9.3 Personality Tests

Personality Tests

The Big Five personality test examines extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Self-assessment statements might include the following:

1. I have an assertive personality.
2. I am generally trusting.
3. I am not always confident in my abilities.
4. I have a hard time dealing with change.

Personality

Personality encompasses a person’s relatively stable feelings, thoughts, and behavioural patterns. Each of us has a unique personality that differentiates us from others, and understanding someone’s personality gives us clues about how that person is likely to act and feel in various situations. Having this knowledge is also helpful in placing people into jobs and organizations. Personality traits cluster into five main categories, called the Big Five. Personality assessment involving the Big Five should be considered part of the HR selection toolkit for most jobs.

Table 9.3.1 The Big Five Personality Traits

Trait	Description
Openness	Imaginative, inventive, intellectually curious, and receptive to new experiences.
Conscientiousness	Methodical, reliable, goal-oriented, detail-focused, and disciplined.
Extraversion	Energetic, talkative, outgoing, and enjoys social interactions.
Agreeableness	Compassionate, cooperative, good-natured, trusting, and considerate.
Neuroticism	Prone to stress, emotionally unstable, anxious, and often experiences negative emotions.

The Big Five

Here are the definitions for each of the five dimensions:

Openness: People high in openness seem to thrive in situations that require flexibility and learning new things. They are highly motivated to learn new skills and do well in training settings. They also have an advantage when they enter a new organization. Their open-mindedness leads them to seek a lot of information and feedback about how they are doing and to build relationships, which leads to quicker adjustment to the new job.

Conscientiousness: Refers to the degree to which a person is organized, systematic, punctual, achievement-oriented, and dependable. Conscientiousness is the one personality trait that uniformly predicts how high a person’s performance will be across various occupations and jobs. Conscientiousness is the trait most recruiters desire, and highly conscientious applicants tend to succeed in interviews. Once hired, conscientious people not only tend to perform well, but they also have higher levels of motivation to perform, lower levels of turnover, lower levels of absenteeism, and higher levels of safety performance at work. One’s conscientiousness is related to career success and career satisfaction over time.

Extraversion:  is the degree to which a person is outgoing, talkative, friendly, and enjoys socializing. One established finding is that they tend to be effective in jobs involving sales. They also tend to be effective managers and demonstrate inspirational leadership behaviours. They do not necessarily perform well in all jobs; jobs depriving them of social interaction may be a poor fit. They are not necessarily model employees. For example, they tend to have higher levels of absenteeism at work, potentially because they may miss work to socialize with or attend to the needs of their friends.

Agreeableness: Agreeable people may be valuable to their teams and influential leaders because they create a fair environment in leadership positions. People with agreeableness are also less likely to engage in constructive and change-oriented communication. Disagreeing with the status quo may create conflict, and agreeable people may avoid creating such conflict, thus missing an opportunity for constructive change.

Neuroticism: refers to the degree to which a person is anxious, irritable, temperamental, and moody. It is perhaps the only Big Five dimension where scoring high is undesirable. People with very high Neuroticism typically experience several problems at work. Being high in Neuroticism seems to be harmful to one’s career, as these employees have lower levels of career success (measured by income and occupational status achieved in one’s job).

Personality tests have become a popular screening tool. Recent Canadian stats show that in 2013, almost 30 percent of small and medium Canadian businesses reported using them. In 2017, Michaels, a North America-wide arts-and-crafts store, asked applicants to complete a personality questionnaire online. Virtually all psychologists accept the Big Five as a legitimate test of personality – conscientiousness, which correlates to success at work. However, one of Michael’s applicants, Ashleigh, stated that Michael had asked about her essence as a person. She said, ‘It’s especially trying if it’s for a minimum-wage job, and they’re asking if you’re always happy.” Michael Lynk, a professor at Western University’s Faculty of Law, said employers shouldn’t be asking questions that reveal someone’s mental health. “Asking if you’re happy all the time, asking if your moods swing a lot, are just red flags that no employer should ask,” he said. Decades of research into how employees think and behave have gone into personality testing. So, while there is a place for personality tests in HR employee selection, we must be mindful of the questions and the candidates’ experience in answering them (Field, 2018).

Aside from the Big Five personality traits, perhaps the most well-known and most often used personality assessment is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Unlike the Big Five, which assesses traits, MBTI measures types. MBTI was developed in 1943 by a mother-daughter team, Isabel Myers and Katherine Cook Briggs. One distinguishing characteristic of this test is that it is explicitly designed for learning, not for employee selection purposes. The Myers & Briggs Foundation has strict guidelines against using the test for employee selection. However, organizations do find it helpful for training and team-building purposes.

“Personality and Values” from Principles of Management II by Anonymous is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, except where otherwise noted.—Modifications: Used paragraph one of section Personality, edited; Used section Big five personality traits, edited.

“2.3 Individual Differences: Values and Personality” from NSCC Organizational Behaviour by NSCC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.—Modifications: Used section Myers-Briggs type indicator, edited, summarized.