CCP Job Analysis and Documentation 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which job analysis approach focuses on the behaviors workers use rather than the tasks they perform, making it more transferable across organizations?
- Task-oriented analysis
- Worker-oriented analysis (Correct answer)
- Functional job analysis
- Structured job interview
Correct answer: Worker-oriented analysis
Worker-oriented job analysis identifies the human behaviors, attributes, and characteristics required to perform work, which are more generalizable across contexts.
Question 2: The critical incident technique (CIT) is most useful in job analysis for:
- Generating a comprehensive list of all routine tasks
- Identifying behaviors that distinguish effective from ineffective performance (Correct answer)
- Documenting the physical demands of manual labor jobs
- Establishing salary ranges for benchmark positions
Correct answer: Identifying behaviors that distinguish effective from ineffective performance
CIT collects examples of especially effective or ineffective job behaviors to highlight which actions truly matter for performance.
Question 3: A compensable factor is best defined as:
- A legally mandated minimum qualification for a job
- A job characteristic that an organization values and is willing to pay for (Correct answer)
- The total compensation paid to an employee for performing a job
- A factor used to adjust pay for geographic cost-of-living differences
Correct answer: A job characteristic that an organization values and is willing to pay for
Compensable factors are dimensions of job content—such as skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions—that the organization recognizes as bases for pay.
Question 4: Which of the following is the primary advantage of using a structured questionnaire over interviews in job analysis?
- It allows for deeper probing of unique job aspects
- It can be administered to many incumbents simultaneously, improving statistical reliability (Correct answer)
- It is better for capturing tacit knowledge embedded in complex jobs
- It requires no subject-matter expert review before deployment
Correct answer: It can be administered to many incumbents simultaneously, improving statistical reliability
Structured questionnaires can be distributed to large samples of incumbents simultaneously, producing quantitative data that improves reliability and statistical comparability.
Question 5: In functional job analysis (FJA), worker functions are organized along three hierarchies. Which set correctly identifies those hierarchies?
- Skills, knowledge, and abilities
- Data, people, and things (Correct answer)
- Input, process, and output
- Cognitive, affective, and psychomotor
Correct answer: Data, people, and things
FJA, developed by Sidney Fine, classifies worker functions along three hierarchies: data, people, and things, each with increasing levels of complexity.
Question 6: An organization is conducting a compensation survey and needs to identify 'benchmark jobs.' What criterion best defines a benchmark job for this purpose?
- A job whose duties change frequently in response to business needs
- A job with stable, well-defined content that is common across multiple employers (Correct answer)
- A job unique to the organization that requires specialized analysis
- A job filled exclusively by employees hired from internal promotions
Correct answer: A job with stable, well-defined content that is common across multiple employers
Benchmark jobs have stable, well-understood content that is sufficiently similar across organizations, making them suitable anchors for external market comparisons.
Question 7: Which legal doctrine holds that job evaluation results should reflect only job content, not the wage rates historically paid to incumbents, to avoid perpetuating past pay discrimination?
- Comparable worth (Correct answer)
- Pay equity
- Equal work standard
- Job relatedness
Correct answer: Comparable worth
Comparable worth argues that jobs requiring similar levels of skill, effort, and responsibility should receive equal pay, regardless of the sex composition of the job's workforce or its historical wage.
CCP Job Analysis and Documentation 3
Which job analysis approach focuses on the behaviors workers use rather than the tasks they perform, making it more transferable across organizations?