Essay On Personality

For many years, there has been a debate in which whether or not personality plays a role in the workplace, in areas like “teamwork, job-fit, leadership, service, sales, and overall performance and satisfaction” (Furnham, 2008). Personality is an important topic for human resources and training professionals to consider during the hiring process and employee development. Employees’ personalities might have a significant impact on an organization’s performance. Therefore, I believe using personality tests in a workplace is necessary.

Personality tests help identify an individual’s characteristics, provide employees and managers information about the individual to use for discussing individual differences, promote conscious knowledge of one’s character, feelings, and motives, and provide a starting point for group discussion (Passmore, 2008). Employers that uses workplace personality tests for development purposes look for tests that are “less psychological and have more positive language, such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)” (Lloyd, 2012). The MBTI is one of the most used personality tests in businesses today. It was developed over 30 years ago by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. They generated their test based on Carl Jung’s theory personality types. Jung proposed that there are two psychological types of the basic personality traits—introversion and extraversion, and four functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting). He also believed that everyone has aspects of both introversion and extraversion; however, one of those attitudes is seen more consciously and the other is more unconsciously. Myers and Myers-Briggs added two more functions to Jung’s theory (judging and per...

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...ther a job applicant has a tendency towards violence or other harassing behavior” (Stabile, 2002). Lastly, for some employers, it is often better to be able to test for specific traits in a particular job that might predict success or that might make an applicant a wrong fit for the particular job. For example, in service industries, employees deal directly with the public, so it is important to have a sense of the employee's prospective of service orientation, since the company is judged by the quality of the service provided. Another example is seen in a position that requires sales and constant communication with people, finding someone who leans toward extroversion might be more helpful for the organization's goals.

Overall, the use of personality tests is significant to workplaces for either selecting new employees or developing existing employees.