Personality: Does it depend on the situation?
Most organisations take a trait-based approach to personality for choosing people. Applicants fill out inventories saying what they generally do across situations. Yet, there is decades of research showing that people vary greatly between situations. From this standpoint, we can expect a general inventory of personality to be a relatively poor predictor of how the applicant will behave in specific situations - with your customers, for example.
Most organisations take a trait-based approach to personality for choosing people. Applicants fill out inventories saying what they generally do across situations. Yet, there is decades of research showing that people vary greatly between situations. From this standpoint, we can expect a general inventory of personality to be a relatively poor predictor of how the applicant will behave in specific situations - with your customers, for example.
A leading exponent of the situational approach - Walter Mischel - makes clear that just because we vary between situations does not mean we lack personality. It simply means that our personalities are more complex than is suggested by the typical personality inventory. In describing people, we need to include their differing reactions to particular types of situations - for example, threatening versus non-threatening situations. We need to know what 'if....then' rules each person has built up to deal with situations.
This line of thinking fits well with the use of assessment centres. They are designed to determine how applicants respond to the same types of situation they will face at work. For example, do they take a proactive approach in these situations? Are they creative problem-solvers? Whether they would respond with the same behaviours in the non-work setting remains unknown - and irrelevant. Conversely, asking how someone behaves outside work tells us less than the assessment centre about how they might be expected to perform at work.
Reference
Mischel, W. and Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, Vol 102 No 2, Pps 246 - 268.
Newsletter: 2003