ABSTRACT
The use of personality measures in personnel selection has a long and controversial history (Guion & Gottier, 1965; Morgeson et al., 2007b). To understand current thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of personality measures as predictors of broad criteria such as job performance or organizational success or narrower criteria such as effectiveness as a leader in specific jobs that draw heavily on specific personality traits (e.g., sales extraversion), it is important to lay out the relevant historical context. Professional consensus about the role of personality measures as predictors of both broad and narrow criteria in organizations has undergone a remarkable set of changes, in some ways paralleling the substantial changes in thinking about the validity of cognitive tests as predictors of similar criteria. The common thread running through both the ability and personality testing literatures is the marked influence of meta-analysis and studies of validity generalization (e.g., Schmidt & Hunter, 1998) on our understanding of the circumstances under which measures of cognitive abilities or of broad personality dimensions will or will not predict both broad and narrow performance criteria. Table 28.1 illustrates the evolution of the literatures dealing with the validity of cognitive ability and personality measures over the last 50 years. Professional Consensus Regarding Validity as a Predictor of Job Performance https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Time Period
Cognitive Ability
Broad Personality Dimensions
1960–1970
Strict situational specificity
Strict situational specificity
1970–1980
Some acceptance of generalizability
Strict situational specificity
1980–1990
Broad acceptance of generalizability
Strict situational specificity
1990–2000
Broad acceptance of generalizability
Acceptance of generalizability for some traits
2000–2010
Broad acceptance of generalizability
Increasing awareness of situational specificity
