Cognitive Complexity with Employees from Entrepreneurial Financial Information Service Organizations and Educational Institutions: An Extension and Replication Looking at Pay, Benefits, And Leadership (Manuscripts) (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Cognitive processing is one of the central topics of interest for selection (Bobko, Roth & Potosky, 1999), training (Warr & Bunce, 1995), compensation (Carraher & Buckley, 1996) and employee-job matching purposes (Van Vianen, 2000) both domestically and internationally (Culpepper & Watts, 1999) and yet its influence on instrument construction has largely been ignored in the literature (Roberts & Stankov, 1999). Work on cognitive complexity, on the other hand, goes back more than 45 years to Kelly's theory of personality (1955) but so too has its potential influence on instrumentation issues been largely ignored (Carraher & Buckley, 1996). In general, cognitive complexity is a construct intended to indicate how an individual conceptualizes of his or her environment. It is based on Kelly's (1955) theory of personality which is founded on the premise that each individual has available a certain number of personal constructs or dimensions for "cognizing" and perceiving of events in their social world. It emphasizes the nature of constructs and the differences among individuals in the types and number of constructs that they employ when evaluating their external environment. We are interested with the conceptualization of cognitive complexity as concerned exclusively with the differentiation of the number of dimensions of judgment used by an individual rather than with other aspects of differentiation (Bieri et al., 1966) and how mean group differences in cognitive complexity could influence the observed dimensionalities of psychological instruments. Research on cognitive complexity has been reviewed by Stish (1997) and Streufert (1997).