Personality and the ADA: Ameliorating fairness concerns and maintaining utility

Abstract

We strongly agree with the argument presented in the focal article (Melson-Silimon, Harris, Shoenfelt, Miller, & Carter, 2019) that great care should be taken to adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act's (1990) regulations when deploying personality assessments in pre-hire contexts. However, we strongly believe that occupational personality assessments do not infringe upon the ADA, so long as they are well-developed and implemented properly. The focal authors provide some sound recommendations to this end, and we will address several additional practical hurdles that ensure the job-relatedness and ADA compliance of personality assessments. These practical hurdles must be addressed at each critical stage of the traditional test implementation process: (a) test development (b) job analysis (c) test deployment, and (d) decision making. Before addressing these practical hurdles, we must first clarify what is meant by "personality assessment." We believe that much of the focal article was aimed at personality inventories (e.g., MMPI, NEO-FFI), but a distinction must be made between the assessment methodology (i.e., questionnaires or inventories) and the construct(s) being assessed (i.e., personality traits; Arthur & Villado, 2008). Industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists can measure personality in several ways, either directly or indirectly, such as through interviews, assessment centers, and more. Any departure from using personality inventories does not necessarily mean a departure from measuring personality traits. In fact, it is our belief that organizations should continue to use personality inventories in their pre-employment processes, rather than other, more bias-prone methodologies (e.g., the qualitative ratings currently at issue in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2015). Furthermore, by distinguishing between assessment methods and assessment constructs, I-O psychologists should be able to better refine personality assessment at the methodological and theoretical levels, respectively. In what follows, we outline a strategy that supports the continued valid, legally defensible, and fair use of personality assessments. Specifically, we will discuss the benefits of using more refined approaches for measuring personality traits, highlight the need to employ more robust job analytic and predictive validation strategies, the advantages of using compensatory selection models, and a call for organizations and practitioners to develop proactive steps for individuals with psychological disorders (PDs) to safely disclose and request reasonable accommodations during the selection process. Collectively, we anticipate these steps will aid researchers and practitioners in making more informed decisions about using personality to predict performance while simultaneously protecting those with PDs (and other groups) against adverse impact.