Discuss two issues that arise when an organization decides to use a personality test as part of their employee selection process.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• An issue that arises when using personality tests for employee selection is the degree to which the results of the tests can be influenced when the test taker does not respond in an honest fashion, generically referred to as “faking.”

• Faking occurs when a people try to respond to the test questions in a way that presents themselves in the most positive fashion.

• If job candidates can fake the results of a selection test, the validity of the results for predicting job performance might be compromised.

• There is disagreement in the literature regarding the degree to which faking on personality tests actually reduces the correlation (validity coefficients) between the test and a criterion measure.

• Some studies suggest that faking will reduce the validity of the test while other studies suggest that effect, if present at all, will only minimally affect the validity of the test.

• The second issue that arises when using a personality test for employee selection is whether more of a personality trait that is associated with high job performance will always be better than less of the trait.

• New research has suggested that it may not be true.
o In the case of conscientiousness, there is data that shows job performance improves as the level of conscientiousness increases but only to a point.
o In cases of exceptionally high conscientiousness, performance may actually decrease.
o The reason why earlier research did not show this was due to a possible artifact in the method that is used to score most personality tests.