ABSTRACT

The most frequently repeated criticisms of cognitive research on performance appraisal is that the research has restricted itself to laboratory settings with no major attempt to determine if any findings generalize to the field. As early as 1985, Ilgen and Favero (1985) noted that cognitive research considered psychological phenomena that might not operate in the same ways in the field, and suggested that this research would have only limited applications to field problems. This criticism seemed a bit premature since, by 1985, only a few of the empirical studies described here were published, and there was no reason to believe that cognitive research would not move to the field-only that it had not as yet. But these criticisms continued (e.g., Banks & Murphy, 1985; Ilgen & Klein, 1988; Murphy & Cleveland, 1991). Criticizing research for not moving to the field is an interesting process, since surely everyone who does laboratory research knows that the research must eventually move to the field. This is the only way to determine if the lab results could be generalized, but it is not always easy to get organizations to allow us to try out those ideas. Of course, cognitive studies pose a special problem for the field since they require some detailed data collection from raters, but it was always our intention to move our research into the field.