Summer '09 Personnel Psychology

The Summer 2009 issue of Personnel Psychology covers a lot of ground. Take a look:

Kuncel & Tellegen demonstrate (with undergrads) that when inflating on personality inventories, people don't always max out their self-presentation; in fact for some traits a moderate level of endorsement is seen as more desirable.

Bledow & Frese describe how a situational judgment test can be used to predict not only overall job performance, but a particular construct--in this case, initiative. Participants were employees and supervisors at six banks in Germany.

This one particularly caught my eye. Yang & Diefendorff discovered (using ~200 employees in Hong Kong), among other things, that agreeableness and conscientiousness seem to moderate the relationship between negative emotions and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Implication? If you're hiring for a job prone to negative emotions (e.g., customer service), consider adding a personality inventory to your screeening process to prevent CWBs.

De Pater, et al. studied both students and employees to determine that challenging job experiences reported by participants predicted promotability ratings above and beyond current job performance and job tenure. This has implications for both career development and performance management.

Want to know more about what executive coaches do? Then check out Bono et al.'s study of similarities and differences between practicing coaches that are also I/O psychologists versus those that aren't. (Turns out they do a lot of the same things)

Last but definitely not least, Aguinis et al. describe a web-based frame of reference training they used to decrease the amount of bias inherent in personality-based job analysis. The article describes in detail how the training was implemented, and it had quite dramatic effects. Useful stuff for anyone looking to add this tool to your assessment procedure (in this case they used Raymark et al.'s personality-related personnel requirements form, which they describe as superior to Hogan & Rybicki's performance improvement characteristics tool (which I've actually used and found quite user friendly).