Analyzing the Effectiveness of Personality Tests in Organizations

This essay examines the effectiveness of personality tests as a strategy to improve organizational behavior within the workplace. It discusses the argument that personality tests help understand an employee's effectiveness before recruitment, assisting in avoiding post-recruitment difficulties and setting organizational behavior standards. The essay highlights how these tests guide HR in categorizing behavioral traits to predict employee reactions and ensure job role compatibility, especially in communication-focused organizations. However, it also acknowledges the counter-argument that personality tests provide a vague idea of a person and that employee behavior can improve over time or be influenced by organizational culture and management. The essay concludes that personality tests have the potential to enhance the recruitment process and maintain workforce quality, despite potential downsides like interviewee hesitation, emphasizing the need for well-designed tests and strategic implementation by HR management. Desklib offers a platform to explore similar solved assignments and essays.

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Organizational behavior is one of the crucial aspects that the companies must consider in
order to run the business process without any difficulties. The notion of organizational behavior
assists the managerial authorities to determine the direction of the knowledge regarding the
behavior or attitude of the individuals in an organization. Thus it can be said that organizational
behavior plays an important role for the overall management of an organization. In order to
improve organizational behavior within the work place, a company adopts different strategies in
order to address and improve organizational behavior in a company (McShane, Olekalns and
Travaglione 2013). The main objective of organizational behavior is to create a better
relationship among the employees as well as between the employees and the organization.One of
the most considered as well as the most adopted strategy to improve organizational behavior
within workplace is the training program. However another school of thought considers training
program to be ineffective in improving the behavioral attributes of the individuals working in an
organization. The following section of the discussion further goes deep arguing the effectiveness
of the personality test while recruiting employees in an organization (Weber and Dwoskin,
2014).
Some scholars opine that personality test is the personality test largely helps to
understand the effectiveness of an employee before recruiting them. The purpose behind
introducing the personality test program is to avoid post recruitment difficulties (Kitchin 2017).
However, personality test program is not a new phenomenon in the business world. Many
organizations in the industry has been using psychological test in order to judge the compatibility
of the employees that the organization plans to hire. The program of personality test helps an
organization to set the standard of the organizational behavior within the organization (Weber
and Dwoskin, 2014). Prior to the hiring employees, a personality test determines the strategies

that are needed to address the issues of employee behaviors and overall manage the workforce.
Since employee behavior has been considered as one of the biggest challenges for human
resource management, thus personality test programs can work to greater extent. The personality
test guides the human resource department regarding the way of categorization of the behavioral
traits by which the person’s mentality can be understood thus it helps the management to
perceive possible reaction of an employee to a particular situation. For example, an organization
where employees are divided into teams, personality test helps to understand that that which
group, the new recruitment will more efficiently work with. However the main purpose of
personality test is to ensure the new hire meets the job role (Weber and Dwoskin, 2014). In this
regard, it must deserve mention that the organization s which deals with the communication
services will be the most beneficiary from the personality test. From the group interaction
perspective, personality test helps the employees o understand about their own drawbacks so that
they can work to improve their behavioral attributes, thus the conclusion can be drawn that the
personality test is a useful pre-recruitment strategy.
Meanwhile another school of thought argues that personality test is completely a vague
idea of screening the employees before recruiting (O’Neillet al., 2013. The above statement
regarding the effectiveness of personality test has been argued by several scholars as well as by
the several business heads. They argue that the personality test gives a general idea of a human
being which cannot to be regarded as the basis upon which a person to be judged. There are
many instances, where employees have been seen to be improved than he or she was in the
starting of his or her new job.Most of the employees themselves improve their behavioral
attributes in the course of their working with an organization. Or sometimes under the guidance
of managementauthorities, the overall employee behavior is improved. It can be further argued

by stating that employee behavior solely expends on the aspect of organizational culture. The
employee behavior and the manager behavior are co related with each other as there is a
tendency of following the higher authority among the employees. For example, most of the
employees follow what is done by their immediate boss (Christiansen and Tett, 2013). Thus it is
revealed that presplit test of a person to make sure his effectiveness is nothing bust a vague idea
and the success rate of this strategy is very less than other strategies of organizational behavior.
To conclude it can be said that the personality test actually has all the possibilities to
make the recruitment process better. Even if personality test does not bring satisfactory long-
term results, for the initial period, personality tests will be able to avoid most common issues
regarding new recruitment in an organization. It is not completely a vague idea as the in the
process of personality test, the overall aspect of a one’s character is thoroughly assessed which
helps in keeping the standard of an organization. In one word, personality tests help in keeping
the quality of the workforce intact. One of major issues concerning personality test is that most
of the interviewees do not agree to take personality test as they hesitate of revealing their
drawbacks before others. Despite of the fact that there are some downsides regarding the
implementation of the personality development test, it will still be regarded as one of the useful
tool of recruitment process but then also the human resource management need to implement the
strategy. Along with that, the contents of the personality test have to be designed in such a way
that it can effectively assess the character of human being.

References
Christiansen, N. and Tett, R. eds., 2013. Handbook of personality at work. Routledge.
Kitchin, D., 2017. An introduction to organisational behaviour for managers and engineers: A
group and multicultural approach. Routledge.
McShane, S., Olekalns, M. and Travaglione, T., 2013. Organisational behaviour: Emerging
knowledge, global insights.. Ryde. New South Wales, Australia: McGraw-Hill.
O’Neill, T.A., Lee, N.M., Radan, J., Law, S.J., Lewis, R.J. and Carswell, J.J., 2013. The impact
of “non-targeted traits” on personality test faking, hiring, and workplace deviance. Personality
and Individual Differences, 55(2), pp.162-168.
Weber, L. and Dwoskin, E., 2014. Are workplace personality tests fair?. Wall Street Journal.