Justin Lin

Professor Livingston
ILRHR 2600
18 June 2016
Extra Credit Summary 4: Ones Viswesvaran
Often, one of the most important aspects of managers is the integrity
of their employees. Employers are often concerned with the trustworthiness,
honesty, dependability, and integrity of their employees, particularly in
positions where such traits can affect the profitability of an organization.
Recently, such measures of integrity have become increasing popular; paper
and pencil tests have been used to determine the predisposition of
candidates for hire and current employees to engage in counterproductive
behavior such as theft and dishonesty.
Criterion related validity and construct validity have been studied and
analyzed extensively. Personality based and overt tests of integrity have
shown to both have useful levels of predictive validity. Using the Big Five
personality dimensions and their importance, the construct validity has also
been examined. In this study, the different groups of age, gender, and race
are examined against overt integrity tests.
Employers need to consider adverse impact as well as the job related
predictors. Several qualitative reviews of integrity testing have given support
to the belief that integrity tests avoid adverse effect for women and race
based minorities. However, there are many reasons logically to reexamined
group differences in integrity tests. First, previous research has confounded
adverse impact with group differences. Second, the Civil Rights Act of 1991

did not prevent previous publishers from using adjustments against the
specific groups. Thirdly, most research referenced in this study were from
unpublished, non-technical sources. Fourthly, single integrity instruments
have made up the majority of previous empirical results. In this study,
several overt instruments are used to study the question of group difference
in the context of integrity tests. Fifthly, the research in this study uses real
job applications as opposed to students looking for course credit or
compensation. Sixth, most studies about group differences have used limited
samples. This study will have 700,000 individuals, making the sample much
more representative. Thus, the results should be much more generalizable.
Finally, most research in this area has been restricted to Whites and Blacks.
Other ethnic groups such as Asian Americans and American Indians have not
been compared against other racial groups in this sort of research.
Results have shown that women score 0.16 units higher than men. On
average, higher age is correlated with greater integrity. Youthful indiscretions
likely could be the plausible reason that those over the age of 40 tend to
score about 0.08 units higher. Racial differences on overt integrity tests were
found to be negligible. The small differences were likely due to the
constructs. Future studies ought to look at integrity tests as correlated with
race differences. The use of differential cutoffs and separate scoring keys
and score adjustments are not the reason for the small race differences.
Blacks scored 0.04 lower than Whites. Hispanics scored 0.14 higher than
whites. Asians scored 0.04 higher than whites. American Indians scored 0.08

standard deviations above whites. However, despite these findings,

correcting against the unit weighted mean reveals negligible differences. The
results of the study lead to conclusions that the magnitude of subgroup
differences need further clarification and study. As the largest study,
empirically and demographically, the research is useful for clarifying the
conception of group differences in overt integrity tests.
Reference:
Ones, Deniz S. Viswesvaran Chockalingam. (1998). Gender, Age, and
Race Differences on Overt Integrity Tests: Results Across Four Large-Scale Job
Applicant Data Sets. Journal of Applied Psychology.