Cognitive/Mental Abilities in Work and Organizational Settings

Some Definitions

Both Carroll (1993) and Fleishman (1972) define abilities as relatively enduring attributes of an individual's capability for performing a particular range of different tasks; however, these abilities may develop over time and with exposure to multiple situations (Snow & Lohman, 1984).

Recently, the term ‘competencies’ has come into use to describe individual attributes related to quality of work performance (see e.g. McClelland, 1973). A competency has been defined as an ‘underlying characteristic of an individual which is causally related to effective or superior performance in a job’ (Boyatzis, 1982). This definition is, of course, consistent with our definition of ability. However, lists of competencies often contain a mixture of knowledges, skills, abilities, motivation, beliefs, values, and interests.

The distinction between ‘abilities’ and ‘skills’ is often made (see e.g. Fleishman, 1966, 1972); where an ability is a general trait of an individual that is inferred from the relationships among performances of individuals observed across a range of different tasks, skills are more dependent on learning and represent the product of training in particular tasks. The development of a given skill (e.g. airplane piloting) is predicated, in part, on the individual's possession of relevant underlying abilities (e.g. spatial orientation, multi-limb coordination). These underlying abilities are related to the rate of acquisition and final levels of performance that a person can achieve in particular skills (see Ackerman, 1988; Fleishman, 1972).

Fleishman (1982) and Fleishman and Quaintance (1984) have described the different conceptual bases for defining ‘tasks’. Wheaton (1973) proposed that a task reflects an organized set of responses to a specified stimulus situation intended to bring about the attainment of a goal state. This definition of a task is similar to one proposed by Hackman (1968) and McCormick (1976) and, more recently, by Carroll (1993), who defines a task as ‘an activity in which a person engages in order to achieve a specified objective or result’.

Tasks can be described in terms of the abilities required to perform them (Fleishman, 1972). Tasks requiring the same ability or a similar group of abilities would be placed in the same category. The use of empirical information on the relationships among performances of individuals performing different tasks allows us to identify the basic underlying abilities (Fleishman, 1972; Carroll, 1993).