“A Contemporary Look at the Relationship Between General Cognitive Ability and Job Performance”, Paul R. Sackett, Saron Demeke, Isaac M. Bazian, Anne Marie Griebie, Reed Priest, Nathan R. Kuncel2023-12-07 (IQ & SES)⁠:

The relationship between general cognitive ability (GCA) and overall job performance has been a long-accepted fact in industrial and organizational psychology. However, the most prominent data on this relationship date back more than 50 years.

This meta-analysis examines the relationship between GCA and overall job performance using studies from the current century.

Results: across 153 samples and a total sample size of 40,740 show a mean observed validity of 0.16, with a residual SD of 0.09. Correcting for unreliability in the criterion and correcting predictive studies for range restriction produces a mean corrected validity of 0.22 and a residual SD of 0.11.

While this is a much smaller estimate than the 0.51 value offered by Schmidt & Hunter 1998, that value has been critiqued by Sackett et al 2022, who offered a mean corrected validity of 0.31 based on integrating findings from prior meta-analyses of 20^th century data.

We obtain a lower value (0.22) for 21^st century data. We conclude that GCA is related to job performance, but our estimate of the magnitude of the relationship is lower than prior estimates.

[Keywords: cognitive ability, job performance, validity, meta-analysis]