s the amount of time and resources that a company has to expend in order to learn as much as possible about given job situations. Functional job analysis is considered to have a low level of generalizability, meaning that results cannot be readily applied outside of the original context in which they were obtained. Task inventory, on the other hand, provides highly generalized results, with the consequence that results gained from task inventories can be applied to similar situations, thus saving the company additional money and time in assessing its human resource needs and system.
If the job analysis system that a company uses is highly reliable, the results from that system can be used with greater confidence than if the results are suspect due to low reliability. In this way, a company may use a system that has a poor reliability record and base future decisions on that system, only to find that because of the low reliability, the decisions are not the best for the company. Reliability thus becomes an important factor when considering which job analysis system is right for a particular organization. Functional job analysis provides a poor level of reliability while task inventory offers a very good level of reliability. Based on this information, managers who use functional job analysis should view their results carefully and understand that the results may have limited applicability within the organization. Managers who work in organizations that use task inventories will find that they have a higher degree of confidence when making decisions based on the results obtained from those inventories.
Closely related to reliability is the issue of validity. The validity of the job analysis system refers to the legitimacy of the results. Functional job analysis has a fair to good level of validity, while task inventories provide a very good level of validity. As with the previous two considerations, task inventory has a hi...