Workshop 6 (half day)
The State of the Art in Personality Assessment
Presenters: Lawrence R. James, Georgia Institute of Technology
José M. Cortina, George Mason University
Coordinator: Rose A. Mueller-Hanson, Personnel Decisions Research Institutes
Theory, research, and conventional wisdom support the notion that personality has an impact on important outcomes such as job performance, organizational fit, and job satisfaction. However, our ability to assess personality is largely limited to multiple-choice self-report surveys. These surveys are problematic for several reasons, including modest validity, susceptibility to faking, self-deceptive biases, limited insight into one’s own personality, and potential negative reactions of job applicants. This workshop will explore recent innovations in the science and practice of personality assessment, which have the potential to result in more accurate assessments. Topics will focus on new, alternative assessment methods, how they work, and the results of research, which demonstrate considerably stronger validities than typically found with self-reports. Primary attention will be given to implicit attitude tests (IATs), conditional reasoning tests (CRTs), situational judgment tests (SIJs) for personality, and nonself-report forms of emotional intelligence (EI) tests. Also addressed will be leading-edge concepts in personality assessment that are still new but have the potential to positively impact the field (e.g., computer-adaptive personality testing). This workshop is designed for practitioners and researchers interested in better understanding the current state of personality assessment.
This workshop is designed to help participants:
• Describe new personality measurement systems, including:
- implicit attitude tests (IATs)
- conditional reasoning tests (CRTs)
- situational judgment tests (SIJs) for personality
- nonself-report forms of emotional intelligence (EI) tests
• Discuss leading-edge concepts in personality assessment such as computer-adaptive personality testing
• Describe the ways that implicit personality systems operate and how they are related to explicit personality systems
• Plan to build a system to measure implicit personality and the pitfalls to avoid
• Identify when implicit personality tests such as IATs, CRTs, and SIJs are appropriate to use
• Compare the psychometric properties (e.g., reliability, validity) of a variety of implicit personality tests
• Explain how implicit personality tests are scored, how scores should be interpreted, and how to report test results to clients
Larry James is a well-known methodologist in the field of I-O psychology. He chaired the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management and the Society of Organizational Behavior. He twice served as the scientific advisor to SIOP. He recently received the Distinguished Career Award from the Research Methods Division of Academy of Management. James is a Fellow in SIOP, the Methods Division of APA, and APS. He was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow and recently completed a term on the National Research Council Committee on Human Factors. He has served multiple terms on the editorial boards of eight journals and received the Academy of Management Review 2002 Best Paper Award (with Terry Mitchell) and the Academy of Management Research Methods Division’s 2002 Advancement of Organizational Research Methods Award. The latter award was for his seminal work in developing the concept and measurement system for conditional reasoning. James received his PhD in I-O psychology from the University of Utah.
José M. Cortina is an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University. He received his PhD in 1994 from Michigan State University under the tutelage of Neal Schmitt. Cortina has published on a variety of methodological and selection-related topics. His recent interest has been in alternative strategies for measuring personality. He was honored to receive the 2001 Ernest J. McCormick Award for Early Career Contributions as well as the 2004 Rod McDonald Award for his paper with Gilad Chen and Bill Dunlap on moderated structural equation modeling. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology.
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