Exploring the Relationship between Cognitive Ability Tilt and Job Performance

Abstract

Most of the work examining the relationship between intelligence and job performance has conceptualized intelligence as g. Recent findings, however, have supported the claim that more specific factors of intelligence contribute to the prediction of job performance. The present study builds upon prior work on specific cognitive abilities by investigating the relationship between ability tilt, a measure representing differential strength between two specific abilities, and job performance. It was hypothesized that ability tilt would differentially relate to job performance based on whether or not the tilt matched the ability requirements of the job, and that ability tilt would provide incremental validity over g and specific abilities for predicting performance when the tilt matched job requirements. Hypotheses were tested using a large sample from the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) database. Ability tilt related with job performance in the expected direction for 27 of the 36 tilt-job combinations examined, with a mean effect size of .04 when the tilt matched job requirements. The mean incremental validities for ability tilt were .007 over g and .003 over g and specific abilities, and, on average, tilt explained 7.1% of the total variance in job performance. The results provide limited evidence that ability tilt may be a useful predictor in addition to ability level, and contribute to our understanding of the role of specific abilities in the workplace.