Relationships among Factors in New Officer Effectiveness Report System. Final Report for Period 15 December 1975-30 April 1978.

To investigate operating characteristics of performance factors and the evaluation of potential ratings for new officers, an analysis of controlled effectiveness for 9,230 lieutenant colonels was performed. The study was done to determine whether performance factor variance was so restricted that the performance factors would not provide useful information in the rating process. Also of interest was the extent to which performance factor ratings relate to evaluation of potential ratings and whether any factor could be eliminated from the system due to its insignificant contribution. Results show each of ten performance factors has a mean rating of over 4.4 on a 5-point scale. Over sixty-three percent of the ratings are in the well-above-standard block and twenty-three percent are in the above-standard block. Deletion of no single performance factor from the rating system can be justified because of insufficient variance. Performance factors intercorrelated moderately among themselves. An optimally weighted sum of combined ratings account for forty-five percent of variance in evaluation of potential ratings. No single factor made a significant independent contribution to the prediction level. It appears that raters could provide evaluation of potential ratings of the same quality if one or a small subset of performance factors were deleted from the system. (Author/CSS)