Page 296 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

11. PERSONALITY-BASED UNFAIR DISCRIMINATION
Second, brief descriptions are provided of a number of uses of such mea­
sures for personnel-related purposes.
Views on the Use of Personality Measures for Selection Purposes 263
Years ago, Guion and Cottier (1965) cautioned against the use of person­
ality measures for personnel selection purposes, arguing that "it is dif­
ficult in the face of this summary to advocate with a clear conscience
the use of personality measures in most situations as a basis for mak­
ing employment decisions" (p. 160). More recently, Guion (1991) noted
that much of the evidence on the use of personality measures for selection
purposes was seriously flawed, that the evidence came from concurrent
as opposed to predictive validation studies, and that studies often lacked
replication. As a result, he argued that "the evidence does not exist to
justify the use of personality measures, without specific research for spe­
cific purposes, as the basis for employment decisions" (p. 343). In spite
of these and other concerns, in the past 20 years, there has been consid­
erable interest in the use of personality measures for personnel selection
and other purposes. In contrast to the views of Guion (Guion, 1991; Guion
& Cottier, 1965) and others (e.g., Stone-Romero, 1994), the developers of
some such measures (e.g., Hogan, 1991) argue that not only are they quite
useful in work organizations, but also that the validity problems cited by
Ghiselli (1973) and Guion and Cottier (1965) are mythical and unfounded.
In addition, several recent meta-analyses (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Tett,
Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991) have been conducted in the hopes of doc­
umenting the validity of such measures for predicting job performance
and other types of criteria. Regrettably, as is demonstrated below, opti­
mistic views of the value of personality measures for various organiza­
tional purposes seem quite inconsistent with the extant evidence on their
validity.

Uses of Personality Measures in Organizations

A review of the literature in industrial and organizational psychology and
allied fields (e.g., human resources management) shows that personality
measures are being used widely for a number of purposes. The sections
that follow consider several such purposes.
Individual Assessment Personality measures often play a key role in in­
dividual assessment efforts, in which a psychologist evaluates an individ­
ual for the purpose of an important personnel decision (e.g., hiring, promo­
tion, and development). For example, in a recent study, Ryan and Sackett
(1987) asked members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational