Ability
Contrary to what we were taught in grade school, we weren’t all created equal in our abilities. For example, regardless of how motivated you are, you may not be able to act as well as Jennifer Lawrence, play basketball as well as LeBron James, or write as well as Stephen King. Of course, all of us have strengths and weaknesses that make us relatively superior or inferior to others in performing certain tasks or activities. From management’s standpoint, the challenge is to understand the differences to increase the likelihood that a given employee will perform their job well.
What does ability mean? As we use the term, ability is an individual’s current capacity to perform the various tasks of a job. Overall abilities are essentially made up of two sets of factors: intellectual and physical.
Intellectual Abilities
Intellectual abilities are abilities needed to perform mental activities—thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Most societies place a high value on intelligence, and for good reason. Smart people generally earn more money and attain higher levels of education. They are also more likely to emerge as leaders of groups. However, assessing and measuring intellectual ability are not always simple, partially because people aren’t consistently capable of correctly assessing their own cognitive ability.66 IQ tests are designed to ascertain a person’s general intellectual abilities, but the origins, influence factors, and testing of intelligence quotient (IQ) are controversial.67 So, too, are popular college admission tests, such as the SAT and ACT, and graduate admission tests in business (GMAT), law (LSAT), and medicine (MCAT). The firms that produce these tests don’t claim they assess intelligence, but experts know they do.68
Dimensions of Intellectual Ability
The seven most frequently cited dimensions making up intellectual abilities are number aptitude, verbal comprehension, perceptual speed, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, spatial visualization, and memory.69 Exhibit 2-2 describes these dimensions.
Exhibit 2-2
Dimensions of Intellectual Ability
Intelligence dimensions are positively correlated, so if you score high on verbal comprehension, for example, you’re more likely to also score high on spatial visualization. The correlations aren’t perfect, meaning people do have specific abilities that predict important work-related outcomes when considered individually.70 However, they are high enough that researchers also recognize a general factor of intelligence, general mental ability (GMA). Evidence supports the idea that the structures and measures of intellectual abilities can be generalized across cultures. Someone in Venezuela or Sudan, for instance, does not have a different set of mental abilities than an American or Czech individual. There is some evidence that IQ scores vary to some degree across cultures, but those differences become much smaller when we take into account educational and economic differences.71
The Wonderlic Intellectual Ability Test
It might surprise you that the intelligence test most widely used in hiring decisions takes only 12 minutes to complete. It’s the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test. There are different forms of the test, but each has 50 questions and the same general construct. Here are two questions to try:
When rope is selling at $0.10 a foot, how many feet can you buy for $0.60?
Assume the first two statements are true. Is the final one:
True.
False.
Not certain.
The boy plays baseball.
All baseball players wear hats.
The boy wears a hat.
The Wonderlic measures both speed (almost nobody has time to answer every question) and power (the questions get harder as you go along), so the average score is quite low—about 21 of 50. Because the Wonderlic is able to provide valid information cheaply (for $5 to $10 per applicant), many organizations use it in hiring decisions including Publix supermarkets, Manpower staffing systems, BP, and Dish satellite systems.72 Most of these companies don’t give up other hiring tools, such as application forms or interviews. Rather, they add the Wonderlic for its ability to provide valid data on applicants’ intelligence levels.
Intellectual Ability and Job Satisfaction
While intelligence is a big help in performing a job well, it doesn’t make people happier or more satisfied with their jobs. Why not? Although intelligent people perform better and tend to have more interesting jobs, they are also more critical when evaluating their job conditions. Thus, smart people have it better, but they also expect more.73
Physical Abilities
Though the changing nature of work suggests intellectual abilities are increasingly important for many jobs, physical abilities have been and will remain valuable. Research on hundreds of jobs has identified nine basic abilities needed in the performance of physical tasks.74 These are described in Exhibit 2-3. High employee performance is likely to be achieved when the extent to which a job requires each of the nine abilities matches the abilities of employees in that job.
Exhibit 2-3
Types of Physical Abilities
Organizations are increasingly aware that an optimally productive workforce includes all types of people and does not automatically exclude anyone on the basis of broad categories of abilities. For example, a pilot program of software company SAP in Germany, India, and Ireland has found that employees with autism perform excellently in precision-oriented tasks like debugging software.75 The potential benefits of diversity are enormous for forward-thinking managers. Of course, integrating diverse people into an optimally productive workforce takes skill. We discuss how to bring the talents of a diverse workforce together in the next section.