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The Incremental Contribution of Complex Problem-Solving Skills to the Prediction of Job Level, Job Complexity, and Salary

Journal of Business and Psychology volume 34, pages 825–845 (2019)Cite this article

Abstract

As work life becomes increasingly complex, higher order thinking skills, such as complex problem-solving skills (CPS), are becoming critical for occupational success. It has been shown that individuals gravitate toward jobs and occupations that are commensurate with their level of general mental ability (GMA). On the basis of the theory of occupational gravitation, CPS theory, and previous empirical findings on the role of CPS in educational contexts, we examined whether CPS would make an incremental contribution to occupational success after controlling for GMA and education. Administering computerized tests and self-reports in a multinational sample of 671 employees and analyzing the data with structural equation modeling, we found that CPS incrementally explained 7% and 3% of the variance in job complexity and salary, respectively, beyond both GMA and education. We found that CPS offered no incremental increase in predicting job level. CPS appears to be linked to job complexity and salary in a range of occupations, and this link cannot be explained as an artifact of GMA and education. Thus, CPS incrementally predicts success, potentially contributes to the theory of job gravitation, and adds to the understanding of complex cognition in the workplace.

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Notes

  1. Ederer et al.’s (2015) study served as a starting point for the current study and used a subsample (n = 399) with less than 50% overlap with the sample used here. More important, the current study includes two dependent variables, occupational level and job complexity, not examined by Ederer et al. (2015) and frames the analysis in terms of a multivariate model with multiple dependent variables, in contrast to the univariate wage regression model in Ederer et al. (2015).

  2. Several of the authors of the current paper were part of the team that developed the computerized CPS assessments used in PISA.

  3. We collected data from 676 respondents but dropped five employees who reported unusually high or low wages relative to the median (with a cut-off of more than 2.5 times the Median Absolute Deviation [MAD; Hampel, 1974] around the median; as recommended by Leys, Ley, Klein, Bernard, & Licata, 2013). As a result, our sample included N = 671 working individuals.

  4. Mean monthly salary per job level were $1,495.84 (SD = 292.27) on Level 1, $2,044.72 (SD = 1,740.99) on Level 2, $2,929.71 (SD\ = 1,565.23) on Level 3, $2,907.23 (SD = 1,377.89) on Level 4, and $5,916.80 (SD = 3,371.15) on Level 5 (i.e., Managers). This finding largely supports that ISCO-08 sorts jobs by salary levels, as suggested by the OECD (2013a).

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Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg (ATTRACT “ASK21”), and the European Union (290683; LLLight’in’Europe). We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Silvia Castellazzi, André Kretzschmar, Jonas Neubert, and Alexander Patt, who aided in collecting the data reported here.

Disclaimer

Samuel Greiff is one of two authors of the commercially available COMPRO-test that is based on the multiple complex systems approach and that employs the same assessment principle as MicroDYN, and he receives royalty fees for COMPRO. The COMPRO test was not used in this study, but its similarities to MicroDYN are substantial. For any research and educational purpose, a free version of MicroDYN is available.

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  1. University of Luxembourg, Institute of Cognitive Science and Assessment, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Jakob Mainert, Christoph Niepel & Samuel Greiff

  2. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Kevin R. Murphy

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  1. Jakob Mainert
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  2. Christoph Niepel
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Correspondence to Jakob Mainert.

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Mainert, J., Niepel, C., Murphy, K.R. et al. The Incremental Contribution of Complex Problem-Solving Skills to the Prediction of Job Level, Job Complexity, and Salary. J Bus Psychol 34, 825–845 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-018-9561-x

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