Category Archives: Personality

Predicting someone’s propensity to morally disengage (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Assessment, Personality, Ethics, Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Workplace Deviance
Publication: Personnel Psychology (SPRING 2012)
Article: Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior
Authors: Celia Moore, James R. Detert, Linda Klebe Treviño, Vicki L. Baker, & David M. Mayer
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin

Organizations obviously want their employees to be ethical. While there are existing measures that are used to predict who will act immorally, the authors of this paper proposed a new construct that they called an individual’s propensity to morally disengage – an individual difference in how people think about ethical decisions and behavior that allows them to act unethically without feeling bad about it.

Celia Moore and her colleagues developed a measure of an individual’s propensity to morally disengage. In a series of studies, they then validated the measure for working adults by showing that the propensity to morally disengage was positively related to unethical behavior after accounting for a number of other related traits, orientations, and emotions. Predicted outcomes included self-, supervisor-, and coworker-reported unethical behavior, decisions to commit fraud, and self-serving decisions in the workplace.

You may be wondering how this paper is relevant to practitioners. This new measure of the propensity to morally disengage predicts unethical behavior, and it is short – it only includes eight items. While it has yet to be validated for employee selection, this measure certainly shows promise for its ability to predict unethical behavior. The authors also found that this measure had a low correlation with social desirability, so it seems to be fairly resistant to test-takers faking their responses to receive a good score. If your organization is using a lengthy integrity test in the selection process for the sole purpose of predicting those who would conduct unethical behavior, then this new measure may be something your organization might want to consider using instead.

Moore, C., Detert, J. R., Treviño, L. K., Baker, V. L., & Mayer, D. M. (2012). Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior. Personnel Psychology, 65, 1-48. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01237.x

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

 

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Does Asking For Help Lead to High Performance? (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Learning, Personality, Job Performance
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (MAR 2012)
Article: The Impact of Help Seeking on Individual Task Performance: The Moderating Effect of Help Seekers’ Logics of Action
Authors: D. Geller, P.A. Bamberger
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Help, I need somebody! When employees get stuck trying to complete a task, asking for help seems to be the surest way to solve the problem. But does asking for help lead to better job performance? According to Geller and Bamberger (2012), the answer is that it depends on who you are and why you are asking for help in the first place.

The researchers explain the difference between two reasons why a person may ask for help. The first is called dependent help-seeking logic. This is when a person is focused primarily on completing the task at hand as fast as possible, and is not necessarily concerned about developing long-term skills and abilities. Because people using this kind of logic pay little attention to the solution, they will likely ask for help the next time they are faced with a similar problem.

The other type is called autonomous help-seeking logic. This is when a person asks for help because of an inner desire to become competent at the task. When people use this logic, they are more likely to learn the solution to the problem, and will not need assistance next time they are confronted with the same problem.

So which kind of help-seeking logic leads to better job performance? After conducting a study of call-center employees, the researchers found that people who are usually autonomous help-seekers and people who are rarely dependent help-seekers are associated with better job performance. Practically, this means that people who seek help in order to learn how to do the task themselves are more likely to do better at their jobs.

What do we do with this information? From the perspective of people in helping positions, we might want to be on the lookout for help-seeking people who pay little attention to learning the solution for themselves. Helping these people does not seem to improve their performance in the long run. On the other hand, when we identify someone intent on mastering skills and gaining personal autonomy, helping them out might be a good idea. Investing time in these people may lead them to better job performance.

From the perspective of the help-seeking individual, we ought to ask ourselves what our motivation is when asking for help. If we are asking for help in order to learn and master the solution, we are on the right track. If we are asking for help as a mere shortcut, you might say we are not exactly helping ourselves.
Geller, D., & Bamberger, P.A., (2012). The impact of help seeking on individual task performance: The moderating effect of help seekers’ logics of action. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(2), 487-497.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

 

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What Does Your Credit Score Say About You? (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Selection, Personality
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (2012)
Article: An Empirical Investigation of Dispositional Antecedents and Performance-
Related Outcomes of Credit Scores
Authors: Bernerth, J.B., Taylor, S.G., Walker, H.J. and Whitman, D.S.
Reviewer: Neil Morelli

You’ve no doubt heard the catchy jingles asking you to check your credit score. You may have also heard that a bad credit score could potentially cost you a new job, but have you wondered if companies should actually be looking at applicant credit scores? Recognizing that “60% of employers conduct credit checks of at least some of their new hires”, according to a recent SHRM poll, Bernerth and colleagues investigated if credit scores are indeed related to dispositional traits and job performance—as many organizations assume.

They specifically hypothesized that conscientiousness, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) would be positively related to employee credit scores, while neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and workplace deviance would be negatively related.

After gathering personality information, FICO scores, and performance feedback from direct supervisors for over 100 people, Bernerth et al. discovered that credit scores were in fact positively related to conscientiousness, task performance, and OCBs, whereas agreeableness was negatively related as expected. Surprisingly, the authors did not find a relationship between extraversion, neuroticism, and workplace deviance, this suggested that people with a poor credit score may not deserve as much stigma as popularly thought.

So, while credit scores do seem to be a viable tool for screening applicants, the evidence does not support the generally held belief that applicants with poor credit scores are “up to no good.” However, the authors qualified this conclusion by suggesting different results might be found if self-report deviance data were available from the financial industry in particular. Another word of caution: although a credit score could be used as a selection tool it may also be subject to adverse impact on protected groups and negative impressions by applicants; thus, more research may be needed to determine if the practice is really worth it.
Bernerth, J.B., Taylor, S.G., Walker, H.J., & Whitman, D.S. (2012). An empirical investigation of dispositional antecedents and performance-related outcomes of credit scores. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(2), 469-478.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

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Predicting executives’ ability to think strategically (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Leadership, Personality
Publication: Personnel Psychology (Winter 2011)
Article: Developing executive leaders: The relative contribution of cognitive ability, personality, and the accumulation of work experience in predicting strategic thinking competency.
Authors: Lisa Dragoni, In-Sue Oh, Paul Vankatwyk, & Paul E. Tesluk
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin

Effective leaders need to think strategically. So, if you’re looking to develop leaders or choose someone for a leadership position, it would help to know what predicts strategic thinking. In a recent study, Lisa Dragoni and her colleagues investigated how work experience, cognitive ability, and personality traits relate to executives’ ability to think strategically.

Executives’ cognitive ability and openness to experience were related to their strategic thinking competency, with smarter executives and those who were more open to experience exhibiting better strategic thinking. To determine the accumulated work experience of participants, the authors assessed the extent to which they had taken on different roles and responsibilities (i.e., contributor, manager, lead strategist).  Extraverted executives had more accumulated work experience, and the amount of work experience was also related to executives’ strategic thinking competency.

The authors weighed the relative importance of the different predictors in their analysis. Cognitive ability predicted 78.9% of the observed variance in strategic thinking competency (in contrast, accumulated work experience predicted 7%, openness predicted 2.6%, and extraversion predicted 2.3%).

So, on a practical level, what does this all mean? Cognitive ability is a great predictor of the ability to think strategically. In fact, it’s more important than accumulated experience. However, an executive who is less intelligent can somewhat make up for that with more work experience; it just might take him/her a little longer to learn from those experiences than it would for a more intelligent executive. You can’t change the intelligence of the leaders in your organization, but you can expose them to a variety of work experiences in which they take on different roles and responsibilities. Bottom line:  the authors suggest that in a selection situation for a leadership position, both work experience and cognitive ability should be used to make decisions.

Dragoni, L., Oh, I.-S., Vankatwyk, P., & Tesluk, P. E. (2011). Developing executive leaders: The relative contribution of cognitive ability, personality, and the accumulation of work experience in predicting strategic thinking competency. Personnel Psychology, 64, 829-864. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01229.x.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

 

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A New Weapon in the Fight Against Faking on Personality Tests (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Faking, Personality, Selection
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology
Article: Testing the efficacy of a new procedure for reducing faking on personality tests within selection contexts
Authors: Fan, J. Gao., D., Carroll, S.A., Lopez, F.J., Tian, T.S., & Meng, H.
Reviewer: Neil Morelli

Has your organization ever used, or ever considered using a personality test as part of their selection battery? Due to personality tests’ predictive validity and relatively low subgroup differences, you’re not alone. However, one controversial issue still plagues the use of personality tests in selecting applicants: faking. Faking is defined as the intentional distortion of responses to portray a more positive image, and it can negatively affect the validity of the selection device. Fortunately, Fan et al. have recently tested a new method for identifying and reducing faking on personality tests that uses a computer-based warning system.

Fan et al. admits that there’s nothing new about warning applicants about faking, but the novel component of Fan et al.’s system is how the warning is provided. Instead of a reactive system for reducing faking via statistical controls, the Fan et al. method proactively mitigates faking by first testing for the likelihood of faking on an “initial item block” (this block consists of impression management items, a bogus scale, and a subset of items from the actual personality test). After comparing the scores from this block to a cutoff level for faking, the computer provides “a polite warning” to respondents flagged as potential fakers while non-flagged applicants are given a control message. All respondents are then given the “main item block” (a second testing of the faking items and the full personality measure).

This method’s utility rests in combining best practices from the faking literature: using a proactive mitigation strategy, only providing a warning to potential fakers, and allowing an opportunity for retest. In an organizational quasi-experiment, and a student-based true experiment, Fan et al. was able to demonstrate that flagged applicants lowered their scores after the warning was provided. Another benefit was that the perception of the test was not significantly affected. Admittedly, some of the kinks still need to be
ironed out, but as selection methods become more technologically advanced, new opportunities for reducing faking, such as the Fan et al. method, will be recommended.

Fan, J. Gao., D., Carroll, S.A., Lopez, F.J., Tian, T.S., & Meng, H. (2011). Testing the efficacy of a new procedure for reducing faking on personality tests within selection contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

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How Guilt Leads to Organizational Commitment (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Personality, Organizational Commitment
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JAN 2012)
Article: When Feeling Bad Leads to Feeling Good: Guilt-Proneness and Affective Organizational Commitment
Authors: F.J. Flynn, R.L. Schaumberg
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Is it good to be guilty? If you have just been accused of being a lousy tipper, being a nosy neighbor, or stealing candy from an actual baby, then the answer is unequivocally no. But if instead we’re referring to a personality type that is generally prone to feeling guilty, then it may be good after all. New research by Flynn and Schaumberg (2012) has surprisingly found that guilt-prone people feel more organizational commitment.

Organizational commitment, which is when employees emotionally identify with an employer, has long been studied by IO psychologists. Researchers have traditionally argued that “good” moods typically lead to higher levels of organizational commitment and “bad” moods lead to lower levels of organizational commitment. This study argues that sometimes “bad” moods or personality characteristics actually strengthen the emotional connection to an employer. Specifically, employees who are prone to feelings of guilt in response to failure had higher levels of organizational commitment in both a lab and field study.

So what explains this finding? The authors found that guilt-prone employees feel especially bad when they have experienced setbacks or failures. In order to make up for these shortcomings, these employees put more effort into their work. Once employees invest extra effort into their work, they then rationalize this extra effort by experiencing higher levels of organizational commitment. This supports research that has found that levels of commitment may be influenced by how much effort an employee has already expended. Although this seems backwards, the authors say that people sometimes make sense of how they feel after observing and interpreting their previous behavior.

Does this mean that we should look for guilt-prone people to hire? Not necessarily, say the authors. There is still much to learn about the possible costs and benefits of people with this personality. For example, although guilt-prone people make greater effort, they may also make too much effort and be liable to burnout. Still, this study should make us think twice about the effectiveness of people with so-called “bad” moods.

Flynn, F.J. & Schaumberg, R.L. (2012). When Feeling Bad Leads to Feeling Good: Guilt-Proneness and Affective Organizational Commitment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(1), 124-133.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

 

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Tips for Getting Tips (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Job Performance, Personality, Training
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (NOV 2011)
Article: Want a Tip? Service Performance as a Function of Emotion Regulation
and Extraversion
Authors: N. Chi, A.A. Grandey, J.A. Diamond, K.R. Krimmel
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Your restaurant server is quite the professional!  He manages a genuine, warm smile despite his impending apartment eviction, recurring car-transmission problems, and the fact that his favorite football team just lost in the playoffs.  But to pull that off, your server had to perform something called emotional labor, a crucial topic of interest to IO Psychologists.  New research by Chi, Grandey, Diamond, and Krimmel (2011) has found that certain emotional labor strategies are more useful than others, and that sometimes it depends on the type of person using these strategies.

The authors discuss two major strategies for performing emotional labor.  The first is called surface acting.  This is when employees fake the desired emotions even when those emotions don’t accurately reflect how they feel inside.  The other strategy is called deep acting.  This is when employees actually change their inner feelings to the desired state by focusing on past experiences.  For example, an employee who is in a bad mood might try thinking hard about a time when he was in a happy mood, causing him to project a display of authentic happiness to his customers.

But the two strategies do not always lead to similar results.  The researchers found that deep acting by restaurant servers will lead to them receiving more tips and exceeding customer expectations.  In a separate study involving simulated call-center employees, the researchers found that deep acting leads to an overall better emotional performance, meaning it is more convincing to the customers.  They also discovered that deep acting also leads employees to perform extra-role behaviors, meaning tasks that are not strictly part of someone’s job description but are nevertheless important.  The authors explain that deep acting puts employees in a good mood, which makes them more likely to do extra work.

But what about surface acting?  The researchers found that surface acting leads to receiving more tips, but only when used by extraverted, outgoing employees.  When introverted employees tried surface acting, their overall emotional performance became worse, and was not as convincing to the customers.  Specifically, this was true when the introverted employees performed extra-role behaviors.  The authors explain that “faking it” strategies like surface acting are particularly exhaustive to introverts, and while introverts may be able to “fake it” while performing their typical duties, their emotional resources may become depleted when asked to perform extra-role behaviors.

The implications of these findings are important for training in any industry that requires contact with customers.  Clearly, deep acting is a useful approach to dealing with the demands of emotional labor, and should be the preferred method endorsed during employee training.  Surface acting may be an alternative method that works when deep acting is not possible or inconvenient, but only for naturally extraverted employees.

Chi, N., Grandey, A.A., Diamond, J.A., & Krimmel K.R. (2011). Want a Tip? Service Performance as a Function of Emotion Regulation and Extraversion. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(6), 1237-1346.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

 

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How Much Do Pronouns Matter Anyway? (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Personality
Publication: Harvard Business Review
Article: Your use of pronouns reveals your personality
Author: Pennebaker, J.
Reviewed by: Liz Brashier

Do function words – words like pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions – matter? And if so, what do they tell us?  James Pennebaker, chair of the Psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent a considerable amount of time investigating those exact questions.  In a recent Harvard Business Review IdeaWatch, we get to learn more about Pennebaker’s research, and what it might mean for us.

These function words matter for several reasons.  With over 500 in the English language, and 55% of our spoken and written language composed of them, they express the real meat of our communication.  They get at our ideas, help us shape our language and understand connections, and reveal key information about a speaker’s emotions, age, or socioeconomic background.  According to Pennebaker, people who lie tend to use negation words much more often, and people who are are depressed use the pronoun “I” at a much higher rate than do non-depressed people.

You might be wondering what this means for an organization.  In a job interview, listening to function words might prove helpful in securing a better fit.  For example, in a position in which decisiveness is needed, listening for a candidate who avoids “I think” and speaks more assertively could be helpful.  And as for gender differences, women are more tuned in to their own internal states, indicated by a greater use of first-person and possessive pronouns, like “I” or “mine.”  Men tend to talk about objects more often, as is evident in a greater use of “a,” “an,” and “the.”

So the next time an employer or client asks you about the weather, work on appearing more confident – it’s as simple as saying  “it’s cold outside” instead of “I think it’s cold.”

Pennebaker, J. (2011). Your use of pronouns reveals your personality. Harvard Business Review, 89, 32-33.

human resource management,organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

 

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Leadership

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         The Predictive Power of Grit: How to Select Successful People

Topic: Leadership, Personality
Publication: The Leadership Quarterly (JUN 2011)
Article: Leader development and the dark side of personality
Authors: Harms, P. D., Spain, S. M., & Hannah, S. T.
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin

Recent research suggests that some positive personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness) are related to leadership outcomes. But what about the “dark side” of personality? In other words, what about subclinical traits (traits that fall between “normal” and what would be considered a personality disorder)?

Harms, Spain, and Hannah (2011) studied subclinical (“dark side”) traits and their effect on leader development in West Point cadets. They found that development did occur, with all twelve leader development dimensions increasing over the three-year time period. Subclinical traits had an effect on the rate of leader development, but the nature of that effect was mixed. Some traits (skeptical, imaginative) were negatively related to leader development, while others (cautious, bold, colorful, dutiful) were positively related to leader development.

These results suggest that we should not see all “dark side” traits at being completely bad; in terms of leader development, some seem to help and others seem to hurt. In addition, this study provides further evidence that leadership develops over a long period of time, and personality explains much of that change. Therefore, personality assessments that go beyond the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) would be useful as part of leadership development programs.

Harms, P. D., Spain, S. M., & Hannah, S. T. (2011). Leader development and the dark side of personality. The Leadership Quarterly, 22, 495-509. doi: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.04.007

human resource management,organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

Predicting CWBs: Have We Been Measuring the Wrong Things?

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Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Personality
Publication: Personnel Psychology, 64, 2 (Summer 2011)
Article: Reconsidering the Dispositional Basis of Counterproductive Work Behavior: The Role of Aberrant Personality
Authors: Wu, J. & Lebreton, J. M.
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rad

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) remains a heavily-researched area in I-O psychology. CWBs can take a variety of forms, from relatively minor acts of workplace theft to dramatic outbursts of workplace violence. Regardless of who they target or how severe they might be, CWBs are always a negative phenomenon, and organizations have a vested interest in predicting the likelihood that employees (or applicants) might engage in these behaviors. Traditionally, work linking personality characteristics to CWBs has been done using common personality frameworks, such as the Big 5. However, previous research has generated mixed findings in terms of how well these “common” personality traits predict CWBs.  As such, Wu and Lebreton suggest that it may be more effective to attempt to predict an individual’s likelihood of engaging in CWBs by measuring aberrant personality profiles. In their paper, Wu and Lebreton theoretically examine the links between CWBs and a number of aberrant personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

With an eye towards future research, the authors posit a number of hypotheses about the link between these three aberrant personality profiles and CWBs, including that individuals high in narcissism would be particularly likely to perceive hostile behaviors from others, and that primary psychopaths would engage in more thoroughly-planned CWBs.

The title of this review is posed as a question, and at least for now, it remains an open question. However, this appears to be a fruitful area for research. There is no doubt that CWBs remain a topic of great importance to organizations, and in this author’s opinion, the potential that measuring aberrant personality features has for improving prediction of CWBs is well worth exploring.

Wu, J. & Lebreton, J. M. (2011). Reconsidering the dispositional basis of counterproductive work behavior: The role of aberrant personality. Personnel Psychology, 64, 593-626.