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Parsing Personality Assessment
July 21, 2008
The right personality assessment can do more than tell you the psychological leanings of employees—it can help you grow your business.
By Todd Harris, Ph.D.
If you agree with the phrase "the people make the place," you'll understand why use of personality assessments in business and industry continues to grow rapidly. Personality assessments tap into each employee's unique "behavioral DNA," yielding key insights into individual drives, temperaments, and motivations (e.g. why I might enjoy analyzing financial statements for hours, while you may prefer to be out of the office developing personal relationships with customers.) There is a direct connection between how well a person fits his or her job, his or her productivity, and ultimately, your bottom line.
Why is Personality Important?
The field of personality is a hot one right now in management and HR communities for a number of reasons:
• Personality traits have a direct and substantial impact on job performance. Research suggests 20 to 25 percent of an employee's effectiveness on the job is attributable to his or her personality. Companies that do not systematically assess candidate and incumbent personality are leaving a large slice of the "job performance pie" on the table.
• Well-developed personality assessments predict job performance effectively across a broad range of jobs, countries, and cultures, and just as importantly, do so in a non-discriminatory way.
• The changing nature of work and organizations. In today's increasingly customer-focused, service-based, and team-oriented business environment companies are discovering the personality attributes of their employees can be key competitive differentiators. In an era of consumer empowerment and fleeting brand loyalty, people truly make a difference. For example, when buying a cup of coffee on my morning work commute, I drive a mile out of my way to visit a certain coffee shop because I know I will be greeted warmly and served quickly.
Using Personality Data throughout the Employee Lifecycle
There are many "milestones" across an employee's career with a company, and personality assessments can play a useful role at each one. Many leading companies are using these familiar instruments in new and creative ways, maximizing their return on investment. For example:
• Recruiting: Personality assessments can be used to define important behavioral characteristics required for a job, and to craft targeted recruiting messages and strategies to attract key talent.
• Ramping Up: With the insights yielded by personality assessments, new employees can be brought up to speed more quickly and comfortably, making the on-boarding process smoother.
• Coaching: Managers can use the data yielded by personality assessments to tailor coaching strategies for their direct reports, leveraging each employee's unique strengths.
• Leadership Development: Personality assessments are increasingly being incorporated into leadership development programs at all organizational levels, from front-line supervisors to middle-management to the executive suite.
• Team Effectiveness: Team structure, communication, role-clarity, decision-making and performance appraisal all can be improved via use of personality assessments.
• Culture and Strategy Change: Perhaps your company is moving into a new phase or market, experiencing a cultural shift that now places a premium on speed and risk-taking. Personality assessments can be used to identify people who would more naturally thrive in that culture, and also to help coach other employees in making the transition.
Personality Assessments: What to Look For
Given the increasing number of personality assessments on the market, what should you look for if your organization is considering implementing one? The following seven questions are a good guide when evaluating personality assessments:
1. What is the assessment designed to measure and accomplish, and how will that benefit the organization?
2. Does the assessment come with an accompanying job analysis tool that allows for thorough identification of a job's requirements?
3. Is the assessment free of bias to the respondent's age, gender, or ethnic group?
4. Is the assessment reliable? Are peoples' scores on it consistent and repeatable over time?
5. Is the assessment valid? Does it effectively predict important workplace behaviors that drive metrics such as sales, customer satisfaction, and turnover?
6. Is documentation supporting questions 3, 4, and 5 available in a technical manual or equivalent document, and is research on these areas ongoing?
7. What are key "implementation issues" such as cost; the time it takes to complete the assessment; data security; scalability across the organization (some personality assessments should only be used with specific jobs or at certain hierarchical levels); ongoing support from the vendor (the degree to which the vendor understands your business challenges); and degree of client self-sufficiency/knowledge transfer?
Todd Harris, Ph.D., is director of research for PI Worldwide, an international management consulting and sales development organization, and publisher of the Predictive Index. PI Worldwide also provides targeted sales assessment and training services (Selling Skills Assessment Tool and Customer-Focused Selling). Harris serves as an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has published work on performance appraisal, team-building, organizational behavior, and technology. He can be reached at tharris@piworldwide.com.
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