ABSTRACT
Situational judgment tests (SJTs) have been developed to assess a wide range of constructs (Chan & Schmitt, 1997) including job knowledge (Schmidt & Hunter, 1993), tacit knowledge (Sternberg et al., 2000), cognitive ability (Weekley & Jones, 1997), interpersonal skills (Hedge, Borman, & Hanson, 1996), and personality characteristics (Ployhart, Porr, & Ryan, 2004). Typically, SJTs have been utilized as human resource selection tools. Presumably, job applicants who can identify more effective and less effective responses to job-related situations have greater job-relevant knowledge or better job-related judgment and reasoning skills and are thus, expected to have higher levels of job performance than those who are less able to identify appropriate responses to job-related situations (Hedge et al., 1996). In fact, a recent meta-analysis reported an average validity coefficient of .34 for SJTs as predictors of job performance (McDaniel, Morgeson, Finnegan, Campion, & Braverman, 2001). McDaniel et al.'s findings suggest that SJTs can predict a moderate amount of variance in job performance, and research suggests that SJTs can add incremental validity over other widely used selection tools (Chan & Schmitt, 2002; Clevenger, Pereira, Wiechmann, Schmitt, & Harvey, 2001; Schmitt & Mills, 2001). Moreover, SJTs are attractive as selection tools because they tend to show less adverse impact than cognitive ability measures (Clevenger et al, 2001; Hanson & Borman, 1995) and have high face validity (Rosen, 1961).
