Having a Workforce With High Cognitive Intelligence is the Key to Organizational Success

For an organization to stay ahead of its rivals and to stay competitive in the crowded marketplace, it is important to make use of all the new technologies, and all psychometric techniques that are braced under technology. Developing Core competencies is the key to organizational excellence, the organization has to identify and develop their core competencies not only in the technical and critical aspects but also in hiring psychometrics and managing employees psychologically. For a highly creative and motivated workforce is the key to organizational success. Other advantages of enhancing core competencies in an organization through psychometrics are,

Advantages of competency models:

1. Excellent in performance: by making use of psychometric hiring techniques and standardizing the employee training and development protocol, it becomes easy to bring about a structure to the organizational performance and employee management.
2. Incorporation of corporate culture within the business units: some of the top performing organizations make use of this technique for their success. They unify their workforce with the organizational culture and decentralize the organizational hierarchy
3. Identifying training needs: With the help of psychometric competency models, it is possible to widen the scope of employee development. It helps in framing comprehensive employee training and development plans across different platforms.
4. Augmenting the process of recruitment: It helps in the creation of robust hiring process. It matches the talents of the employees with opportunities based on data-focused analytics. It leads to consistent recruitment and talent selection process.
5. Enhances employee development: human force development activities are linked with corporate goals. It also helps in succession planning and in talent identification and development of the employees.

Making use of cognitive intelligence at Work Place:

According to Mettl.com there is a strong interdependence between cognitive intelligence and organizational success. By creating a competency framework based on cognition organizations are able to achieve success at the global front amidst tough competition. Apart from the advantages listed above that drive the organization from within, the cognitive competency framework helps the organization to sustain with a good reputation in the long run.

Practically, it is not possible to create a competency framework for each job role, given the complexity of organizations and the job units of modern times. But the job roles that demand similar cognitive abilities can be grouped so as to develop a competency framework for them. For instance, customer service associates, sales executives, and receptionist all seem to have similar job natures and demand similar skills for performing their day to day task. Jobs can be grouped based on the tasks performed. Job categorization can be performed by taking into account three core competencies such as

• Information processing: This is the proficiency of the person to carry out numerical and analytical tasks
• Solution generation: This is the ability of the person to think out of the box by making use of his creativity and abstract reasoning competencies.
• Decision making: This is the ability of the person to solve problems and to make rational and accurate decisions.

Creating a competency framework for job families:

Job categorization framework consists of pooling different types of job roles with similar functionalities under one category. The job categories differ from each other in way of its nature and the involvement of cognitive competencies. This pool of jobs can be referred to as the job family, each job family consists of job roles are similar and demand the same set of cognitive competencies.

Level 1 of the competency framework consists of those job roles that perform routine tasks day after day. The job nature does not involve tough decision-making skills or analytics. For example, clerical jobs such as receptionist, data entry operators, entry-level clerks, back-office roles, etc.

Level 2 of the competency framework involves those professionals whose job involves making use of analytical abilities. Examples are, customer service executives, entry-level accountants, business supervisors, etc.

Level 3 of the competency framework includes learners and infers who perform advanced cognitive functions such as decision making or problem-solving, E.g., Engineers, quality analyst, teachers, senior accountants, etc.

Level 4 professionals are key decision makers who infer from observed data and past experiences. E.g., research scientists, data and research analyst, strategy consultants, stock market traders, etc.

Level 5 people are those who make intelligent decisions with the help of strong problem-solving skills, they are able to deal with ambiguity wisely, e.g., Product and business innovators, founders of SMEs, etc.

Effectiveness of cognitive assessments for each of the job levels:

The main purpose of categorizing job roles into different levels is to choose the right talent for the right job based on cognitive assessments. Cognitive assessments are made based on psychometric tests and face to face interviews of the candidate. Cognitive assessments are able to identify the most promising candidate from the talent pool. After creating the assessment for a particular job role and level, its effectiveness should also be tested for reliability and validity.

To measure the validity of the cognitive assessment, we use three parameters, namely mean score, discrimination index and the difficulty index of the test. The mean score is the average that the entire candidate pool achieved at the end of the cognitive assessment. The low mean score indicates that only a small number of candidates from the job category were able to score high at the test. The ideal mean score depends on the level of the candidate that the organization is looking for. For selecting candidates with high cognitive intelligence, the assessment should have a low mean score.

The difficulty level is the probability that the candidate would answer the question correctly. All questions in the cognitive assessment are benchmarks with its difficulty quotient. The high difficulty level is inversely related to the mean score. Discrimination index is the degree at which the candidate with the overall score in the assessment is able to crack questions in the interview session. This is a validation tool that is critical to determine if the cognitive assessment tool was effective or not.

Verdict:

There is a strong Interdependence between cognitive intelligence and organizational success, luckily it is measurable and organizations should ensure that they create such tools and use them to choose the best talents for their success.