Perfect Personality Profiles (13 page)

Enterprising

People with this interest type like leading, managing and organizing. They enjoy influencing others and working towards ambitious goals. Typical jobs for this type are manager, entrepreneur, sales person, marketing executive and shopkeeper.

Conventional

Conventional interest types prefer to work with information and data. They like exploring numbers, organizing information and work that requires attention to detail. Typical jobs for this type are administrator, accountant, librarian, office manager, bookkeeper and computer programmer.

Some questionnaires are based on a more functional approach. They look at an aspect of work, such as leadership or working in a team, and try to determine a person’s style of doing these things. In addition, information on work styles may be derived from more general questionnaires. Detailed personality questionnaires often allow this sort of analysis, and you may be told that the questionnaire is profiling your team type or your learning style.

Some of the specific work style questionnaires are similar in style to personality questionnaires. Others are more like a competency questionnaire and can even take a 360-degree approach (see page 61). For instance, measurement of leadership style may take this approach.

For each area of work there are many different models – far too many to list here – that might be measured, but below are some examples of these types of model to give you an idea of the sort of information they provide.

Meredith Belbin developed one model of how people work in teams. He suggested that there are a number of roles that people can take in a team, and depending on the work of the team different roles are required. Belbin’s research suggested that for complex tasks teams in which a wide range of roles are represented often produce the best results. Understanding the roles that you are comfortable taking in a team can help you work better with others, and the whole team can better understand its strengths and weaknesses through an analysis of the roles team members typically take. For example, if a team has too many people who want to lead and direct the work there could be conflict. On the other hand, if no one takes this role the team may be without direction.

Below is a short description of the team types that Belbin developed.

There is something of a growth industry in developing models of leadership. Many different models are used, and different models fit different purposes. Many of these models are quite complex, and they may have a great deal of overlap with personality domains. A simpler model that is frequently used looks at how much a person focuses on making sure things get done (the task) and how much on the people being led.

There are many models of selling styles, but they generally focus on how someone might go about selling rather than whether they can actually sell. Below are some examples of selling style types.

There has been some interest recently on what has been termed the ‘dark side’ of personality. This involves looking at how people who have quite extreme personality traits behave. Extreme personality traits are very unusual, and only a very small percentage of the population is at the extreme. However, the impact of an extreme personality trait on a person’s behaviour could be critical. In certain circumstances, it is argued, behaviour of those at the extremes of some traits can become difficult and dysfunctional. Someone who is low on trusting could be described as shrewd, and being shrewd is a positive quality in many circumstances: shrewd people are unlikely to be taken in easily, they take a critical view of information they are given, and they check out people and assumptions rather than taking them at face value. A shrewd, astute police officer, for instance, would probably be more effective than a trusting but gullible one.

However, shrewdness in the extreme can turn into suspicious mistrust. A high degree of mistrust might be debilitating, and assuming that all information is invalid and nobody’s intentions are what they seem could lead to paranoia and an inability to function. There would be particular concern if a manager showed these tendencies in supervising staff. To work for someone who didn’t trust you at all would be very difficult. A mistrustful manager might not share important information with subordinates, thereby preventing them from working effectively. The manager might also be overly critical of others and undermine their motivation by constantly challenging their intentions.

Dark side questionnaires concentrate on identifying extreme tendencies in people’s personalities rather than on understanding behaviour that is more usually seen. They are usually used only for senior positions, where the negative behaviours could be most harmful and most difficult to manage. They are sometimes used in selection but more often in development activities to help managers become aware of any dysfunctional tendencies they may have.

Unlike other personality questionnaires, the inference from dark side measures is that some personalities are undesirable. That said, it is not claimed that all people with extreme scores show negative behaviours. Rather, there is the potential for negative behaviour to develop in people identified as belonging to an extreme group.

5
How employers use personality questionnaires

There are a number of ways in which an employer might use a questionnaire as part of a selection exercise. They might use the questionnaire in a relatively early stage of the selection process to eliminate highly unsuitable candidates, or they might choose to use it later in the process to provide quite detailed information about individuals to support the final decision. Equally, the employer might use the questionnaire to apply quite simple selection rules – to include people who have scores in a certain region of one or more scales and to reject people who have scores in other regions of some scales. Alternatively, the employer might use the questionnaire in a more qualitative manner to understand the typical behaviour of a person. In this case they will often use the outcome of the personality questionnaire as the basis for some interview questions to verify the results and elicit more details. We will discuss these different ways of using personality profiles in more detail.

Before a personality questionnaire can be used effectively, information about the role and the role requirements must be collected, and there are a number of ways that this can be done. Questionnaires designed for this purpose can be used, although more usually a description of the role requirements will be developed through structured interviews with relevant people. The manager in charge of the role and also sometimes senior managers, other people who work in the same role is nearly always interviewed and people who work with those in the role. This process is called job analysis.

Once a good understanding of the requirements of the role has been developed it can be used to understand the implications for personality. For example, if the role requires frequently dealing with conflict the person will need to be reasonably confident and able to develop relationships with others. If it is critical that no errors are made someone with good attention to detail is required. For any role there will usually be a few clear personality indications that can be used to select people, but there will generally be several areas of personality for which there are no specific requirements. This means that an employer will not be looking for a specific personality profile but rather focusing on a few critical areas.

Early in the selection process the focus of the employer is on weeding out unsuitable applicants. The idea is to create a shortlist of candidates who will be assessed at the next stage in more detail through one or more interviews and exercises. At later stages the focus changes to finding the most suitable candidates. In using a personality measure to deselect people who are unsuitable, employers will be looking at aspects of personality that relate strongly to major elements of the role. For example, someone who was strongly introverted would find a sales role, which requires constant contact with customers to develop and maintain relationships, to understand their needs and to persuade them to buy more, difficult. Someone who prefers to spend time on their own and is shy and retiring will find it hard to relate well to people in the manner required in sales. The employer might use a personality questionnaire to sift out applicants like this. Another example might be a clerical role, where an important part of the job is to proof-read documents for errors. This requires good concentration, attention to detail and a capacity to tolerate repetitive tasks. People who seek excitement and tend to look at the big picture rather than focusing on detail would be unsuitable for this sort of role, and using a questionnaire could sift them out early in the selection process.

At this stage it is most likely that the employer is looking at only a few aspects of behaviour strongly related to the job and is only sifting out people who are extremely different from the desired behavioural style. Often these decisions will be based on previous research that shows how personality results relate to job performance. It is unlikely that the employer will want to talk to you about your profile at this stage, although they may be willing to provide some feedback to you on your results.

When a personality questionnaire is used at a later stage of selection there are two main ways in which the information is used. One is similar in some ways to the early shortlisting use of the questionnaire, but the employer may be interested in more aspects of personality. In previous examples we saw that a highly introverted person would not be suitable in sales and a highly excitement seeking person would not be suitable for close, detailed work. At the next stage the employer might consider the degree of extroversion or excitement seeking of the individual as one aspect of the individual’s job suitability. The individual is assessed not simply by looking at some scores as suitable and others as not suitable. Rather, there will be an assessment of how suitable the person is. The more extrovert the person, the more suitable in one respect the person is for the role. However, now the employer will be thinking about suitability in a multi-faceted way. A number of aspects of the role will be under consideration, and the person may be thought to fit well to some but less well to others. There will be a profile of fit to the role to be evaluated and compared with other candidates. The personality profile will not provide information about all the aspects of the role but may provide information about a number.

Figure 4: Example of a candidate’s job suitability profile