Policy-capturing has been employed extensively in the past to examine how organizational decision makers use the information available to them when making evaluative judgments. The purpose of this article is to provide researchers with guidelines for enhancing the reliability and validity of their studies. More specifically, the authors identify issues researchers may want to consider when designing such studies and offer suggestions for effectively addressing them. They draw on a review of 37 articles from 5 major journals to identify “best practice” and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative approaches to resolving the various issues. The key issues are (a) the realism of the approach and its effect on both internal and external validity, (b) the limits of the full factorial design, (c) the need for orthogonal cues, (d) sample size and statistical power, and (e) the assessment of reliability. The analysis also includes comparisons with conjoint analysis, a similar methodology used in the marketing research literature.

A meta-analytic study was conducted involving primarily published research from 1%6 to 1984 and focusing on the relationship between goal-setting variables and task performance. Two major sets of studies were analyzed, those contrasting hard goals (goal difficulty) versus easy goals, and those comparing specific hard goals (goal specificity/difftculty) versus general goals, "do best" instructions, or no goal. As expected, strong support was obtained for the goal difficulty and goal specificity/difficulty components of E. A. Locke's (1968a, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 3, 157-189) theory. A two-stage approach was employed to identify potential moderators of the goal difficulty and goal specificity/difficulty-performance relationships. Setting (laboratory versus field) was identified as a moderator of the relationship between goal specificity/difftculty and task performance. Two supplemental meta-analyses yielded support for the efficacy of combining specific hard goals with feedback versus specific hard goals without feedback and for participatively set goals versus assigned goal setting (when goal level is held constant), although this latter finding was interpreted as inconclusive based on the limited studies available. Implications for future research are addressed.

This study investigates the relationship among trust, functional diversity, and team performance in a virtual environment. The authors conducted research on more than 200 team members representing 33 virtual teams and found that both trust and functional diversity had a direct impact on team performance using team member ratings; however, neither had a direct impact on team performance using external manager ratings. Instead, trust was found to moderate the functional diversity to performance relationship using the managers' ratings. Differences in the development of trust between virtual teams and face-to-face teams are also discussed, as are the implications that the results of this study may have on organizations, managers, and team members.

The estimation of standard deviations of performance levels is crucial to the application of utility theory A recently developed estimation procedure involves supervisors' point estimates of 50th and 85th percentiles on an assumed underlying normal distribution of performance (Schmidt, Hunter, McKenzie, & Muldrow, 1979) Using archival data from a large insurance company, it is demonstrated that this estimation procedure is quite accurate in reproducing actual standard deviations and that the assumption of underlying normality may be justified when an objective performance criterion is utilized. A modification of the procedure, using consensual feedback, is suggested to reduce large variation across supervisory estimates

Perceptions about the Pearson product moment correlation, r, from bivariate scatterplots were investigated through the use of a questionnaire. It was found that subjects who are relatively sophisticated in psychometric techniques tend to underestimate the magnitude of r, with most pronounced disparity in the range .2 < |r| < .6. Additionally, estimates of r from specially designed scatterplots indicated that subjects (1) correctly estimated the effects of range restriction, (2) underestimated the effects of attenuating outliers, (3) incorrectly reduced estimates of r when the regression slope was relatively high or low, and (4) often failed to consider the effects of removing the middle third of the data. Several implications of these generally conservative estimations are discussed.