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Personality Assessment in the Workplace
Personality assessments in the workplace are applied by employers in a bid to evaluate their workers and understand their psychological dynamics (Bratton et al, 2010). However, personality tests at the workplace attract a number of ethical issues that arise out of the purpose, process and results of the testing exercises. The main ethical concern of the employees is the exposure of their personal traits to the employer, some of which may not be needed at the workplace (Bratton et al, 2010). The discussion about the tests will illustrate the ethical issues of privacy, their predictive accuracy and the use of the results as the concerns that are associated with the tests.
One of the major ethical issues is the lack of privacy by the employer when handling the process of personality tests. The privacy of the results and the confidentiality of the personal information collected from the tests should be maintained. Employers should not share any results of psychological assessments or discuss it with the employees or other people who are not supposed to share such information. Lack of privacy raises ethical issues in regard to the exposure of the information to the office (Bratton et al, 2010). Many employees feel that this is an infringement of their privacy and unnecessary exposure of their traits and personal characters to the people in the office. As a result, some employees may tend to give incorrect information as a way of concealing their true traits and character (Bratton et al, 2010).
The information given during the tests, thus affects their predictive accuracy. As a result, there is an ethical concern about the accuracy in which these tests have in predicting the traits of employees and their psychological dynamics. This in turn leads to the concerns of the reliability of the tests. The significant concern in this case is whether it is ethical to rely on the results of the tests to make major decisions about the employees, when the tests are subject to inaccuracies (Marshall, 2010). The use of the tests may not be solely depended upon by the employers but, form the basis of evaluating employees psychologically. This makes the concerns about reliability and accuracy valid issues in both ethical and workplace standards.
In addition, there is an ethical concern over the use of the results in making decisions about the employees and their work. It raises ethical concern over the reliance on the results of personality tests to change or alter the roles, tasks or schedules of employees. According to Marshall (2010), it is unethical to use personality results of tests like MBTI to make decisions that relate directly to employee assignments. At the same time, the use of personality tests should be entirely on a voluntary basis and the results should not be used to implicate employees or judge their performance. In this regard, it is considered unethical when employers who do declare that the results of personality tests will not be used to make work decisions.
Personality tests raise ethical concerns of their reliability and ethical issues of privacy and confidentiality of employee’s personal information. At the same time, the tests raise concerns about the use of the results for work related decisions by employers. The use of the personality results tests is desired by employers, but should be used ethically. While some employers may be seeking the right intentions, the use of personality tests in the workplace is not welcomed by employees who are concerned about the application of the results of the tests.
References
Bratton, J., Forshaw, C., Callinan, M., Sawchuk, P.,& Corbett, M. (2010). Work and Organizational Behaviour 2nd Edition: Understanding the Workplace. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Marshall, J. (2010). The Ethics of Workplace Personality Tests. Retrieved From, <http://ethicsalarms.com/2010/02/04/the-ethics-of-workplace-personality-tests> June 4, 2015