Measurement of Implicit Attitudes

In organizations, with their pressing task demands and complex social dynamics, people act reactively and reflexively in many situations where unconscious processes undoubtedly matter. Implicit measures (IMs) have gained the attention of organizational researchers and practitioners because of their promise in assessing these unconscious [Page 922]processes and capturing illusive constructs such as organizational culture, employee engagement, leadership potential, and unconscious bias in the workplace.

Implicit measures are defined as those measures claiming to assess psychological processes that are implicit, automatic, mindless, unexamined, indirect, subconscious, and not intentional and where outcomes are not under conscious control. Implicit measures typically use speeded categorization tasks and response latencies as indirect measures of associations. A common implicit measure is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a speeded categorization task in which ...