Situational Judgment: An Investigation of Its Process and Relationship to Scholar Performance

Abstract

Considerable disagreement exists regarding the nature of situational judgment and its relationship to performance. The purpose of this research is to address this disagreement. First, this research addresses lack of agreement regarding the nature of situational judgment by proposing that research to date has focused inappropriately on the final test score. More specifically, this research proposes that situational judgment can be shown to be a function of various cognitive processing tasks. A situational judgment inventory with embedded cognitive processing questions was developed to address these issues. The data do not support the models as proposed. After significant modification, situation awareness was the only cognitive processing variable to show promise as a predictor of situational judgment scores. Likely reasons include inappropriate operationalization of the factors.

This research also examines the relationship of situational judgment to performance in a group of university scholarship recipients. Situational judgment was proposed to be a partial mediator between accepted performance predictors and three performance criteria. The data do not support the model as hypothesized. After significant modification, the situational judgment scores were still not predictive of performance. Likely reasons for the lack of predictive validity include the nature of situational judgment, the nature of the sample, and methodological weaknesses. Implications for future research are discussed.