KSAOs/Individual Differences

Vocational Interests: An Alternate Approach for Personnel Selection

Personality assessments are often used to help identify the applicants who are likely to succeed in a perspective job.  However, they are not the only solution available to help select an applicant that will be successful in the available position. Vocational interests may also serve as strong predictors of a job applicant’s future job performance, job knowledge, and intentions to continue with an organization.  Read more

Curiosity Adapted the Cat

Most employees do not stay at the same job their entire career. As such, managers often find themselves overseeing the adaptations that employees make when starting a new job.  Newcomer adaptation, the time during which a new employee is trying to adapt to an organization, is influenced by the employee’s level of curiosity.  Curiosity is defined as the desire for new information that leads to inquisitive and exploratory behaviors.  Individuals who are curious like to explore and experiment to draw on a variety of experiences to make sense of one’s situation.  As a manager, by knowing about a newcomer’s type of curiosity, you can do more to ensure retention.  Read more

Promoting Creative Performance on the Job

Employee creativity is a critical component of an organization’s ability to be innovative. This creativity, also known as creative performance, refers to an employee’s ability to generate novel and practical ideas or solutions. One effective way that supervisors can increase creative performance is by enhancing their employees’ belief in their own ability to be creative. This belief in one’s own ability to generate creative ideas or solutions is called creative self-efficacy. Read more

The Impact of Emotion Predispositions on Performance

People are predisposed to experiencing certain levels of approach-related arousal emotions and avoidance-related arousal emotions which influence different aspects of their job performance. Approach-related arousal is generally associated with feelings such as happiness, elation, or feeling energetic. Avoidance-related arousal is generally associated with feelings involving negative emotions. These predispositions, which are called positive affect and negative affect, are different from the emotions a person will experience in reaction to specific events in that affect shows stability across time and even situations. It is important to realize that positive affect and negative affect are not opposite ends of a continuum – one can have high levels of one but not the other, or can have high or low levels of both types at the same time. Read more

‘Keep Your Chin Up’ at Work

Surviving the various burdens of one’s work and personal lives can be difficult for anyone, not even counting the “Great Recession” of the last two years which has been so stressful for so many people. Morale of employees ranging from CEOs to interns has dropped precipitously in line with the fall in consumer confidence and rising unemployment. However, seeing the “bright side of things” and having hope for the future can relate to meaningful positive outcomes at a personal and an organizational level. These outcomes include: Read more

Two Ways to Activate Employee Creativity

Creative thinking is valued across occupations and industries. Even in the most simple of jobs, creative ideas are necessary to solve novel problems that arise. For some occupations, creativity is a bona fide requirement. Creativity is also crucial for organizational growth and long-term success as companies must develop new ideas to stay competitive within their respective industries. Read more

A Better Way to Use Personality for Predicting Performance

Using personality assessments to help predict job performance is nothing new, but by understanding the factors that influence personality traits related to job performance, organizations can increase the effectiveness of their assessments. Read more

Can Behaving in a Socially Desirable Fashion Equal Faking?

Many organizations utilizing a personality assessment as part of their selection system also include a measure of social desirability, to identify applicants who may be trying to “fake” the assessment. Read more

Emotional Intelligence Can Be Faked!

A number of organizations are utilizing measures of emotional intelligence (EI) as part of their selection systems, because of EI’s ability to predict performance. Emotional intelligence has been defined from two different perspectives, in terms of how it can be utilized. Read more