The impact of response distortion on preemployment personality testing and hiring decisions.

Response distortion (RD), or faking, among job applicants completing personality inventories has been a concern for selection specialists. In a field study using the NEO Personality Inventory, Revised, the authors show that RD is significantly greater among job applicants than among job incumbents, that there are significant individual differences in RD, and that RD among job applicants can have a significant effect on who is hired. These results are discussed in the context of recent studies suggesting that RD has little effect on the predictive validity of personality inventories. The authors conclude that future research, rather than focusing on predictive validity, should focus instead on the effect of RD on construct validity and hiring decisions. Personality assessment as a preemployment screening procedure is receiving renewed interest from researchers and practitioners. A number of quantitative reviews have demonstrated that personality inventories can be useful predictors of job performance, particularly if specific, job-relevant personality constructs are used to predict specific criteria (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hough, Eaton, Dunnette, Kamp, & McCloy, 1990; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 1993; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). These findings have led to a resurgence of interest in personality testing as an employee-selection tool. Yet this trend is not without controversy. One major debate concerns the effect of response distortion on personality inventory scores. What is clear from the existing research is that people completing personality inventories

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