Situation Descriptions in Situational Judgment Tests: A Matter of Including Trait-Relevant Situational Cues?

SJTs have traditionally been conceptualized as low-fidelity simulations of how respond to work-related situations. Yet, several studies demonstrated that situation descriptions were necessary to solve some SJT items, whereas they were not needed for other SJT items. So far, no solid support was found for various factors (e.g., item characteristics, presentation format, instructions, and content domain) that make some situation descriptions relevant and others irrelevant for responding to SJT items. Building on trait activation theory, we posit that trait-relevant situational cues serve as an ignored factor in SJT situation descriptions. Across two main studies (N-1 = 269, N-2 = 1,092), we manipulated the availability of trait-relevant situational cues in SJT items to examine their impact on SJT scores and convergent validity. We found a main effect for the availability of trait-relevant situational cues on the proportion of correctly solved SJT items, but only a marginal impact on convergent validity. The current study thus helps explaining why some SJT items can be situated on the context-dependent side, whereas other items are on the context-independent side. At a practical level, this suggests that more systematically embedding trait-relevant situational cues into SJT descriptions may be a helpful design consideration to make SJT items more context-dependent, even if its impact on convergent validity appears to be limited.