Psychological testing in personnel selection, part III: the resurgence of personality testing.

In the first article in this series, which was published in the Spring 2008 issue of Public Personnel Management, we noted that while the utility of some selection instruments, particularly cognitive ability testing, has been widely accepted, the usefulness of personality testing in selection has not faired nearly as well. (1) Logic dictates that personality should influence performance, and research has revealed that successful managers share a large number of personality traits regardless of time or organization. (2) However, reviews of the research exploring the validity of personality testing has generally not supported the validity or utility of personality testing. (3) Nevertheless, recent research in personality testing has been promising, and there seems to be considerably more optimism about the role of personality testing in selection. (4) It is to these issues we now turn.

Contemporary Personality Testing in Employee Selection

In recent years, the use of personality testing as a human resource selection method has been heavily criticized because personality tests have historically had low criterion validity, low predictive validity, high development and use costs, and considerable risks for adverse impact. When coupled with the risk personality tests present for invasion of privacy and their generally lack of acceptance by test takers, their application as selection instruments is sanctioned only with a fair amount of caution by staffing experts. (5)

Certainly, however, all personality tests do not share either the same limitations nor strengths. Individual instruments are developed using methods, and each test assesses a unique set of psychometric properties. Also, each will have been validated for use in either quite narrow or broader populations. Certainly, the personality tests developed for discriminating between people with a mental disorder and people without a mental disorder have only very specific utility in highly specialized personnel selection activities. On the other hand, personality tests developed to assess test takers' possession of certain traits or personality-related abilities may be useful for predicting employees' behaviors and outcomes across a broad array of positions. (6)

Despite a significant amount of research, there remains considerable disagreement about the value of personality testing in employee selection. While a majority of the selection research of the last 30 years has called the value of personality testing into question, the search for predictors of job performance that have less adverse impact than cognitive ability tests has renewed interest in personality testing. (7) Some have suggested that using personality testing in conjunction with cognitive ability testing can enhance the validity of employee selection decisions while also reducing the adverse impact of the decision-making process. (8) However, confusion over the definition of personality, how to measure personality, and what exactly personality tests measure has hampered such efforts and kept the controversy over personality testing alive. (9) In part to answer critics, the focus in personnel psychology in recent years has been on developing theories of the psychological processes that underlie and determine job performance, and this work is opening new doors for the use of personality testing for selection purposes. (10)

Proponents of general mental ability (GMA) as a solid predictor of job performance are aware that the core components of this predictor seem to relate to the acquisition of job knowledge: People with demonstrated high levels of GMA seem to acquire job knowledge with greater speed and depth, and this boosts job performance. At the same time, is well known and well accepted by experienced psychologists that certain personality traits enhance a person's ability to actuate intellectual capacity and that other personality traits dampen that ability. (11) It is likely, then, that using efficient and valid tools to measure a person's GMA and assessing his or her personality traits that influence receptiveness to information, interference of cognitive and affective states, and willingness to ally and interface with others would lead to better personnel selection decisions.

Although developing tools to fairly and thoroughly measure GMA and personality traits is the most complex approach to improving the selection process in terms of criterion validity and cost-effectiveness, it is also potentially the most fruitful. The field of personnel psychology has only recently become equipped to seriously undertake the development of meta and trait-oriented instruments for employee selection. The reason for this is the natural maturation of the nearly 100-year-old science and related scientific methods, the advent of sophisticated and readily available computer support in most major organizations, and the success of the education system in training an army of managers, psychologists, business owners, investors, specialty consulting firms and staffs with advanced research skills.

A number of meta-analyses have produced precise and generalizable estimates of the validity of different constructs for predicting job performance and made it possible to calculate correlations among the constructs. This work of identifying predictive personality traits, adapting statistical and psychometric methods, and dealing with workforces and hardware has been done against a backdrop of the rapid evolution of measurement techniques that score aspects of personality that are themselves amalgamations of subcomponent parts (12) labeled by construction rather than absurdity. The research findings are only beginning to be applied to employee selection, so one should not be discouraged by the infancy of this approach and the current crudity of the tools the approach has yielded. A vast array of metapredictors and metautilities that could amplify the strong but comparatively simple utility of cognitive tests await discovery.

Hogan, Hogan, and Roberts (13) have noted that since the early 1990s, personality has come to be understood as the enduring and stable reputational aspects of how a person wishes to be seen and behave in interpersonal relationships. Thus, when a person completes a personality questionnaire, the evaluator is getting a rough index of reputation. These authors believe that the link between personality scale scores and reputation is why well-constructed personality tests predict nontest behavior.

Since the early 1990s, estimates of the validity of personality measures have inched upward. This may be largely due to the resurgence of factorial approaches, which have consistently found what have come to be known as the Big-Five personality factors that seem to reoccur as core elements of personality across many studies. (14) With the confusion about what represents personality beginning to clear, with the validity of personality as a personnel selection measure improving, and with personality factors beginning to demonstrate increasing stability within and across instruments, interest in the use of personality tests in selection has increased.

The Big-Five Personality Factors

We noted above that a person's GMA is associated with his or her ability to acquire the job knowledge and job-related skills that result in improved individual and organizational performance. It is also reasonable to assume that, all other things being equal, the degree to which an employee possesses the personality trait of conscientiousness should be correlated with job performance. Schmidt and Hunter found this to be the case when analyzing findings from several studies of personality and job performance, writing that, "controlling for mental ability, employees who are higher in conscientiousness develop higher levels of job knowledge, probably because conscientious individuals exert greater efforts and spend more time 'on task."' (15) These authors go on to point out that the central determining variables in job performance appear to be GMA, job experience, and the personality trait of conscientiousness. From these conclusions, it is reasonable to surmise that a combination of intellectual ability and personality traits and attributes that potentiate focus, dedication, commitment, collaboration, readiness to learn, dependability, group orientation, and problem solving (i.e. some form of maturity or psychological uniqueness) is really what is being measured by tests of GMA.

The Big Five personality factors can be traced to the factor analytic studies of Louis Leon Thurstone in the 1930s. Thurstone (16) was probably the first to describe five independent common factors that emerged in his factorial research. While he set aside these studies of the core of personality and never followed up on his findings, others took up the work. Raymond Cattell repeatedly talked of at least 12 core factors that emerged from his personality research, but when others later analyzed his variables, only five factors proved to be unique. (17) A number of other investigators have found the five core factors. (18)

The Big-Five factors have been labeled as follows:

* Factor 1: Extraversion, or surgency.

* Factor 2: Agreeableness.

* Factor III: Conscientiousness.

* Factor IV: Emotional Stability, or neuroticism.

* Factor V: Culture, or, more recently intellect (19) or openness to experience. (20)

Hogan, Hogan, and Roberts, and others, (21) have pointed out that the basic personality factors can be organized hierarchically and that each factor can be broken down into hundreds, if not thousands, of traits. For example, talkativeness, assertiveness, and activity level traits such as silence and passivity are indicative of extraversion. Agreeableness is demonstrated through kindness, trust, and warmth and disagreeableness is demonstrated by hostility, selfishness, and distrust. Organization, thoroughness, and reliability are signs of conscientiousness, while carelessness, negligence, and unreliability are signs that an individual lacks this factor of their personality. Lack of emotional stability is manifested in nervousness, moodiness, and temperamentality, and negative culture traits are shallowness and imperceptiveness. As reflected in the newer terminology for Factor V--intellect or openness to experience--imagination, curiosity, and creativity are traits for people with a positive culture.

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