A disagreement about within-group agreement: Disentangling issues of consistency versus consensus.

James, Demaree, and Wolf (1984) developed an indes, r WG , for assessing within-group agreement appropriate when only a single target is rated. The assessment of interperceiver agreement in such situations is of particular relevance to the composition model for climate. Schmidt and Hunter (1989) have criticized the conceptual foundation of r WG because it is not consistent with the classical model of reliability. They proposed an alternative approach, the use of the rating standard deviation (SD X ), the standard error of the rating mean (SE M ), and the associated confidence intervals for SE M to index interrater agreement. This comment argues that the critique of r WG dit not clearly distinguish the concepts of interrater consensus (i.e., agreement) and interrater consistency (i.e., reliability)