Personality in the Workplace

Question 1

Vocational Fit

Answer 1

• Vocational Interests
• *Vocational Characteristics
• Vocational Fit
  
  • Alignment of personality values, aptitudes, interests, personal goals with characteristics of the vocation/job
• Not distinctions between vocation, career, and job
• Job Satisfaction, engagement, retention

Question 2

Vocational/Career Interests

Answer 2

• Holland RIASEC Scales
• Holland scales are arranged in a circle; more proximal scales tend to be more correlated
• Like the big 5 of vocational interest
• ORVIS categories’ is quite similar usually a free test version

Question 3

Holland/Big 5 correlates

Answer 3

Question 4

ORVIS/Big 5 correlates

Answer 4

Question 5

Employee Well-being and Performance

Answer 5

• Employee Well-Being
  
  • Job Satisfactions. Employee Engagement, Organisational Commitment
  • Occupational Stress/Burnout
• Job Performance
  
  • Task Performance
  • Organisational
  • Citizenship Behaviour
  • Counterproductive Work Behaviour
    
    • Interpersonal: harassment, bullying, discrimination
    • Organizational: theft, unreasonable absenteeism, fraud

Question 6

Personality and Job Satisfaction

Answer 6

Question 7

Job Performance

Answer 7

Performance

• Conscientiousness is the most consistent predictor
• Theory and some support that ideal personality varies across jobs

Question 8

Organisational Citizenship Behaviors

(OCB)

Answer 8

• Definition
  
  • Doing positive things for the organization beyond the defined job
• Important traits:
  
  • Conscientiousness and agreeableness are noteworthy

Question 9

Counterproductive Work Behaviors

(CWB)

Answer 9

• “Unethical, illegal, or unwise workplace behaviours such as stealing and bullying”
• Key traits
  
  • Conscientiousness, agreeableness
  • See also Dark Triad (i.e. narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and also captures by low honesty-humility on the HEXACO

Question 10

Compensation

Answer 10

• High conscientiousness and low neuroticism predict higher pay
• Agreeableness predicts lower pay

Question 11

Leadership

Answer 11

• Leadership
  
  • “the ability to motivate individuals to reach a shared goal”
• Emergent leadership and effective leadership
• Many theoretical models of leadership
  
  • Transactional
  • Transformational

Question 12

Work Applications of Personality Assessment

Answer 12

• Professional Development
  
  • Leadership Development
  • Team Building
  • Self-awareness building
• Career Counselling
• Employee Selection
  
  • Multi-billion dollar industry
  • Employers are particularly keen to hire people who are conscientious, agreeable and not too neurotic
  • Standard personality tests are popular but often other measures are aiming to assess an applicants personality (e.g. interviews, reference checks, assessment centres)

Question 13

Aporoaches to Manging Faking

(Fake high stakes test results)

Answer 13

• Prevention
  
  • Test Instructions
    
    • Warnings: Detection, consequences
  • Subtle/neutral items
  • Ipsative Tests
• Detections
  
  • validity scales: lie scales, impression management scales; overclaiming questionnaires
  • cross-referencing with interviews and referee reports
• Corrections
  
  • Social desirability corrections (no evidence of improved predictive validity)
  • integrate with other selection tools and use more to flag problematic candidates as opposed to identifying best
  • Develop validation algorithms based on applicant personality data