ABSTRACT
Over 30 years ago, Jim Farr and I finished one of the last large-scale manual literature reviews and narrative analyses of a central topic in industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology: performance rating (Landy & Farr, 1980). We considered hundreds of empirical and theoretical articles that appeared over the 30 years preceding our article. Since the appearance of that article, it has been cited over 500 times, so it clearly did and still does address a topic of interest to I/O psychologists. We drew a number of conclusions in that article. Some of the conclusions remain as true today as they were then and are hardly controversial. For example, we argued that performance rating was much more complicated than it might appear. We suggested a process model that included some of the complicating factors. Although that model can and has been improved, no one has suggested that rating is any simpler than we suggested. Even that preliminary model was likened by Jim Naylor to the plumbing in an old Scottish castle. We also suggested that cognitive operations of raters deserved serious consideration. Although this may have been a novel proposition for I/O psychologists, it was hardly earthshaking for the rest of the psychological research community. The cognitive revolution was well under way in most areas other than I/O psychology. Again, this proposition was embraced and, along with the work of Feldman (1981), could be seen as a valuable point of departure for later research.
