Scenario III
The HR Director at a company is interested in determining what employee characteristics relate to high sales performance. Due to the importance of interacting with customers she suspects that sales associates who are higher in the personality trait Agreeableness will have higher sales numbers. However, she also believes that having experience on the job may impact the nature of the relationship between Agreeableness and sales numbers. To examine this relationship she has a sample of 200 current sales associates complete an Agreeableness measure (with scores ranging from 0-100), obtains tenure information (in months), and collects sales numbers (in dollars) for the current quarter. She finds that higher Agreeableness scores are positively related to sales numbers for low tenure employees (0-2 years). However, Agreeableness is not related to sales numbers for higher tenure employees (2+ years). Based on these results the HR Director decides to implement the use of the Agreeableness measure for hiring decisions for new sales associates and promotion decisions for experienced sales associates (2+ years).
Please describe the following:
1. The design used by the researcher
2. The predictor(s) [independent variable(s)]
3. Outcome(s) [dependent variable(s)]
4. The moderator variable
5. Describe whether you think the conclusions that HR Director came to are accurate and justify your conclusion.
