Psychological assessment in human resources management

Starting date
September 12, 2020
Duration (months)
36
Departments
Human Sciences
Managers or local contacts
Ceschi Andrea , Sartori Riccardo , Tommasi Francesco

Conducting psychological evaluations in the workplace is not only a necessity in personnel selection, but also an opportunity for organizations to grow. Conducting regular psychological evaluations of employees allows monitoring the well-being of employees. Conducting targeted interventions following such evaluations is a practice that can have a positive impact on the organizational climate, thereby promoting employee satisfaction and performance. There are numerous psychological assessment tools in organizational settings, often based on correlations found between personality tests and job performance, but this methodology may not be functional for every situation.
Depending on the need, assessment (evaluation) can be done through different measurement approaches. The qualitative approach requires tools such as interviews, while the quantitative approach is characterized by the frequent use of self-report questionnaires. Assessment operations require a set of measures and techniques (e.g., conducting interviews and observations, administering standardized instruments, etc.) that are so well established in the literature that naive or improvised attempts at assessment are no longer justifiable. In this regard, the purpose of this line of research is to study and formulate new tools for psychological assessment of employees. One of the studies in this line of research, entitled “Big Five for Work and Organizations: FLORA” (Role Related Personal Profile), analyzes the personality assessment needs of organizational members and candidates to capture relationships with other individual and organizational dimensions (e.g., job performance). As part of this study, a new personality test (called FLORA) was created and validated based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM) and specifically designed to assess specific job profiles in organizations. Another study was conducted using three methods: a semi-structured interview and the completion of the Big Five questionnaire by employees. The results show that, in the perception of employees, the most important trait influencing job performance is Conscientiousness. Emotional Stability, on the other hand, is recognized as the second most influential trait on job performance in the Big Five.
Based on these findings, it is imperative that those involved in human resource management be aware of the risks involved in collecting information during assessment and rely on the use of scientifically validated tools for this purpose.

Project participants

Andrea Ceschi
Associate Professor
Riccardo Sartori
Associate Professor
Francesco Tommasi
Temporary Professor
Research areas involved in the project
Formazione e organizzazioni
work and organizational psychology
Publications
Title Authors Year
Social Representation and Assessment of Salespeople Personality for Job Performance: An Overview and an Italian Piece of Research Sartori, Riccardo; Costantini, Arianna; Ceschi, Andrea; Tommasi, Francesco 2021
Psychological assessment in human resource management: discrepancies between theory and practice and two examples of integration Sartori, R; Costantini, A; Ceschi, A 2020
Not only correlations: a different approach for investigating the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and job performance based on workers and employees’ perception Sartori, Riccardo; Costantini, Arianna; Ceschi, Andrea; Scalco, Andrea 2017
Big Five for work and organizations: FLORA (Role Related Personal Profile), an Italian personality test based on the Five-Factor Model and developed for the assessment of candidates and employees Sartori, Riccardo; Ceschi, Andrea; Costantini, Arianna; Scalco, Andrea 2016
The relationship between the big five personality traits and job performance in business workers and employees’ perception Ceschi, Andrea; Costantini, Arianna; Scalco, Andrea; Charkhabi, Morteza; Sartori, Riccardo 2016
Quality and quantity in the construction and validation of a psychological test for the assessment and selection of aspiring volunteer rescuers: the action-research in an Italian health association Sartori, Riccardo; Ceschi, Andrea; Cubico, Serena; Favretto, Giuseppe 2014
Assessment and development centers: judgement biases and risks of using idiographic and nomothetic approaches to collecting information on people to be evaluated and trained in organizations Sartori, Riccardo; Ceschi, Andrea 2013

Activities

Research facilities

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