PS390 Unit 6 Personality Testing Paper Example

The Vendor's Service Personality Test and the Cutoff Score: A PS390 Unit 6 Personality Assessment Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS390: Introduction to Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Unit 6 Personality Assessment Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the call center, the vendor and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

The Offer

In March, a testing vendor approached our Charlotte customer service center with a forty-minute online personality inventory marketed as a measure of "service orientation." The vendor recommended a cutoff: applicants scoring below the fortieth percentile would be screened out before interviews. The center manager liked the idea, since it promised to reduce the number of interviews supervisors had to conduct. My job was to advise whether the test would improve hiring and whether it could create unfair outcomes.

The Big Five at Work

Barrick and Mount (1991) combined dozens of studies that related job performance to the five broad traits psychologists call the Big Five: how outgoing, calm, cooperative, careful and curious a person tends to be. Being organized, dependable and driven to achieve, the trait called conscientiousness, predicted performance across all the job families in the analysis, though by a small margin. The remaining traits mattered only for particular jobs; being outgoing, for instance, helped in managers' and salespeople's work.

Modest validity is still useful when combined with other methods, but it means a personality test alone will misclassify many applicants. A cutoff that rejects people below the fortieth percentile will reject some who would have done well and accept some who would not.

The Vendor's Evidence

The vendor's technical manual reported a correlation with supervisor ratings in a call center sample, but the study included only ninety employees at a single company, and the manual did not report results by gender or race. It also did not say how scores related to retention, our main problem. Without that information, I could not judge whether the test would work for our jobs or whether it would affect groups differently.

Adverse Impact From Personality Tests

Personality tests are often considered fairer than cognitive tests because group differences on personality scales tend to be smaller. Risavy and Hausdorf (2011) examined how personality testing can still produce adverse impact through differences in hiring rates. They showed that even small average differences between groups on a personality scale can translate into noticeable differences in who passes when a cutoff is used, especially when the cutoff is high, so the way scores are used matters as much as the size of the differences.

A small difference in average scores can become a large difference in who gets an interview once a hard cutoff is applied.

The Diversity-Validity Dilemma

Ployhart and Holtz (2008) reviewed strategies organizations use to reduce subgroup differences and adverse impact in selection while preserving validity. They described approaches such as using predictors with smaller subgroup differences, combining several predictors, reducing reliance on any single cutoff, using alternative methods of testing and improving recruitment, and noted that each strategy involves tradeoffs between fairness, validity and cost. No strategy eliminates the tension, but some reduce it substantially.

Their review suggested that our current combination, a structured interview and a work sample, already uses predictors associated with relatively small subgroup differences. Adding a hard personality cutoff at the front of the process would put the least validated, least locally tested step in the most powerful position.

What the Job Actually Calls For

Before weighing any test, I went back to the job analysis we wrote for the structured interview. High-performing representatives and supervisors had named staying calm with angry callers, following billing rules precisely, keeping notes while listening and showing up reliably for fixed shifts, including weekends. Several of these line up with conscientiousness, such as following rules carefully and being dependable, and some with emotional stability. None obviously required extraversion; some of our best representatives describe themselves as quiet. A test measuring a general "service orientation" might mix these traits with others that matter less for our work, and it might favor outgoing applicants who sound good on the phone but leave when the schedule turns out to include Saturdays. If personality is used at all, measuring the traits our job analysis identified would make more sense than buying a general label.

The Center Manager's Concern

The manager's real problem was interview volume: supervisors were spending hours each week interviewing applicants who withdrew or failed the work sample. A cutoff test would cut that volume, but so might other steps. Moving the realistic job preview earlier, before the interview, and scheduling the work sample first for applicants who pass the preview would reduce interviews without screening anyone out on an unvalidated measure.

My Recommendation

I recommended against the vendor's pass-fail cutoff and proposed a six-month pilot instead. All applicants who consent will take the inventory, but scores will not affect decisions. After six months, we will check whether scores relate to our own outcomes, ninety-day retention and quality scores, beyond what the interview and work sample already predict, and we will calculate selection rates by gender and race as if the cutoff had been used. If the test adds prediction without adverse impact, we could add it as one weighted part of a combined score rather than a gate.

Faking and Applicant Experience

Personality inventories can be faked by applicants who guess what an employer wants. In a pilot where scores do not count, faking is less likely, which will give a cleaner picture of validity than we would get in actual use. We also asked three recent hires to take the test and comment on it. Two said several questions felt unrelated to the job, which matters for how applicants perceive the fairness of the process. If the test is ever used, applicants will be told what it measures and why, and the questions that recent hires found unrelated will be raised with the vendor.

Law and Ethics

When a hiring test puts a protected group at a disadvantage, the burden falls on the employer to tie the test to genuine requirements of the job. Using a vendor's test without local evidence would leave the center unable to defend it. Ethically, applicants deserve to be judged on qualities that matter for the job, measured accurately.

Conclusion

Barrick and Mount show that personality, especially conscientiousness, predicts job performance modestly. Risavy and Hausdorf show that cutoffs can turn small score differences into unequal hiring rates, and Ployhart and Holtz show that every strategy for balancing validity and diversity carries tradeoffs. The vendor's test will be piloted without affecting decisions, and used only if local evidence supports it.

References

Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1991.tb00688.x

Ployhart, R. E., & Holtz, B. C. (2008). The diversity-validity dilemma: Strategies for reducing racioethnic and sex subgroup differences and adverse impact in selection. Personnel Psychology, 61(1), 153-172. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2008.00109.x

Risavy, S. D., & Hausdorf, P. A. (2011). Personality testing in personnel selection: Adverse impact and differential hiring rates. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 19(1), 18-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2389.2011.00531.x