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Notes: Person-environment congruence, as defined in this series of studies, is the fit between the subordinate's perceptions of the requirements of the job, and the requirements of the supervisor or of the organization. Person-environment congruence is measured in this research by the Performance Priority Survey (PPS), a Q-sort procedure in which respondents rate the relative importance of work behaviors. The priorities of the organization (reported by supervisors) and the priorities of the subordinates (or applicants) are correlated to produce an agreement score. The agreement score for each supervisor-subordinate pair measures the degree of similarity between the perceptions of the relative importance of work behaviors for the job in question, as reported by both members of the pair. The agreement score is calculated in two ways: (a) between the report of the subordinate (or applicant) and the report of the immediate supervisor, and (b) between the report of the subordinate (or applicant) and the organizational culture (aggregated reports of supervisors). The agreement scores correlate significantly with performance ratings. The PPS has a lower adverse impact on African-Americans than a typical multiple-choice test. The PPS is proposed as a means for improving the validity of selection and for reducing adverse impact.

Notes: It was the purpose of this investigation to examine the significance of the perceptions of incumbents on jobs regarding 1) how they did their work (Report of Performance), 2) how they thought their work should be done (Perceived True Requirements), and 3) how they thought their immediate supervisor wanted the work to be done (Perceived Supervisor's Requirements). It was predicted at the beginning of the study that different patterns of consistency and inconsistency among these three perceptions would be related to attitudes of the incumbents regarding themselves, their work, and their supervisors.The predictions worked out very much as expected, especially when the Perceived True Requirements were compared with the Perceived Supervisor's Requirements. This score is called “Role Agreement”, referring to the subject's report that the role requirements he has for the job agree with what he believes his supervisor requires. Subjects scoring high on Role Agreement rated their supervisors high. They also felt that they were free from pressure from their supervisors to do things the supervisor's way, and that they understood what their supervisors expected of them. They tended to be satisfied by their work and to see in it an opportunity to show what they could do.On the other hand, high Role Agreement had nothing to do with how a man rated his own work, or his basic qualifications to do the work. These attitudes were closely related to the amount of agreement between Perceived True Requirements and Report of Performance, called “Performance Suitability”. That is, people who reported that they were doing the job the way they thought it should be done tended to rate their work and their abilities high, and to derive satisfaction from their work. They felt also that their supervisors would rate their work high.A third comparison was made involving the Report of Performance and Perceived Supervisor's Requirements. To score high on this measure, a person reported that what he was actually doing was in line with what he believed his supervisor required of him. High scorers tended to rate high both their supervisor and their understanding of his requirements, and they tended to be satisfied with their work. The relationships between this type of agreement and positive attitudes were less pronounced than the others, and, in the case of over-all job satisfaction, disappeared when the effects of Role Agreement and Performance Suitability were partialed out.The results lead to the hypothesis that the two orientations, Role Agreement and Performance Suitability, are independent, and each contributes to general satisfaction and to specific job attitudes. If this hypothesis is true, much of the difficulty in finding clear-cut relations between gross measures of job satisfaction, and other variables such as productivity, and supervisory ratings may be explained.

Notes: Four rating scale formats were used by the first and second line supervisors of four groups of clerical workers. The formats varied from unstructured to highly structured. The format incorporating trait titles and behavioral descriptions of scale steps demonstrated marked superiority over both more- and less-structured formats. This format demonstrated higher inter-rater reliability, less halo and less leniency than did the other formats. Variability was approximately equal for all formats.

Notes: This report, the second in a series on the relationship of scale formats to graphic ratings, is concerned with the relationship among the seven scales employed in the study. These were divided into one group that dealt with personal attributes of the individual and another that was work-oriented.It was found that job traits showed greater agreement between first- and second-level supervisors than did personal traits. The difference is greater in the less structured of the two formats considered.Intercorrelations among job traits were substantially higher on both formats than they were for personal traits. With the exception of “leadership” ratings, raters seemed to be more lenient when rating personal characteristics than job characteristics.An over-all scale correlated from .89 to .94 with the optimum sum of the seven individual ratings. The maximum zero-order correlations for the four populations ranged from .75 to .88. The comparison of standard score regression weights indicated that the purely personal scales contributed practically nothing to the variance of the over-all scales.The value of multi-trait scales is questioned as is the impact of human relations training of supervisors.