The Future of Psychometrics
The use of psychometric assessments in the workplace has become quite popular. Employers are beginning to consider how individual and social behaviour affects task performance and goal achievement. While It is understandable that some organizations may not have fully embraced the idea of viewing the workplace as a complex ecosystem of human emotions and behaviours, in order to succeed in talent landscapes that are evolving at a rapid pace, organizations will increasingly need to utilize work psychometrics to hire the right people, build the right cultures and produce great work!
Your employees’ psychological dispositions and emotional states interact with their work situations. These interactions impact how they set and achieve personal objectives. Because employees are primarily motivated by personal motivations to achieve organizational objectives, organizations should take personality characteristics into account. It is important to acknowledge that Personality psychology is a rapidly evolving field and there are differing views within psychological literature around the stability of traits.
Most trait theories posit that there are important stable individual patterns that characterize each person. There are four significant trait theories of personality namely: Allport's trait theory, Cattell's 16-factor personality model, Eysenck's three-dimensional model, and the five-factor model of personality. The five-factor model of personality or the Big Five is commonly used as a pre-employment assessment. While the MBTI may be more popular, the Big Five is the only personality model with a scientific consensus in the field of personality psychology.
Personality neuroscience, a nascent field, hopes to settle some of the profound questions on the stability of personality by examining whether any neural correlates of personality traits really even exist. It is often noticeable that behaviour can differ depending on the situation. The situational impacts on behaviour add layers of complexity to personality assessments.
Although we aren't certain about the level of stability, predictability, and permanence of personalities, it's unwise to dismiss personality evaluations as a valuable tool for understanding our employees and enhancing their performance. The good news is that research has indicated that people can not only be defined by stable individual differences in their overall behaviour but also by stable and unique patterns of behaviour in different situations (Mischel and Shoda, 1995).
In 1995, Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda introduced the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) as a valuable addition to the field of personality psychology. This model suggests that to accurately predict behaviour, it is important to understand the individual, the situations, and the way they interact with one another. The CAPS theory centres on the relationship between situations and behaviours through the use of ‘If… then…’ definitions of situation-behaviour relations (e.g., if A. then she X, but if B then she Y).
In clinical psychology, the CAPS theory is commonly used to predict behaviour and aid in the treatment of depression and anxiety. This is done by utilizing the CAPS ‘If…then…’ framework. In the workplace, the theory can help us understand how people behave in specific work situations, and interactions. It takes into account their expectations, personal values, competencies, and ability to regulate themselves. This is particularly relevant in the relationship between a supervisor and their direct report. Models based on CAPS theory can also be used to design programs that support culture activation by predicting general employee behaviour in different kinds of interactions.
The CAPS theory can be used to build models that help inform managerial development specialists how in some situations a direct report can rate their supervisor as ‘pleasant to work with’ but in others as ‘micromanaging' and ‘manipulative’. By redefining situations to include their fundamental psychological characteristics, it is possible to use information about behaviour tendencies that are specific to those situations (Kelly, 1955; Mischel, 1973) to predict behaviour across a variety of contexts that share the same psychological features (Shoda et al., 1994). For example, If someone is sensitive to rejection in intimate relationships, they may feel more upset than others when facing criticism or lack of attention.
The theory describes Cognitive-Affective Units (CAUs) as those psychological, social, and physiological aspects that get activated when people face situations. The activations, and cross-activations of these units give rise to the behaviour that people display in various situations. Encodings (personal constructs for self and others), expectations & beliefs (about outcomes of behaviours in particular situations), feelings emotions, goals & values and competencies are some of these CAUs.
To put it simply, models based on CAPS theory allow an organization to use the anonymised data it collects around employee expectations, interactions, values, and competencies to meaningfully categorise and visualise data of employees’ aggregate responses in various situations. This can help people and culture specialists in organizations to gain meaningful insights using predictable ‘if...then...’ patterns related to important work outcomes like quality, productivity and people management. This way of assessing work personality is extremely nuanced and can help explain why some employees are more conscientious in some situations but not in others.
In a nutshell, comprehensive evaluations that take into account the complex work context, diverse behavioural landscape and rich emotional tapestry in an organization are necessary for effective work psychometrics, as they recognize that work behaviours are often situation-dependent. The most effective assessments simulate work situations realistically and predict the behavioural tendencies of the assessee in a diverse set of work situations.
We propose that it is also important to do value assessments and overlay those with personality assessments. After all, value assessments are a more direct way of understanding what employees want. A mature organization is expected to define culture consciously and deliberately and describe the values employees need to espouse to sustain such a culture. Given the complexities in understanding the person-situation dynamics, it must be ensured that value and culture articulations are as concise as possible.
Also, because self-reported questionnaires are limiting because people tend to overreport their positive tendencies but underreport negative behaviours, it is important to include 360-degree assessments that people and culture specialists can use to create culture and value heatmaps and understand not just apparent but hidden aspects of culture and values at their organizations. Immersive interfaces that draw people into answering are likelier to increase employee participation and generate insights that are statistically valid.
360-degree, real-time and continuous personality, competency, value and engagement assessments delivered using sleek interfaces that are way friendlier than large formlike cumbersome questionnaires are the future of psychometric assessments. For employees to be more accurate in describing their tendencies and internal states, their experience in multiple interactions and measuring their competencies, data collection should be a joyful experience.
Organizations will have an increasing ability to collect and process anonymous data about employee behaviour, personality, and interactions and overlay that with data about work situations. Interactive dashboards and visualizations of psychometric and other data overlaps and connections will make it easier to gain insights about your people at work!
