Jessica Bowers XXXXXXXXXXSaturday Oct 24 at 1:38pm Use of personality assessments in the workplace has become commonplace, especially as human resource managers and management strive to make dynamic...

Jessica Bowers

Use of personality assessments in the workplace has become commonplace, especially as human resource managers and management strive to make dynamic choices about talent management with increasing speed and accuracy. Personality assessments are beneficial because they can help to identify personnel who have underlying skills that can be developed for future succession planning and can help strengthen the interview process by informing the interviewer about a candidates personal attributes. Personality assessments also have drawbacks, including they are prone to bias, are highly subjective, and may screen out qualified candidates.

Personality assessments should be recommended to assess soft skills for identification for succession planning or in the case of working in teams or for group dynamics. In the case of group dynamics, the benefit of understanding personality will help to build teams that are cohesive. When examined empirically, it is suggested that groups that are complementary in their personality traits will operate more effectively (Amato & Amato, 2005). Additionally, personality assessments can be beneficial to group members who might not be complementary in helping to highlight and provide awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of other group members.

Personality assessments should not be used in the process of performance management or as any single measure of performance review, whether that is in succession planning, pay raises, evaluations, or promotions. There should be extreme caution applied to personality assessments in their potential to pigeonhole individuals. Although they are informative and can provide insight into areas of development, as well as applications for interpersonal interactions, personality assessments should be used as guidelines for growth and avoid using the outcomes as barriers or boundaries. To avoid the mistakes of misusing personality assessments, practitioners should ensure that they are using validated instruments and insist on applying personality assessments as one part of a holistic assessment package.

Amato, C. H., & Amato, L. H. (2005). Enhancing Student Team Effectiveness: Application of Myers-Briggs Personality Assessment in Business Courses.
Journal of Marketing Education,
27(1), 41-51.

Carol Wilson

Personality assessments are designed to measure the relevance of personal characteristics in clinical, health care, forensic, educational, and organizational settings. Research seeks to find a deeper understanding of human behaviors and theorizes that diversity derives from personality. Observed behaviors such as facial expression and body movement can express emotions, including anxiety, motivation, hostility, emotion, and introversion-extroversion. Personality assessments intend to describe how people differ in how they think, feel, act, and behave under certain circumstances. Human behavior is too complex to define based on a personality assessment alone because of the challenges, pleasures, demands, and stresses of everyday life (Weiner, 2017).

Practitioners are concerned with the use of personality assessments because of their validity, effectiveness, and legality issues. Some states have outlawed the use of many personality tests due to employment discrimination laws and invasion of privacy. Personality tests can lead to workplace lawsuits because of the refusal to hire based on age, religion, race, color, religious faith, ancestry, age, sex, national origin, and disabilities. (O'Meara, 1994).

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assesses four personality types that result in four-letter personality type codes:

1. Extraversion–Introversion (E-I)


2. Sensing–Intuition (S-N)


3. Thinking-Feeling (T-F)


4. Judging–Perceiving (J-P) (Lake, 2019).

The MBTI, released in the 1940s, is still widely used but regularly criticized because of format, reliability, and validity. The group of practitioners often tasked with selecting employee assessments is human resources (HR) professionals. HR professionals are knowledgeable in legal, management, financial, and strategic domains but receive only brief training in personality and psychometric issues such as validity and personality testing reliability. Industrial-organizational (IO) psychologists receive extensive training in personality, validity, reliability, statistics, and test development/evaluation, becoming an essential part of the assessment and hiring domains. Choosing the perfect employee assessment is complex because reliability, validity, time, and pricing are all factors to consider (Lake, 2019).

The identification of talent and assessment is a well-known organizational issue. The most common characteristics assessed in the workplace are cognitive ability, personality, background and experience, knowledge and skill, physical performance, and competencies. The Five-Factor Model is often used when describing normal personality. This model is a good starting point for describing character. This model describes normal personality in five broad factors with cognitive abilities: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. Competencies are defined as a collection of knowledge, skills, abilities, traits, interests, values, motivations, education and training, and experience. Competencies are extremely complex to determine without knowing the individual's work ethics, values, and motivation (Scott, 2010).

I agree that the personality test can be beneficial to the interview but should not be used alone as a rule when hiring. I would use the personality assessment in a high-profile position with applicants at a consulting firm or government agency because it can assist with the assignment of duties. I would not recommend the personality assessment be used within a small business because the relationship is more personal. Face to face interactions where coworkers must learn to adapt to each different personalities, the test would be time-consuming and costly with little purpose.

Hippocrates' theory is a good foundation for determining personality types and predicting human behaviors.

Hippocrates four types:

1. Choleric (Yellow Bile)


2. Phlegmatic (Phlegm)


3. Melancholic (Black Bile)


4. Sanguine (Blood) (Essig, 2014).

The Hire Success Model test evaluates 20 different trait scales independently, so it seems this would be more appropriate to assess personality. Personality tests can be skewed and show different results each time they are taken, so this should only be used as a part of the assessment (Essig, 2014).

References

Essig, T. (2014). The Mysterious Popularity Of The Meaningless Myers-Briggs (MBTI): Leadership Strategy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/09/29/the-mysterious-popularity-of-the-meaningless-myers-briggs-mbti/#7ef800c71c79

Lake, C. J., Carlson, J., Rose, A., & Chlevin-Thiele, C. (2019). Trust in name brand assessments: The case of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 22(2), 91–107

O'Meara, D. P. (1994). Personality tests raise questions of legality and effectiveness. HR Magazine, v39(n1)

Scott, J. C. & Reynolds, D. H. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of workplace assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Weiner, I. B., & Greene, R. L. (2017). Handbook of personality assessment. ProQuest Ebook Central