Determining important tasks within jobs: A policy-capturing approach

Abstract

The job holders' process for judging overall task importance was analyzed using a policy-capturing approach. Sixty incumbents of four jobs rated their respective tasks on five dimensions (e.g., task difficulty) and on the criterion, overall task importance. The results indicated that incumbents' judgments of importance were primarily reflective of task criticality and difficulty of learning the task. Composites of task importance formed from these two component dimensions were found to be more reliable and convergent with average ratings of overall importance than holistic judgments of importance or judgments of relative time spent. In addition, a Q-mode factor analysis indicated that most incumbents used a linear combination of task criticality and difficulty of learning the task regardless of the job they held, suggesting that a composite of these two measures may be generalizable across jobs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)