Seek and Ye Shall Find

Abstract

Being familiar with their earlier work investigating the factor structures of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test, we read with interest Ree, Carretta, and Teachout's (2015) proposal to extend the idea of a dominant general factor (DGF) beyond the realm of cognitive abilities to other areas of research and practice in industrial–organizational (I-O) psychology. We found their ideas intriguing and their arguments compelling, but we stumbled on a reference to an article of one of the present authors (Lance, Teachout, & Donnelly, 1992) and Ree et al.’s claim that Lance et al. (1992) had found a DGF that accounted for 59% of the variance in job performance ratings in a military job. They did not. Rather, Lance et al. reported a hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model that explained parsimoniously the correlations among 15 job performance first-order factors in terms of four Job Proficiency and four other Measurement Source second-order factors. We reasoned that Ree et al. must have conducted some secondary analysis on the results presented by Lance et al., and indeed we replicated their claim by finding that the first unrotated principal component accounted for 59% of the variance in correlations among the four Proficiency second-order factors reported in Lance et al.’s Table 6.