Recent studies have attempted to reduce the cost and intrusiveness of the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) by limiting the amount of information provided to the analyst, with consistently negative results. We examined an alternative technique for improving the cost-effectiveness of the PAQ that avoids the need to rate the hundreds of items that constitute the instrument. Three groups of raters (professional job analysts, graduate students in industrial psychology who were familiar with the PAQ, and PAQ-unfamiliar undergraduates) made direct holistic ratings of the PAQ dimensions for four familiar jobs. The holistic ratings were compared with decomposed PAQ dimension profiles obtained from the item-level ratings of the professional analysts. Cronbach accuracy analyses indicated near-zero convergence between the holistic and decomposed dimension ratings, even for the professional PAQ job analysts. We conclude that holistic rating of dimensions is not an effective means of reducing the cost of a PAQ job analyses and that it is likely to be similarly ineffective with task-or ability-based instruments.Job analysis is ubiquitous in personnel psychology by virtue of the fact that its data form the foundation for virtually every aspect of human resource management. Unfortunately, most job analysis methods are time consuming and costly: considerable ratee and rater effort is spent observing jobs, providing background information, making ratings, and analyzing the results. Although precise figures are unavailable, it is likely that the high cost of the process deters many organizations from collecting and maintaining an adequate job analysis database. Consequently, it is not surprising that many recent job analysis studies (e.g.

No abstract