Rethinking Interviewing and Personnel Selection (eBook)

Teresa Carla Oliveira is director of the Coimbra Centre for Innovative Management and a member of the Centre for Health Studies and Research in the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra where she teaches and directs programmes in organisational psychology and management. After qualifying for university in science she took her undergraduate degree in psychology and a master's in educational psychology at Coimbra, before gaining a doctorate in organisational psychology at the University of London. She has researched in the areas of leadership, human resource management, psychological contract and performance management. She currently is addressing such issues in research on the scope and limits of government reforms of health services and of the judiciary, as well as in management of small and medium enterprise.

Cover 1
Rethinking Interviewing and Personnel Selection 4
Contents 6
List of Figures 8
List of Tables 9
Preface 10
Acknowledgements 11
About the Author 13
Introduction 14
1 What Selection Theory Claims 20
The normative mission 21
Box 1.1 Inviting inferential overload 22
Principles, norms and practice 23
Questions on bias 24
Survival of the fittest 26
Cognitive fit and candidate fit 27
Person–job and person–organisation fit 28
Social and cultural differences 30
Implications 31
2 Who Knows for a Fact? 33
Understanding in context 34
perceptions and paradigms 36
Schema and socio-cognitive dynamics 37
Rethinking schema and scripts 39
Tacit knowledge 40
Not by focal attention 41
Tacit rules, implicit norms and selection 43
3 Yet How Do We Know? 46
Competing hemispheric rationalities 47
Box 3.1 Left and right hemispheric thinking 48
Hume and after 49
The self and the other 51
Implicit learning and tacit knowledge 53
The cognitive continuum 55
Neural Darwinism 55
Referential rationality 56
The socially constructed self 58
4 What’s the Logic? 60
Conscious and unconscious logic 61
Grammar, symmetrisation and unconscious logic 63
Tacit rules and implicit norms 64
Norms and mental models 66
Iterative logic, fractals and semi-structured interviewing 67
Iterative method and selection sequencing 68
5 Where’s the Proof? 70
Predictors and proof 71
Cognition and prediction 72
Questions on verification 73
Grounded theory and selection 75
Social construction, discourse and verification 76
6 Why Dismiss Intuition? 78
Intuition and scientific method 79
Recognising intuition 80
Intuition’s setback 81
No time to reflect 83
Premise dependence 84
Intuition as iterative processing 85
Intuition and tacit knowledge 87
Intuition and selection decision-making 87
Box 6.1 Intuition, cognition and understanding 88
An alternative conceptual framework 89
7 Interviewing and Psychological Contract 91
Bourdieu's habitus 92
The interview as a psychological contract 94
Perceptions and presumptions 95
Career anchors and plateaux 97
Theory and practice 98
8 Tacit Knowledge and Implicit Learning 100
Learning from work and from life 100
Making sense of experience 103
Fractal insights 104
Starting from the self 105
Case study A – Identifying lifelong learning 106
Surfacing tacit knowledge and implicit learning 106
Findings and implications 107
9 Rethinking Selection Theory 109
Sets-within-sets of meaning 109
Level, content and role fit 111
The interview as iteration 114
Dispositional and situational logics 115
Dichotomising interviewing methods 117
Integrating structured and iterative methods 117
Gaining a balance 120
10 What Managers Have in Mind 122
Not initially premised 122
The selection context 124
Content analysis 126
Case study B – Personnel selection in a public broadcasting corporation 126
Surfacing tacit knowledge in choice of selection criteria 126
Structured and semi-structured interviewing 128
Selectors and selection sequencing 129
Findings 130
Different rationales but consistent logic 132
Implicit sets of criteria 133
Situational and dispositional logics 135
Unconscious logic and procedural and distributive justice 135
Findings 138
Structured and semi-structured panel interviewing 139
Integrating cognitive fit and candidate fit 140
Implications of the findings 142
11 Power and Panel Interviewing 144
Not only from the top: Mintzberg 144
Foucault and knowledge as power 145
Implicit power 146
Not for its own sake 148
Implicit logic and power dynamics in selection 149
The Head of HRM 151
The middle operational manager 151
The junior operational manager 153
The training manager 154
The company psychologist 154
Implications 155
12 So Where Now? 158
1. The empirical constraint 159
2. The cognitive constraint 160
3. Inferential and referential rationality 161
4. Displacing the tacit and implicit 162
5. Dismissing intuition 163
6. Iterative logic and iterative interviewing 164
Implications 165
Annex: Sets-within-Sets of Criteria in Panel Interviewing 168
1. Individual criteria 168
Specific knowledge 168
General knowledge 168
Abilities 169
Skills 169
Values 169
Beliefs 170
Personality 170
Person–organisation fit 171
Person–operation fit 171
2. Interrelated sets of criteria 172
KAS (knowledge–abilities–skill) relating to operation fit 172
VBP (values–beliefs–personality) relating to operation fit 173
KAS relating to organisation fit 173
VBP relating to organisation fit 174
Operational capability 174
Operational culture 175
Organisational capacity 175
Organisational culture 175
Bibliography 177
Index 195