Employee Performance Management

Practical applications of personality typing

About the author of 3DPersonality.com

Understanding personality profiles has practical applications in the business world. Interpersonal relations with supervisors, co-workers, and staff require appreciation of communication styles and work environment preferences to be able to effectively match tasks with personnel. Since we are dealing with acquaintances, knowledge of how traits tend to be packaged together gives us better insight into the people we deal with on a daily basis.

Hiring and Employee Performance Management

When recruiters are looking to fill a position, they are not just seeking people who have the skills required to do the work. For most positions, there will be a short list of candidates that all meet the minimum qualifications. The interviewers are looking for someone who, in addition to the needed experience and knowledge base, has the best fit on the basis of the values of the firm, and who also conforms to the type of person judged to be most successful in that type of position. A sales team leader may not be interested in hiring introverts. Emotional stability may be an important trait for firefighters. Honesty is especially important for someone entrusted with money, such as a teller or a guard for a Brinks armored truck. Other jobs may require careful attention to detail, such as accounting, or ability to work in a distracting environment, such as a commodity trader.

Employment Personality Test

Sometimes employers feel the need for knowledge about personality characteristics is more specific than what can be obtained from the regular interview process, and they will use employment personality tests to screen for particular job-related traits. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) first issued guidelines for the use of personality tests for employee selection in 1978 to ensure that the tests are used to obtain information on traits actually employed on the job and not for other purposes. The employer must show that the test predicts how the person tested will perform on the job. In addition, the test cannot discriminate against any one group of people, being used as a de facto screening device to eliminate all members of a group, such as women, blacks, Hispanics, other minorities, or the handicapped. For example, one test used in screening of police officers in a number of jurisdictions is the revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI II) which has over 400 questions and is designed as a tool to identify people with a range of mental illnesses.

As author Annie Murphy Paul points out, it is good for the EEOC to be skeptical. Many of the tests that have been developed are not good predictors of traits on the job. When there is an effort to go back and check the test results with actual traits as evidenced by behavior, the error rate can go as high as 96 percent. Personality tests should be viewed as indicators of tendencies but not as full profiles. In addition, people are not necessarily truthful when they take tests that determine their employment fates. Applicants may attempt to answer the questions based on a fictional persona they wish they had, rather than reflect the everyday person they actually are and would report to work if they got the job.

Keys to Employee Performance Management

Employee performance needs to be evaluated on the basis of actual performance on the job. Even when a company is using employee performance software or other human resources software, a supervisor must remain objective when making employee performance appraisals. An individual employee's personality type should not influence the assessment. However, the supervisor should consider the employee's personality style when deciding the most appropriate way to give both constructive and negative feedback to someone with that personality type.

So, for example, suppose a supervisor had to give critical feedback to an administrative assistant, someone she was fairly certain could be characterized as a Caregiver – a Two under the Enneagram system. The supervisor would want to be sure that the feedback was given in a friendly, conversational manner. She would emphasize that the relationship was still in good standing. She would talk with her employee about how the two of them could make changes to correct the behavior. This is very different from how the same supervisor would want to give critical feedback to an Observer – a Five in the Enneagram system. The supervisor would want to set up a time to discuss the issue with a Five, and explain the reason for the meeting ahead of time. She would want to be very specific and detailed. She would be clear about her understanding of the problems caused by the behavior, and ask the Five to contribute his or her impressions about the issue. The supervisor would present a plan for correcting the problem, include the Five's suggestions, as appropriate, and explain the rationale for the decision.

Another key component of employee management is promotion. Promotion is hiring from within for the next position in the hierarchy. Promotion involves a search for the right fit, and often that search is for the one that the decision makers feel has the traits that match the personality style that the company tends to place in that position. Even with all the discussion of diversity these days, it is still very difficult for alternative personality styles to be promoted and be successful because they do not correspond with everyone else’s expectations regarding how those jobs should be handled.

References

More real world examples of personality typing:
     Team Building
     Customer Relations
     Professional Career Choices

About the primary author of 3DPersonality.com: Dr. R. Jean Maddigan is a professional social scientist who has been interested in personality systems for over a decade. Read more on her background.