Reflective and intuitive thinking styles

meta-analysis performance employee selection employee development psychometrics

A new construct on the block for employee selection and development?

Luděk Stehlík https://www.linkedin.com/in/ludekstehlik/
12-12-2023

Alaybek et al. (2021) quite recently conducted a meta-analysis examining the relations between individual differences in reflective (rational) and intuitive thinking styles and workplace task performance, and showed that reflective thinking style has a positive and non-zero relation with task performance (ρ = 0.213).

This positive relation was stronger in environments characterized by higher task complexity, greater importance of creativity and innovation for work tasks, and higher time pressure associated with work tasks.

In the case of intuitive thinking style, there was a very small but positive relation with task performance (ρ = 0.051), and this relation was stronger in environments characterized by higher task complexity.

More important, incremental validity analyses revealed that reflective thinking style explains unique variance in task performance, beyond conscientiousness and intelligence.

It seems that a reflective thinking style may bear some extra clues to workplace performance. Not super surprising, but still far away from “Elementary, my dear Watson!” 😉

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Stehlík (2023, Dec. 12). Ludek's Blog About People Analytics: Reflective and intuitive thinking styles. Retrieved from https://blog-about-people-analytics.netlify.app/posts/2023-12-12-reflective-and-intuitive-thinking-styles/

BibTeX citation

@misc{stehlík2023reflective,
  author = {Stehlík, Luděk},
  title = {Ludek's Blog About People Analytics: Reflective and intuitive thinking styles},
  url = {https://blog-about-people-analytics.netlify.app/posts/2023-12-12-reflective-and-intuitive-thinking-styles/},
  year = {2023}
}