Staff Performance: Do Attitudinal "effectiveness Profiles" Really Assess It?

Performance differences were examined for mental hospital staff with divergent profiles on the Opinions About Mental Illness (OMI) that have been purported to reflect differential staff effectiveness. Two staff groups (N = 40 each) were selected, in pairs, from 19 treatment programs serving adult mental patients to provide extremes of "OMI-effective" vs. "OMI-ineffective" profiles while equating groups on demographic, experiential, and program characteristics that had previously been found to influence OMI scores or staff performance. Actual on-the-floor performance was assessed by direct hourly observations obtained on the Staff-Resident Interaction Chronograph over a full week in each program. The OMI effective group was found to perform greater amounts of overall activity and greater amounts of interaction with institutionalized residents than did the OMI-ineffective group. These differences in public job-relevant activity, likely, provide the basis for earlier reports of positive evaluations for staff who score in the OMI-effective direction. However, the groups did not differ in the specified nature and pattern of their staff-resident interactions when the overall rate of interactions was controlled. Such differences would be required for the OMI to be a measure of staff effectiveness in improving resident functioning. These results, in combination with previous studies, provide little support for the OMI as a measure of effectiveness or as an indirect measure of the goodness of staff performance. The OMI effective group did produce a higher frequency of interactions, and, thus, the OMI appears to serve as a useful descriptor of staff characteristics that might interact with other variables influencing effectiveness; but the absence of discrimination regarding the more crucial specific nature of interactions indicates that the OMI cannot substitute for direct assessment of actual staff performance.