A Contemporary Look at the Relationship Between General Cognitive Ability and Job Performance

The relationship between general cognitive ability (GCA) and overall job performance has been a longaccepted fact in industrial and organizational psychology. However, the most prominent data on this relationship date back more than 50 years. This meta-analysis examines the relationship between GCA and overall job performance using studies from the current century. Results across 153 samples and a total sample size of 40,740 show a mean observed validity of.16, with a residual SD of.09. Correcting for unreliability in the criterion and correcting predictive studies for range restriction produces a mean corrected validity of.22 and a residual SD of.11. While this is a much smaller estimate than the.51 value offered by Schmidt and Hunter (1998), that value has been critiqued by Sackett et al. (2022), who offered a mean corrected validity of.31 based on integrating findings from prior meta-analyses of 20th century data. We obtain a lower value (.22) for 21st century data. We conclude that GCA is related to job performance, but our estimate of the magnitude of the relationship is lower than prior estimates.