Personality testing and the Americans With Disabilities Act: Cause for concern as normal and abnormal personality models are integrated

Melson-Silimon, Arturia; Harris, Alexandra M; Shoenfelt, Elizabeth L.; Miller, Joshua D.; Carter, Nathan T.

doi:10.1017/iop.2018.156

Cited by 19 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…We view this shortcoming of the PPRF as an opportunity to refine it. Hence, we echo Melson-Silimon et al (2019) in their call for more research into POWA. Importantly, we believe that future research should examine the promise of adapting POWA to identify ideal trait standings and that more research is needed to demonstrate that ideal trait standings for a given work setting exist.…”

Section: Does Screening or Selecting For Ideal Workers Cause Adverse mentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In other words, at worst, we may be assessing impairments but not necessarily disabilities (see Wu & LeBreton, 2011); therefore, using ideal point personality assessments in pre-employment contexts before conditional job offers is unlikely to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (Dilchert et al, 2014;Wu & LeBreton, 2011). Nevertheless, we agree with Melson-Silimon et al (2019): We should be vigilant and proactive in receiving guidance from the EEOC. History need not repeat itself.…”

Section: Does Screening or Selecting For Ideal Workers Cause Adverse mentioning

confidence: 92%

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Assessing ideal personalities at work: Is it all just a little bit of history repeating?

Castille

Smith

2019

Ind. Organ. Psychol.

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Melson-Silimon, Harris, Shoenfelt, Miller, and Carter (2019) raise an important issue that industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists should take seriously: As we integrate normal and abnormal personality models, we may find that personality assessments adversely impact the mentally disabled. Though not mentioned by Melson-Silimon and colleagues, this is a criticism of the personality testing enterprise that has been ongoing since its inception in the early 20th century. We would like to use this commentary as an opportunity to focus on the future of personality assessment in employment selection. We call attention to the relevant history of the personality testing enterprise, discuss whether personality testing adversely affects the mentally disabled, and discuss the strategic role I-O psychologists play in this enterprise. Consider the context surrounding the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 (for details, see Zickar & Kostek, 2013), which outlawed the practice of asking applicants if they would unionize. During this time, organizational sociologist Elton Mayo claimed that irrational thinking and emotional issues explained poor employee performance and union membership (Zickar & Kostek, 2013). Managers, who were eager to prevent unionization, thus saw personality testing as a means of indirectly flouting the law. Catering to these desires, Doncaster Humm and Guy Wadsworth marketed their Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Test for these purposes (see Zickar & Kostek, 2013). Although this test was designed to identify and help employees or job applicants suffering from a mental disorder, it was used by employers to weed out individuals they believed were union sympathizers (antisocial types) or who were communist ideologues (manic-depressive types; see Emre, 2018). The need for personality testing was exacerbated after 1978 when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection. The Uniform Guidelines sparked a search for selection procedures with comparable utility but less adverse impact compared to cognitive ability tests, leading I-O psychologists to personality tests (see Hogan, 2007). We raise this historical perspective to encourage the I-O psychology community to maintain awareness of the historical context within which we operate. Personality testing has long been criticized by academics, politicians, and also in the popular press (e.g., Emre, 2018) for denying mentally disordered individuals a voice in our society (see Zickar & Kostek, 2013). We must recognize that our actions could be interpreted as yet another attempt to help organizations flout the law, which is clearly not our intention. Rather, we suspect that many within our field will ascribe to an ideal in organizational life that most if not all individuals-regardless of class status (e.g., disability)-can compete for and find a valuable place in our society (e.g., Cascio & Aguinis, 2011). As a profession, our research can inform the sorting process by which individuals fi...

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Section: Does Screening or Selecting For Ideal Workers Cause Adverse mentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Does Screening or Selecting For Ideal Workers Cause Adverse mentioning

confidence: 92%

Assessing ideal personalities at work: Is it all just a little bit of history repeating?

Castille

Smith

2019

Ind. Organ. Psychol.

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“…The key factor that distinguishes normal and medical assessments is not the similarity of the underlying constructs, but rather the extremity of the individual responses that they can detect and the norms used to evaluate them. If, following the reasoning offered by Melson-Silimon et al (2018), most normal range personality measures cannot be used for personnel assessment because they assess the same constructs as clinical diagnostic personality scales, this would preclude virtually all individual assessment of any construct on the same grounds.…”

Section: Unity Of Clinical and Normal Constructs Is Not Unique To Permentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructs versus measures in personality and other domains: What distinguishes normal and clinical?

Wiernik

Bornovalova

Stark

et al. 2019

Ind. Organ. Psychol.

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Psychopathology has long been recognized as dysfunction of normal psychological systems (Cloninger, 1987; Eysenck, 1947). Indeed, examination of psychological disorders is one of the avenues through which the structure of normal personality was discovered (Gibby & Zickar, 2008). Melson-Silimon and colleagues (2018) describe a collision course between the objective of accurate personnel assessment and the need for organizations to provide access for persons with mental health disabilities. Their alarm is misplaced. Frameworks for distinguishing normal and clinical assessments are already well-established, and the need to use different instruments or scoring methods for workplace versus clinical assessment is not unique to the personality domain. In this commentary, we highlight the critical distinction between constructs and their normal versus clinical measurement (cf. Dilchert et al., 2014) and demonstrate that normal and clinical personality measures have distinct psychometric properties, even while measuring the same underlying personality constructs. We also show that Melson-Silimon et al.'s concerns about similarity of normal and clinical constructs and their measurement applies to a wide variety of psychological constructs that are routinely assessed in organizational applications. We end by urging caution in interpreting normal and clinical personality measures and offer evidence-based guidance for personality assessment practice. Personality Clinical Constructs = Normal Constructs; Clinical Measures ≠ Normal Measures Melson-Silimon et al. (2018) cite recent work from clinical psychology showing that personality disorders reflect maladaptive extreme low (for Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, or Emotional Stability) or high (Openness) levels of the Big Five personality traits (Markon et al., 2005). They suggest that this research exposes organizations using

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“…In their focal article, Melson-Silimon, Harris, Shoenfelt, Miller, and Carter (2019) discuss the risk that personality testing might be challenged under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) due to the Act's prohibition against pre-offer medical examinations. Although the authors provide a compelling argument that normal and abnormal personality characteristics exist on a common continuum, their argument regarding the legal risks rests on speculation with regard to how the courts might reinterpret such tests in the future.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Adverse impact as disability discrimination: Illustrating the perils through self-control at work

Saxena

2019

Ind. Organ. Psychol.

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Personality testing and the Americans With Disabilities Act: Cause for concern as normal and abnormal personality models are integrated

Cited by 19 publications

References 58 publications

Assessing ideal personalities at work: Is it all just a little bit of history repeating?

Assessing ideal personalities at work: Is it all just a little bit of history repeating?

Constructs versus measures in personality and other domains: What distinguishes normal and clinical?

Adverse impact as disability discrimination: Illustrating the perils through self-control at work

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