The cult of personality tests

'AHEM," says your boss.

It's a Monday morning, and there are bleary eyes and stifled yawns all around the conference table. The boss has called this meeting to introduce a new management tool.

ADVERTISEMENT

''As you may know, the Zodiac 2005 system is the cutting edge in personnel selection, team building, and management development," the boss is saying. He consults the official-looking report in his hand. ''Starting today, all Geminis will be reassigned to sales, which is what they naturally do best. Everyone who's an Aries will receive a promotion, since their sign makes them born leaders. And we really need to add some Virgos to our team--no one else can keep the books so well."

Sound far-fetched? Something not so different is going on in organizations all over the United States. Personality tests are increasingly popular as management tools, yet many of them are no better than astrology at describing character or predicting behavior. Though we may regard personality tests as harmless fun, or an annoying nuisance, in fact important decisions may hang on their results -- making their widespread use deeply troubling.

Today personality testing is $400 million industry, one that's expanding annually by nearly 10 percent. There are some 2,500 personality tests on the market (just one of them, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, is given to 2.5 million people each year and is used by 89 of the companies in the Fortune 100). In a 2003 survey of 1,149 executives, 30 percent reported that their companies used personality tests.

Many of these tests are given to prospective employees. People applying for jobs in retail, banking, or security-services industries, for example, are often asked to take an ''integrity" test -- a personality test that claims to predict if they will lie, cheat, or steal on the job. These tests are administered by an estimated 6,000 US organizations and taken by as many as 5 million Americans each year. Personality tests are also given to employees already in the workplace, ostensibly to develop skills, improve communication, and promote teamwork.

The use of personality tests is growing despite decades of research casting doubt on their effectiveness. Scientists judge the worth of a test by two basic criteria: validity, which indicates that a test measures what it says it measures, and reliability, which indicates that a test delivers consistent results. Too often, personality tests fail on both counts. Many integrity tests, for example, simply aren't valid: according to a review conducted by the federal government's Office of Technology Assessment, 95.6 percent of people who fail integrity tests are incorrectly classified as dishonest.

Many personality tests also fall short of the other crucial benchmark, reliability. The Myers-Briggs, for example, claims to reveal to test takers their inborn, unchanging personality type, but in fact research shows that as many as three-quarters of test takers are assigned a different type when they take the Myers-Briggs again.   Continued...