Study On ’China Civil Servants’ Tacit Knowledge Situational Judgment Tests’ Development And Its Reliability And Validity

Personnel selection and assessment is an important function of modern humanresource management. It plays an important role in the human resources activities suchas recruitment, training and performance appraisal. Many tools and methods can beused for personnel assessment. In the past two decades, situational judgment testsbecame more and more popular because it can investigate the structure of a variety ofabilities, has a good predictive validity, and other advantages. From the trend ofresearch in this field, researchers have started to pay attention to measurement constructof situational judgment tests, and began to develop construct-oriented situationaljudgment tests. However, there is lack of empirical test and measurement process onconstruct of situational judgment tests. In addition, the foreign researchers haveaccumulated a lot of empirical research results about the reliabilty and validity ofsituational judgment test, while domestic researchers mainly focus on the form ofprocedures and tests,and the reliability and validity test of situational judgment testlacks.Based on previous studies, the civil servants’ tacit knowledge structure model andthe construct-oriented development thougt, this study developed situational judgmenttest of the China civil servants’ tacit knowledge, then tested its reliabilty andvalidity.This study can be divided into two sub-studies. The first is about thedevelopment of Situational Judgment Tests. Using seven-dimensional structure of thecivil servants’ tacit knowledge as measurement construct, this study developed the scaleof ‘the civil servants’ tacit knowledge situational judgment tests’.Then, this study madea discrimination test. The correlation coefficients of the response item scores and therespective subscale scores are between0.354and0.720. All the correlation coefficientsreached a significant level. The second sub-study is the reliabilty and validity ofsituational judgment test research. Based on internal consistency analysis results, theCronbach’s alpha coefficient of the total scale is0.76, and the Cronbach’s alphacoefficients of sub-scales are from0.62to0.75. Construct validity of situationaljudgment tests was tested with confirmatory factor analysis method, and the resultshowed that the situational judgment test had measured seven dimensions of the civilservants’ tacit knowledge which proved the multidimensional nature of situationaljudgment tests. Through comparing the scores of better perfromance owners with ordinery perfromance owners, it was found that there was a significant difference andthe former was better than the latter, which indicated the scale has a goodcriterion-related validity. A comparative study between two common modes of score bymarks showed that the mark way was one of factors which impacted the vality ofsituational judgment tests, and the mark way of isometric scale was unfit.This research had accumulated the empirical results about the reliability andvalidity of situational judgment test in theory, and provided an effective measurementtool for the measurement of the civil servants’ tacit knowledge in practice which can beused by government’s personnel department with extent applied prospect.