By Lauren Amps (20-21)

Assessing candidate’s personality as part of the selection process has long been controversial among practitioners and candidates alike. However, understanding personality, in particular how personality interacts with work-related situations resulting in behaviour, can be beneficial knowledge for hiring organisations to possess. Familiar methods of personality assessment which include simply administering personality tests to candidate’s have been criticised for their lack of measuring anything actually related to the job role¹ ². This creates an opening for the development of improved methods for assessing a candidate’s personality with inclusion of how their personality directly interacts with the job role at hand and how this might relate to their future performance in the role.

Why is it important to consider personality in recruitment?

Being able to gain some understanding of how a candidate might perform in the role being recruited for, as well as how the candidate will fit with the workplace as a whole is crucially important³. The importance of the selection process should not be overlooked by employers. It is estimated that a poor hiring decision could cost the employer 30% of that employee’s first year’s earnings⁴. There is research which suggests that assessing a candidate’s personality can help to provide employers with useful information regarding a candidate’s fit with the job role. The Big Five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience) have been found to be able to, in part, predict future job performance⁵. For example, conscientiousness is related to a strong willingness to stick to workplace rules and make efforts in task completion⁵, and extraverts (characterised by being particularly outgoing and sociable) show more positive emotions and better performance in their role when that role requires them to express these behavioural characteristics⁶ ⁷.

New areas of personality-recruitment research

More recently, some researchers have begun to consider personality in terms of how traits are expressed in response to situational cues in the workplace⁸. Interest lies in how interactions between personality traits and situational cues result in variation in the behavioural expressions of personality traits, and how this relates to job performance. This is referred to as within-person variability, which simply describes the changes in people’s behaviours. Situational judgement tests (SJT’s) are a useful way of investigating how personality traits and situations interact⁹. SJT’s present candidates with a work-related situation and a series of responses to choose from that indicate which course of action they would most likely take. Combining SJT’s with personality allow the candidate’s chosen response to be linked with their underlying traits⁹.

Showing variation in behaviours is representative of a knowledge of how effective certain behaviours are for certain work-related situations. Being able to vary the expression of work-related behaviours depending on the situation has been shown to be related to higher supervisor ratings of job performance⁹. This is said to be because those who are able to show variability in their behaviours are better at adapting to varying situations by changing their behaviour to fit the situation¹⁰. This is useful for employers to be aware of as being able to adapt behaviour to fit with various work-related situations has obvious benefits for a number of multi-faceted roles.

The most recent study

A more recent study investigated variability in the Big Five personality traits in response to work-related situations using SJT’s, and how this was related to supervisor ratings of job performance. Data was collected from 92 employees working in the hospitality industry via an online survey. The survey included a personality assessment of the Big Five, and a series of SJT’s that presented situations that were both relevant to one of the Big Five traits (for example, a situation targeting extraversion that required sociability) and relevant to hospitality work. Each SJT required participants to choose from a series of responses that were either effective or ineffective for the situation, and relevant to the personality trait being targeted (for example, describing high or low levels of sociability). Participants were asked to select a response option that they would most likely do and one that they would least likely do. Employee’s supervisors were then asked to rate the employee’s job performance. Supervisor ratings were collected for 37 of the 92 employees.

The study aimed to explore within-person variability in the Big Five by assessing whether the employee’s natural personality traits effected their ability to vary their expression of each trait, as measured using the response options on the SJT. The study also aimed to explore whether showing variability was positively associated with supervisor ratings of job performance. The study found some evidence of within-person variability, finding, for example, that 40% of participants who scored low on agreeableness in the personality assessment were able to vary their natural trait level by selecting a response option that showed high levels of agreeableness because this was the most effective response to the situation. Whilst this study found a negative relationship between this variability and job performance, suggesting that showing variability was associated with lower ratings of job performance, this finding should be considered cautiously due to limited data. The overwhelming body of research suggests that variability is in fact positively related to job performance⁹ ¹¹.

What should be taken from this area of research?

These findings promote an opportunity to improve upon traditional methods of assessing candidate’s personality for use in workplace recruitment processes. Incorporating personality assessment with SJT’s allows employers to assess, and therefore better understand, how a candidate’s personality traits interact with key situational aspects of the job role. This approach would result in a selection method that is both job-related and provides an understanding of a candidate’s fundamental characteristics that could be used alone or to compliment other selection methods, such as traditional SJT’s. Such a hybrid method would provide an indication of how situational aspects of the job role interact with the candidate’s personality, resulting in job-related behaviours and performance. This method would also provide the opportunity to understand how dynamically candidates are able to respond to situational features of the role in terms of how they are able to vary their behavioural expressions to respond in the most effective way.

References

1. Guion, R. M., & Gottier, R. F. Validity of personality measures in personnel selection. Personnel Psychology, 1965, 18(2), 135-164. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1965.tb00273.x
2. Anderson, N., Salgado, J. F., & Hülsheger, U. R. Applicant reactions in selection: Comprehensive meta-analysis into reaction generalization versus situational specificity. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 2010, 18(3), 291-304. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2389.2010.00512.x
3. Hacker, C. The cost of poor hiring decisions and how to avoid them. HR Focus, 1997, 74(10), S13.
4. Hacker, C. (1997). The cost of poor hiring decisions and how to avoid them. HR Focus, 74(10), S13.
5. Barrick, M. R). Yes, personality matters: Moving on to more important matters. Human performance, 2005, 18(4), 359-372.
6. Wihler, A., Meurs, J. A., Wiesmann, D., Troll, L., & Blickle, G. Extraversion and adaptive performance: Integrating trait activation and socioanalytic personality theories at work. Personality and Individual Differences, 2017, 116, 133-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.04.034
7. Dimotakis, N., Conlon, D. E., & Ilies, R. The mind and heart (literally) of the negotiator: Personality and contextual determinants of experiential reactions and economic outcomes in negotiation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 2012, 97(1), 183-193. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025706
8. Tett, R. P., & Burnett, D. D. A personality trait-based interactionist model of job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 2003, 88(3), 500-517. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.3.500
9. Lievens, F., Lang, J. W. B., De Fruyt, F., Corstjens, J., Van de Vijver, M., & Bledow, R. The predictive power of people’s intraindividual variability across situations: Implementing whole trait theory in assessment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 2018, 103(7), 753-771. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000280
10. Paulhus, D. L., & Martin, C. L. (1988). Functional flexibility: A new conception of interpersonal flexibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 88-101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.55.1.88
11. Beckmann, N., Birney, D. P., Beckmann, J. F., Wood, R. E., Sojo, V., & Bowman, D. Inter-individual differences in intra-individual variability in personality within and across contexts. Journal of Research in Personality, 2020, 85, 103909. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2019.103909

By Nadia Baddoo (20-21)

Literature voicing the experiences of minority workers disproportionally focus on racism, homophobia, and sexism, with few studies highlighting the experiences of disabled workers.

Within working contexts, The Equality Act 2010 defines a disability as a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on one’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. However, the disability identity is complex existing on varying levels along a continuum of abled and disabled (Santuzzi & Waltz, 2016; Vick, 2012). Existing between these two categories frequently resides individuals with non-visible disabilities which can present challenges in the workplace for employees with invisible disabilities being as they face the unique challenge of having to verify and prove their disability when seeking reasonable adjustments for their disability (Davis, 2005).

With 15,000 estimated sufferers in the UK, and over 50% reporting needing support at work (Inusa et al., 2020), Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) was used as a case study to investigate the perceptions of workplace support in young female workers with invisible disabilities. The decision to employ SCD as the case study was inspired by the researcher who has been navigating the workplace with the condition since entering the world of employment at the age of 16.

In the quest to explore the lived experiences of support at work in employees with SCD, the study virtually interviewed 5 women aged between 23 and 25 living with SCD in the UK and currently in full or part time employment. Interview questions remained open to gain an in-depth insight to participants perception of support in the workplace. Interviews lasted between 39 and 62 minutes. Each interview was transcribed verbatim and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.

The findings revealed three noticeable themes in the participants narratives of experiences of support: (1) Disclosure, (2) Emotional support, and (3) Accommodation. The key points from each theme are noted below:

1. Disclosure:
2. Disclosure was considered essential in the women’s mission for support due to their increased need for sick days and the irregular nature of their condition
3. Participants largely felt employers acknowledged disclosure purely as a “box tick” function for HR which they believed resulted from a lack of understanding of SCD, namely amongst their white counterparts
4. Participants did not resent this lack of knowledge as they were aware it came from a place of oblivion. Rather what was perceived to be a hinderance to support was employer’s lack of curiosity to educate themselves on SCD both during and after disclosure
5. Failure to acknowledge disclosure made them feel marginalised in the workplace and because of their white co-workers and employers general limited understanding of their disability, all women reported experiencing more support from Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups at work
6. Emotional support:
7. Doubts exist among others relating to participants validations for sick days which dangerously resulted in presenteeism where the participants reported working while sick either due to fear a of looking incompetent or as an act of protest for support
8. The women discuss feeling being treated differently to others during times of need, with the women feeling as though their co-workers’ difficulties were responded to with more urgency and sympathy
9. The concept that people are incorrectly assumed to fit into a single category of abled or disabled rather than on a continuum (Moss, 2000) was reflected within participants’ experiences of limited workplace compassion
10. The invisibility of SCD failed to uphold stereotypical definitions of disabled in the workplace, this involuntarily left all women feeling as though they had to trade the private of the details of their disability in order to gain support at work
11. Accommodation:
12. Self-management as primary support method
13. Where accommodations were provided except for one participant, they were not acquired without a ‘fight’ which had negative implications for their privacy preferences regarding the details of their disability
14. It was perceived to be more supportive and effective for employers to explicitly ask participants what accommodation adjustments they require/would benefit from
15. The results positively support previous research which publicised low-cost workplace adjustments to be successfully provided for workers with SCD (Berghs & Dyson, 2019).

In response to the findings, the researcher concluded the research by outlining the following recommendations for organisations to help increase the level of support they extend towards employees with SCD:

1. Upon disclosure of less common disabilities, recruiters involved in the selection and onboarding process should be trained on how to express inquisitiveness when querying the support needs that may be attached to such disabilities while adhering to non-discriminatory practices.
2. A conscious effort must be made to implement such strategies towards the disclosure of ‘ethic conditions’ to prevent unconscious biases from creating an environment whereby the visibility and experiences of minorities with disabilities become marginalised
3. Maintaining a diverse workforce may assist in alleviating marginalised experiences as similar others may be more likely to be familiar with SCD, supporting the formation of support and ally relationships.
4. It is proposed that HR departments show more commitment or obligation to acquiring at minimum a base level understanding of SCD, utilising employees as subject matter experts (SME)
5. By serving as their own SME, individuals with SCD can be directly involved in reasonable adjustments decisions, thus reducing their experiences of having to ‘fight’ for their support needs
6. It is advised that HR professionals explore alternative routes for SCD employees to seek time off for SC related reasons for which their direct manager is aware of as opposed to taking the traditional sick day to help reduce stigma in the workplace.

References:

Berghs, M., & Dyson, S. (2019). Barriers and Enablers to Employment: Black Disabled Peoples Living with Sickle Cell Disorder Project. De Montfort University.

Davis, N. A. (2005). Invisible Disability. Ethics, 116(1), 153-213.

Inusa, B., James, J., Rajkovic-Hooley, O., Bailey, T., Medalla, G., & Taylor, B. (2020). UK results from the International Sickle Cell World Assessment Survey (SWAY): patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) experience work impairment and decreased productivity. British Journal of Haematology, 189, 34-35.

Moss, P. (2000). Not Quite abled and Not Quite Disabled: Experiences of being “In-Between” ME and The Academy. Disability Studies Quarterly, 20, 287–293.

Santuzzi, A. M., & Waltz, P. R. (2016). Disability in the workplace: A unique and variable identity. Journal of Management, 42(5), 1111-1135.

Vick, A. (2012). Theorizing episodic disabilities: The case for an embodied politics. Canadian Social Work Review/Revue canadienne de service social, 41-60.