Empirical investigations have demonstrated that employment tenure can be predicted by systematically analyzing the biographical information of job applicants. Similarly, long- and short-tenure industrial workers can be differentiated with various measures of interest. The present study examined the responses of two groups of employees, long- and short-tenure personnel, on a personality inventory, the Thurstone Temperament Schedule. Two hundred-ninety male employees were selected from the production population of a textile company. Of this number, 174 men constituted a long-tenure criterion group: they had been employed by the company for six consecutive months or longer. The short-tenure group, consisting of 116 men, had terminated their employment voluntarily before completing three consecutive months of work. One-third of both of these primary groups was selected at random to provide a holdout sample for a cross-validation analysis. While there were no consistent significant differences between the long- and short-tenure employees in terms of biographical information (age, education, and marital status), the long-tenure personnel, on two statistical analyses, scored significantly higher on a mental ability te.st than did the short-tenure workers
