In Support of Personality Assessment in Organizational Settings

Abstract

Personality constructs have been demonstrated to be useful for explaining and predicting attitudes, behaviors, performance, and outcomes in organizational settings. Many professionally developed measures of personality constructs display useful levels of criterion‐related validity for job performance and its facets. In this response to Morgeson et al. (2007), we comprehensively summarize previously published meta‐analyses on (a) the optimal and unit‐weighted multiple correlations between the Big Five personality dimensions and behaviors in organizations, including job performance; (b) generalizable bivariate relationships of Conscientiousness and its facets (e.g., achievement orientation, dependability, cautiousness) with job performance constructs; (c) the validity of compound personality measures; and (d) the incremental validity of personality measures over cognitive ability. Hundreds of primary studies and dozens of meta‐analyses conducted and published since the mid 1980s indicate strong support for using personality measures in staffing decisions. Moreover, there is little evidence that response distortion among job applicants ruins the psychometric properties, including criterion‐related validity, of personality measures. We also provide a brief evaluation of the merits of alternatives that have been offered in place of traditional self‐report personality measures for organizational decision making. Given the cumulative data, writing off the whole domain of individual differences in personality or all self‐report measures of personality from personnel selection and organizational decision making is counterproductive for the science and practice of I‐O psychology.

Training Success for U.S. Air Force Special Operations and Combat Support Specialties: An Analysis of Recruiting, Screening, and Development Processes

“…As previously discussed, personality measures have been shown to be valid predictors of future performance, both in concurrent studies using existing employees and in predictive validation studies using actual job applicants (Ones et al, 2007). However, the TAPAS did not contribute to the prediction of training success in a manner consistent with prior research, which has generally shown that personality can contribute small to moderate gains in the explanation of training success 64 (Barrick and Mount, 2001).…”

Predictors of individual-level innovation at work: A meta-analysis.

“…In terms of individual differences, there are few if any studies of individual innovation that examine compound personality traits as possible predictors, despite findings showing that compound traits are more valid predictors of other types of job behaviors than single personality traits, including those of the Five Factor Model (cf., Hough & Ones, 2001;Ones, Dilchert, Viswesvaran, & Judge, 2007). Also, studies of motivation factors other than intrinsic motivation are relatively few, especially in relation to self-regulatory factors shown to be related to goal-setting, persistence, and risk-taking in other performance domains.…”

Toward a periodic table of personality: Mapping personality scales between the five-factor model and the circumplex model.

“…This increasing popularity of personality assessment has led to the development of a huge variety of inventories, all available commercially for researchers to apply in scientific studies, and for practitioners to use in organizations (Prewett, Tett, & Christiansen, 2013). Beyond more generic issues of the criterion-related validity of these proprietary personality measures (see, for instance, Ones, Dilchert, Viswesvaran, & Judge, 2007;Morgeson, Campion, Dipboye, Hollenbeck, & Schmitt, 2007), this abundance of inventories gives rise to questions about the convergence and divergence of their underlying structures (e.g. Anderson & Ones, 2003;Woods & Hardy, 2012).…”