Organizational and Situational Influences on Adjudicative Decisions

Abstract

In April 2001, the General Accounting Office released the results of a large-scale study addressing the consistent use of guidelines and appropriateness of quality control in Department of Defense (DOD) Personnel Security Adjudication facilities. GAO's study reported both a lack of consistent application of established adjudicative guidelines as well as a need for stronger quality control within individual DOD central adjudication facilities (CAFs). In addition to consistency and quality concerns, DOD also is dealing with a large backlog of reinvestigations that have not been performed in addition to normal requests for new investigations and clearance decisions. This study is expected to contribute to the understanding of these problems by examining how two organizational factors (judgment intent and evaluation expectancy) and two situational factors (risk - as determined by level of clearance, and workload) influence the consistency, accuracy, timeliness, and quality of clearance decisions in DoD. Moreover, this research is expected to provide implications for the notions of reciprocity and the centralization of adjudications. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) results reveal that these factors have significant influences on various aspects of adjudicative decisions. Most notably, the expectation of evaluation was revealed to both help and hinder decision-making, depending on other contextual factors, and situational risk consistently led to better decisions. Additionally, high risk almost always led to more consistent, more accurate, more timely, and higher quality decisions. Implications are presented for addressing these factors and helping adjudicators make the best decisions under certain organizational and situational constraints. (47 refs.)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 31, 2003
Accession Number
ADA415971

Entities

People

  • Whitney B. Helton-fauth

Organizations

  • University of Oklahoma

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Applied Psychology
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Workload
  • Commerce
  • Employment
  • Information Processing
  • Judgment
  • National Security
  • Personnel Management
  • Psychology
  • Reasoning
  • Security
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Thinking
  • United States
  • Workload

Readers

  • Canadian European Scientific Immigration and Epilepsy Clearance Studies
  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Organizational Process Management (OPM).