Work Analysis

We're The Experts
PSTC authored and publishes the Common-Metric Questionnaire (CMQ), which in our assessment is the premier standardized job analysis inventory available.

Our staff have been actively involved in developing job analysis inventories for over 30 years. After acquiring extensive experience developing custom task-based job analysis inventories, we changed our focus to deal with the challenge of developing a standardized job analysis questionnaire that describes jobs on a "common metric" that allows meaningful cross-job comparison.

The Common-Metric Approach
Although customized task inventories are useful for many purposes, they are expensive to develop, and limited in terms of their ability to allow you to draw meaningful comparisons between task-dissimilar jobs.

We began by conducting research on the Job Element Inventory (JEI), which is summarized in the publications below:

Harvey, R. J., Friedman, L., Hakel, M. D., & Cornelius, E. T. (1988). Dimensionality of the Job Element Inventory (JEI), a simplified worker-oriented job analysis questionnaire. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73, 639-646.

Harvey, R.J. (1991). Job analysis. In M.D. Dunnette & L. Hough, Eds, Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Harvey, R. J., & Wilson, M. A. (2000). Yes Virginia, there is an objective reality in job analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21, 829-854.

However, as the Harvey and Wilson (2000) and Harvey (1991) studies describe in detail, it became apparent that first-generation standardized job analysis instruments like the JEI suffer from a range of limitations that seriously limit their usefulness, including

Poor content coverage, especially regarding the kinds of decision making and interpersonal activities that dominate in white-collar and service-oriented jobs.
Subjective, "relativistic" rating scales that make it difficult for analysts to provide accurate, defensible ratings of work activities.
Describing work activities that are too abstract to be objectively verified, which further complicates the task of collecting data that can withstand EEO scrutiny.

To address these limitations, PSTC developed CMQ in 1989. CMQ was designed to provide practitioners with a tool that would allow them to collect high-quality, defensible job analysis data. See the commonmetric.com site for an overview of CMQ, and the CMQonline.com site for additional details and ordering/pricing information.