Reliability and its Relationship to Validity

Discussion Question:
Consider the example of the employer who was trying to identify the best employees by using a measure of punctuality because it was reliable, even though it was not especially valid. Name one or two other traits that might be examined in evaluating employees. Comment on whether each of your suggestions can be measured reliably. Also, comment on whether you think each is more valid than punctuality for determining which employees should receive bonuses.
My Response:
In our book, Patten and Newhart discuss an employer who gave employees bonuses that were based only on their punctuality. The text goes on to discuss how this method is very reliable because it is completely objective but it lacks validity because it disregards all other factors, some of which would be better reasons for an employee to receive a bonus. (Patten and Newhart, 2017). While validity should take precedence over reliability, it is also important to remember that a useful measure has high reliability and high validity (Patten and Newhart, 2017). To make the distribution of bonuses more valid, the employer may want to focus on results that her employees produced over a certain period of time. For example, if this employer is in charge of people who make sales, she could create a list of the people in her department and order them by the number of sales made or the amount earned for their sales. This approach is reliable because the employer doesn’t not have a say in the order of the employees listed. It is also valid because ranking employees on their sales record is a fair way of ordering them, as it is directly related to the job they were hired to do. Unlike the example of ranking employees by who were never late, which would eliminate a good employee who may have had car trouble one day, missing a sale is a better reason to bump an employee off of the bonus list.
Another way that an employer might distribute bonuses is by customer feedback. I’m thinking of the wall at Whole Foods as I’m writing this one. You know the one where they post the positive feedback cards that customers fill out about the employees? A bonus distribution could be based on the number of positive feedback cards each employee received. This would eliminate any bias on the employer’s part and would be high on validity because it is, again, related directly to job performance. Unlike punctuality, this is something that the employee would have complete control over while at work.
References
Patten, M. L., & Newhart, M. (2017). Understanding Research Methods: An Overview of the Essentials (10th ed.). Routledge.