The rhetoric surrounding psychometric personality assessment in a work context often suggests unlikely levels of predictive certainty about job performance. Somehow, personality assessment has come to be regarded as almost mechanistically predictive of behaviour. It isn’t, it never was, and it never will be. Yet we seem wedded to the idea that a person’s personality choreographs their every move.
The reality is that behaviour is influenced by innumerable external and internal events: from hormones to caffeine intake; from genes to international politics; from brain cells to personal relationships, the seasons or the economy. The range of possible influences on behaviour is virtually infinite, so it’s quite amazing that personality profiles manage to raise any kind of discernible signal above all this noise.
The big difference between the noise and the signal is the solid continuity of personality compared to the random, incidental or situational one-off variables that bombard us from all directions. Stable over an adult working life and capable of highly reliable measurement, personality dispositions have an influence that is very consistent and very pervasive. They trace a firm line through the chaotic hubbub of daily experience. They may sometimes be overwhelmed or blown off course but they are sure to re-emerge once the whirlwind specifics of the moment have passed on by.
We take our personality with us wherever we go; into every meeting, every conversation and every decision. It operates as a persistent force; a bias pulling us towards some options and away from others. The term personality ‘disposition’ captures this perfectly. We are more disposed to do A and less disposed to do B, but we have free will and, taking other things into account, we make our decisions. Patterns in the consistency of those decisions and behaviours may not be immediately discernible to others but, over time, people get familiar with them, recognise them and are able to anticipate choices and preferences. Personality assessment offers a structure for this understanding of a person’s dispositions, as well as providing a shortcut to it. In telling us what to expect, it predicts what would otherwise take long acquaintance to fully appreciate. This is the nature of the prediction inherent in personality assessment. It describes a person’s dispositions and, based on that, we make inferences about their behaviour and their potential performance. That works because we generally do best the things that come naturally to us; fighting against our natural dispositions is much harder going.
Performance then, reflects a dynamic relationship between our natural dispositions and our aims and intensions. A personality profile is the best available guide to the particular personal resources we have at our disposal. However, with self-awareness, planning and effort we can manage our limitations as well as our assets, taking us beyond our comfort zone and into wider spheres of capability, effectiveness and influence. This combination of dispositions and self-awareness charts our success and writes our autobiographies.
November 2018