ABSTRACT

When assertiveness is required for successful job performance, how can we tell which of the two job candidates is likely to be more assertive? If we were to survey the current literature in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, we would conclude that we should find a personality inventory that measures assertiveness and administer it to each of them. In research published in psychology as a whole, the preponderance of empirical studies that examine personality constructs at work use self-report questionnaires where individuals choose answers from a fixed set of response options. As McAdams (1995) and others have noted, this process is very different from how we generally get to know people in our everyday lives, typically based on conversations and observations where responses are much less constrained. Although self-report inventories have many advantages, their practicality may come at a cost in terms of the research questions that get asked and the type of personality constructs that are studied (Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004). This is no less true in work settings.