Personality Tests and Employee Selection: What Research Says?
The use of personality data in classifying and measuring individuals on a set of personality characteristics & traits is playing key role in transforming Talent Acquisition. Many researchers share a common consensus on grouping the traits into five broad dimensions – conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to experience (referred to as Five Factor Model (FFM).
There have been mixed reactions (from different researchers) on using personality tests in employee selection. Taking an affirmative stance: that is, personality tests should be used in employee selection, the following provides few arguments in support –
Personality and Job Performance
Job performance is considered as an important criterion and overall job performance forms an important organizational outcome. There has been a lot of research including several meta-analyses on personality-job performance relationship. Let’s take a helicopter view of what eminent researchers say about this relationship and its impact on employee selection.
Theories like trait activation have been proposed to explicate linkages connecting a given trait to job performance in order to highlight where and how personality variables are most likely to influence behavior and performance.
Personality traits like conscientiousness, proactive personality action-oriented trait, extraversion, and others have been shown to predict job performance. For instance, sales professionals who are extravert in nature tend to show high sales performance. The U.S. Army incorporated personality measures (after extensive research) into their personnel selection and achieved some success. Results show that the use of personality measures for employee screening can have substantial utility by reducing costly turnover, improving job performance, or expanding recruiting markets.
Researchers including Oswald and Hough (2008), and Heggestad and Gordon (2008) are creating huge awareness (on personality-performance relationship) among their fellow researchers and other practitioners by emphasizing the importance of facet-level personality measures and contextualized personality assessments on job performance and/or context-specific outcomes. They assert that personality constructs measured at specific-context, specific-situation and specific-facet criteria levels will become increasingly important in models, measures, and meta-analyses of individual-level job performance.
Studies indicate that adding a personality measure to other selection measure/s is likely to add incremental validity or enhance the accuracy of selection decision, thus predicting job performance over that provided by other selection instruments. In addition, research indicates that observer ratings of personality enhance predictions of job performance and have higher predictive validities when compared to self-report personality inventories measuring job performance. Additionally, two meta-analyses have shown that “personality traits relate to expatriate job performance”.
Personality traits matter at work as they are habitual or dispositional predictors that change only slowly over time and organizations can reap beneficial outcomes like job performance throughout an employee’s career (Gatewood et al., 2011).
Personality vital for Team Performance
Many contemporary organizations in today’s era are making a shift from hierarchical structure to a flat/lattice; project-based; self-managing teams; and/or network of teams’ structure. Even organizations that are operating in a hierarchical or high-matrix level demand individual in the organizations to work in teams to ensure project/product/service success.
“Evolving research clearly illustrates that characteristics and actions of teammates have an impact on the manifestation of an individual’s traits” (Stewart, 2008). The author further explicates that traits of a single individual can have a critical effect on collective team performance. Barrick, Mount and Judge (2001), in their second-order meta-analytic research illustrate that if members of a team have personality traits that are anti or counter to team spirit and team work (for instance, uncooperative, inflexible, more argumentative, antisocial), then team performance suffers which in turn negatively impacts project/product/service and organization (as a whole) success.
Ample research (including meta-analyses) indicates that personality traits – emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness are predictors of teamwork and performance in jobs involving interpersonal interactions. Oswald and Hough (2008) share an agreement with Stewart (2008) that “personality traits are especially predictive in the sort of open social and teamwork environments”. Other eminent researchers too strongly believe that personality predicts success even better in team settings, and a few traits emerge as particularly important – agreeableness, extraversion (in certain settings), and emotional intelligence”.
As today’s dynamic and collaborative workforce demand for “getting along behaviors” (in addition to “getting ahead behaviors”), it is prudent and imperative for organizations to incorporate personality measures along with other selection measures.
Personality vital for Leadership
Leadership – the role of leaders and leadership qualities, attributes and characteristics – have always been a central theme of discussion amongst eminent scholars, researchers, academicians and practitioners. Today’s organizational workforce as well as business is operating in a VUCA World – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – and these dynamic environmental flux demand leaders to be effective in steering organizations toward success path.
Numerous leadership models/theories have been proposed starting with the trait theory of leadership to transformational leadership, servant leadership, authentic leadership and others. All these theories focus on leadership qualities and traits like emotional intelligence, humility, extraversion, emotional stability, tolerance, co-cooperativeness, etc.
Meta-analytic research reveals important findings – when selecting effective leaders from ineffective ones’ results reveal that those candidates high in extraversion, openness to experience, and emotional stability experience the greatest success on the job. Conscientiousness and extraversion were the most important personality traits to identify those candidates who are most likely to emerge as leaders. Hough and Oswald (2008) in their focal article highlight research evidence (from meta-analyses) that indicate personality variables predict leader emergence and effectiveness as well as transformational leadership.
Hence, personality measures play a key role in leadership as research results show that great leaders inspire and influence others around them (extraverted), can manage their own anxiety (emotionally stable), are able to adapt as needed (open to new experiences), and have an ‘inner fire’ as they strive for achievement (conscientious) (Gatewood et al., 2011, pg. 518).
Overall, irrespective of jobs being structured, unstructured and/or technical; situations being weak or strong; performance being measured at an individual-, team, and/or organizational-level; personality matters at work and in employee selection (Gatewood et al., 2011, pg. 519).
This post takes an affirmative stance that personality tests should be used in employee selection. Do you agree or disagree? Share your thoughts as comments. Thank you.
Author: Lakshmi CV, Agile HR Coach at Culturelligence
References:
Barrick, M.R., Mount, M.K., & Judge, T.A. (2001). Personality and Performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next? International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9-30.
Christiansen, N.D., & Tett, R.P. (2008). Toward a better understanding of the role of situations in linking Personality, Work Behavior, and Job Performance. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1(3), 312-316.
Gatewood, R.D., Feild, H.S., & Barrick, M. (2011). Human Resource Selection. (7th Ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western, Cengage Learning.
Heggestad, E.D., & Gordon, H.L. (2008). An argument for context-specific personality assessments. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1(3), 320-322.
Hough, L.M., & Oswald, F.I. (2008). Personality Testing and Industrial-Organizational Psychology: Reflections, Progress, and Prospects. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1(3), 272-290.
Stewart, G.L. (2008). Let us become too narrow. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1(3), 317-319.
White, L.A., Young, M.C., Hunter, A.E., & Rumsey, M.G. (2008). Lessons learned in transitioning Personality Measures from research to operational settings. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1(3), 291-295.