ABSTRACT
Employee reliability (or unreliability) is often conceptualized quite narrowly. Consequently, employee screening procedures that focus on theft necessarily ignore a number of other indicators of unreliability; these include substance abuse, insubordination, absenteeism, excessive grievances, bogus worker compensation claims, temper tantrums, and various forms of passive aggression. Unreliable employees engage in a variety of undesirable behaviors ranging from theft and sabotage to absenteeism and insubordination; in so doing, they also generate substantial direct and indirect costs for their employers. Two goals are presents in organizational delinquency construct. The first is to describe the development of a personality measure designed to assess employee reliability and evaluate its construct validity. The measure is a reference test for the organizational delinquency construct. A more general goal is to strengthen the case for the usefulness of personality measurement in personnel selection. With direct cost accounting we can estimate the economic consequences of using the employee reliability scale for selection.
