Essay --

For an organisation to be at its best it requires the best. Traditionally, 'hard skills' e.g. ones education were the decisive factors in employment decisions while â€Å"softer aspects† e.g. their character or personality, were seen as irrelevant. Guion and Gottier (1965) concluded: " it is difficult to advocate, with a clear conscience, the use of personality measures in most situations as a basis for making employment decisions" (p. 106) with others concluding similarly (Schmitt, Gooding, Noe, & Kirsch, 1984; Hough, Eaton, Dunnette, Kamp & McCoy, 1990). Personality itself can be seen as stable, inner, personal dispositions that determine relatively consistent patterns of behaviour (including feelings and thoughts) across different situations (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2007). Therefore personality traits are what makes a person’s behaviour consistent and unique in certain situations. Research into management derailment, absenteeism and stress all point to personality as a mediating factor of job performance (Hogan, Hogan & Kaiser, 2010; Vlasveld et al , 2012) and thus is a necessary consideration all organisational dimensions. With the importance of personality established, the inventories of measuring these traits need to be of equal significance. It is now possible to assess personality in a way that is meaningful for the world of work and for employers and managers to use. The use of psychometric tests such as SHL's OPQ 32 are invaluable in helping predict potential or current employees organisational behaviours along with job performance (Mount et al, 2000; Judge et al 2002). This essay will evaluate the role of personality in the workplace and highlight its importance. I shall start by looking at the concept of personality before ... ... case that personality can have an important role in organisations. While the predictive power of personality measures are lower and applied more specifically than ability tests, the right tests in the right contexts, can help in prediction of future occupational success. Conscientiousness, one of the main fac ¬tors of personality, has general and positive effects on work-related criteria and with Neuroticism seems to be seemingly stable in the general outcome behaviours. While the validity and reliability of such results are often questioned, their importance lies in the extent to which results are used. Using results to help formulate hypotheses rather than making decisions allows for slightly lower validities. If such practices are followed at the very least it seems reasonable to conclude that indeed personality can predict a variety of organisational behaviours.