Jensen's, Gardner's, and Sternberg's theories of applications in measurement of general mental ability in the workplace.

According to Jensen (1998), the g factor is the highest-order common factor that can be extracted in a hierarchical factor analysis from a large battery of diverse tests of an assortment of cognitive abilities. Spearman thought of g as "mental energy" that could be applied to mental tasks (Jensen, 1998). According to Spearman, "individual differences in performance on any mental task result from two sources: differences in the amount of mental 'energy' that can be delivered to …

…something before they know what it is, they run the proverbial risk of putting the cart before the horse. Instead of ideas driving measurement, measurement ends up driving ideas. Both parties may end up manipulating theories to fit measurements, rather than the other way around. Most likely, organizations will want to measure what is easiest to measure, and then OD practitioners end up creating theories that justify these measurements after the fact (Ryan & Sackett, 1998).