; Milkovich and Broderick, 1982; Nelson et al., 1980)
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If this line of inquiry appears fruitful (i.e., if compensable factors can be found and weighted to predict perceptually equitable job hierarchies) , subsequent research can compare results with those obtained from more traditional job evaluation methods and with existing wage distributions.
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compared sets of predominantly female with predominantly male jobs on 15 compensable factors. They then took as evidence of bias any difference between the male and female job sets on a number of psychometric characteristics (e.g., reliability, mean differences, and so forth)
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While more research is again called for, the implications of this finding for wage fairness are potentially profound. For if there is sex bias in current wage structures, replicated evidence that wage rates influence evaluations suggests that bias could enter evaluation results even though salaries are not used as an explicit external criterion in validating the system.
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Treiman (1979) reported that it is customary for organizations to weight compensable factors so that the relationship with some wage distribution is maximized.
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Thus a good bit of research has been conducted on the quality of the scores emerging from the evaluation of jobs on compensable factors. In particular, research has been performed on the reliability of scores, the validity of those scores for predicting current wage differentials, convergence between alternative evaluation systems and between compensable factors, and the degree to which scores are a function of the individuals performing the evaluations.
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A number of the research questions suggested in this paper fall within the institutional domain. These, it seems to me, are more basic than the applied measurement issues that have so far dominated the comparable worth debate.
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Barrett 1984 An internal bias analysis of a job evaluation instrument. Journal of Applied Psychology 69:648-662.
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Schutz 1952 A factor analysis of a salary job evaluation plan. Journal of Applied Psychology 36:243246.
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Schwab, D.P., and D.W. Wichern 1983 Systematic bias in job evaluation and market wages: Implications for the comparable worth debate.
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Viteles, M.S. 1941 A psychologist looks at job evaluation.
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