History and Use of Relative Importance Indices in Organizational Research

The search for a meaningful index of the relative importance of predictors in multiple regression has been going on for years. This type of index is often desired when the explanatory aspects of regression analysis are of interest. The authors define relative importance as the proportionate contribution each predictor makes to R 2 , considering both the unique contribution of each predictor by itself and its incremental contribution when combined with the other predictors. The purposes of this article are to introduce the concept of relative importance to an audience of researchers in organizational behavior and industrial/organizational psychology and to update previous reviews of relative importance indices.…