A formal model for the competency–demand hypothesis

✍ Scribed by Kristof Vansteelandt

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 149 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0890-2070
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0984(199909/10)13:5<429::aid-per359>3.0.co;2-r

✦ Synopsis

The goal of contextualized approaches to personality is twofold: (a) to describe individual dierences in situation±response pro®les in a parsimonious way and (b) to grasp the psychological mechanisms at the basis of these individual dierences. In this paper, it is argued that formal models can be useful to reach this goal. In particular, an item response theory (IRT) model is proposed that formalizes the competency±demand hypothesis, a possible psychological mechanism at the basis of failure behaviour (Wright and Mischel, 1987). The latter hypothesis implies that a person will display a failure response (e.g. aggression) in a situation whenever the demands of the situation are larger than the competency of the person to such an extent that the threshold of the failure response is exceeded. In an empirical study on self-reported hostility in frustrating situations, it is illustrated how the proposed model can be estimated and tested.