Although long thought to be unrelated to job performance, research in the early 1990s provided evidence that personality can predict job performance. Accompanying this research was a resurgence of interest in the use of personality tests in high-stakes selection environments. Yet there are numerous potential problems associated with the current operational use of personality. As such, 5 former journal editors from Personnel Psychology and the Journal of Applied Psychology (2 primary outlets for such research), who have collectively reviewed over 7,000 manuscripts and who have no vested interest in personality testing, reconsider the research on the use of personality tests in environments where important selection decisions are made. Their comments are based on a panel discussion held at the 2004 SIOP conference. Collectively, they come to several conclusions. First, faking on self-report personality tests cannot be avoided and perhaps is not the issue; the issue is the very low validity of personality tests for predicting job performance. Second, as such, using published self-report personality tests in selection contexts should be reconsidered. Third, personality constructs may have value for employee selection, but future research should focus on finding alternatives to self-report personality measures. Psychology were assembled to discuss the issue of faking in personality testing. The resulting discussion evolved from a focus on faking to a focus on the broader issue of whether the use of personality tests to make high-stakes employment decisions could be justified. With the exception of one of the panelists, there was consensus that there are a number of significant problems associated with the use of self-report personality tests in selection contexts and that perhaps a reappraisal of this literature might be in order. This paper briefly describes the history of the use of personality tests in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology and specifically addresses the issue of fakability. The paper then summarizes and expands upon the points made during the panel discussion.
A Brief History on the Use of Personality Tests in I-O PsychologyIn 1965, Guion and Gottier summarized 12 years (1952)(1953)(1954)(1955)(1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963) of research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology on the use of personality tests in selection contexts. They concluded that "It is difficult in the face of this summary to advocate, with a clear conscience, the use of personality measures in most situations as a basis for making employment decisions about people" (Guion & Gottier, 1965, p. 160). This view prevailed for more than 25 years, until the 1991 publication of two meta-analyses on the validity of personality tests for personnel selection (Barrick & Mount, 1991;Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). Although these two summaries found similar levels of validity as previous quantitative reviews (cf. Schmitt, Gooding, Noe, & Kirsch, 1984), they concluded that meta-a...
