The Effects Of Personality Assessments On The Workplace

The use of personality assessments in the workplace has tremendously increased in recent years for the purposes of selection, placement, and development of employees. The rationale for the use of these tests is that personality assessments are useful for explaining and predicting work attitudes, behaviors, and job performance because â€Å"personality includes a wide range of characteristics that people possess; many of them have an impact upon the ways people behave in the workplace† (Boutelle, 2015). However, an increased use of this type of assessments has raised some ethical issues such as discrimination (i.e., adverse impact), violation of privacy and social desirability bias (i.e., distorted responses) which should be considered when†¦show more content†¦. any test, its administration or action upon the results [shall not be] designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin† (Civil Rights Act of 1964). The court case Karraker v. Rent-A-Center Inc., demonstrates the possibility of discrimination associated with the use of personality test in promotion process (Mulvihill, 2006). In this case, the employer used some questions from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to measure personality traits of employees who applied for managerial positions within the company. The court ruled that the employer’s use of the MMPI as part of its testing process for managers violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and emphasized that the MMPI portion of the test to be a â€Å"medical examination,† which could not be given in a pre-employment situation (Mulvihill, 2006) So it is fair to say that personality assessments which seem to be benign can easily disqualify an individual for certain positions, opportunities and promotions within the workplace. This issue speaks to the Principle D (i.e., Justice) of the APA Ethics Code. This principle enforces psychologis ts to preserve fairness and justice in the processes, procedures and services that they conduct (American Psychological Association, 2010). In case of using personality assessments to make hiring, placement and promotion decisions, this principle can be violated when employers use these assessments and