Maximizing the Predictive Power of Personality Tests

Although measures of personality are fairly common in employee selection and assessment contexts, research suggests that measures of various personality characteristics tend to be less predictive of job performance than other common selection tests (e.g., cognitive ability tests, technical work sample tests). Typically, items on personality measures ask job applicants/employees to report on how they are/act in general, across many different contexts (e.g., home, work, school).

THE RESEARCH STUDY

Researchers (Pace & Brannick, 2010) recently found that by simply framing personality items to fit the work context, one can improve the predictive power of the personality measure. In their study, the researchers selected the personality characteristic of “openness to experience” which is not as commonly studied in selection and assessment contexts as personality characteristics such as conscientiousness. Nevertheless, openness to experience may be very important for jobs that require high levels of creativity and novel problem solving.

Using a sample of 83 employees from various industries, the researchers compared the predictive power of a common openness to experience measure (NEO PI-R) and one that they created which specifically addresses employees’ tendencies at work. Their results suggest that their work-focused measure of openness to experience was much more strongly related to supervisor ratings of employees’ creative performance than the general measure was.

THE BOTTOM LINE

These findings suggest that personality measures focusing specifically on the workplace may predict work performance better than more general measures of personality for which the frame-of-reference is “all the time” as opposed to “at work.” From a practical perspective, this makes sense; how we generally behave or are at work can be quite different from how we behave or tend to be in other contexts.

 

Pace, V.L. & Brannick, M.T. (2010). Improving prediction of work performance through frame-of-reference consistency: Empirical evidence using openness to experience. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 18(2), 230-235.

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