Chapter 4: Assessing Response Distortion in Personality Tests: A Review of Research Designs and Analytic Strategies

The 1990s brought resurgence in the use of personality to explain organizational behavior (Hough & Ones, 2001). The increased use of personality measures in personnel selection can be attributed to the publication of well-developed taxonomies of personality traits (e.g., the Big Five; Hogan, Hogan, & Roberts, 1996) and to the meta-analytic cumulation (Hunter & Schmidt, 2004) of the extant literature using these taxonomies. Several meta-analyses have examined the validity of various personality scales for predicting a wide range of organizational behaviors (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000; Salgado, 1997; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). Even though the exact magnitude and the utility of such magnitudes have been debated (cf. Murphy & Dzieweczynski, 2005; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Dilchert, 2005), there is a strong consensus that an individual’s personality plays a critical role in predicting and explaining behavior within an organizational setting. Specifically, substantial evidence suggests that personality variables correlate with a number of performance measures of importance to organizations (e.g., job performance, training performance, absenteeism, organizational commitment, etc.; Barrick & Mount, 1991; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 1993; Tett et al., 1991).