Individual psychological assessment

Personality is an individual's relatively stable characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, behavior and the psychological mechanisms that support and drive those patterns.[5] The vast majority of investigations of the personality correlates of performance have used the Big Five taxonomy as the basis of their selection of predictors. The Big Five model (or Five Factor Model) holds that personality comprises five dimensions: Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Of the five dimensions, conscientiousness appears to have the strongest relation to overall job performance across a wide variety of jobs.[6][7]

Leadership style is the behaviors of leaders, focusing on what leaders do and how they act. The relates to how leaders delegate and communicate with their subordinates. Their leadership style may be one or a combination of a(n); authoritarian leadership, democratic leadership, charismatic leadership and laissez-faire leadership.[8]

Cognitive ability measures should predict performance outcomes in most, if not all, jobs and situations.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. This form of intelligence allows someone to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and gives them the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought.[9] Assessing an individual's EI enhances the prediction and understanding of the outcomes of organization members, such as their job performance and their effectiveness as leaders within an organization.

There are four dimensions of emotional intelligence:

1. The Perceiving and Expressing Branch - concerns how accurately and how fast individuals can express emotions and identify, detect, and decipher aspects of emotional experiences and emotional displays
2. The Using Emotion Branch - concerns how well individuals capitalize on the systematic effects of emotions on cognitive activities such as creativity and risking
3. The Understanding Branch - concerns how accurately individuals reason about various aspects of emotions, such as when they attach labels to emotions and identify connections between events and emotional reactions
4. The Regulating Emotions Branch - concerns how well individuals can increase, maintain, or decrease the magnitude or duration of their or others’ emotions[9]

The Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) developed by McCormick, Jeanneret, and Mecham (1972) is a structured job analysis instrument to measure job characteristics and relate them to human characteristics. It consists of 195 job elements that represent human behavior involved in work activities”.[15] The items that fall into five categories:[16]

1. Information input (where and how the worker gets information)
2. Mental processes (reasoning and other processes that workers use)
3. Work output (physical activities and tools used on the job)
4. Relationships with other persons
5. Job context (the physical and social contexts of work)

PAQ researchers have aggregated PAQ data for hundreds of jobs; that database are maintained by Purdue University. Many research exists on the PAQ; it has yielded reasonably good reliability estimates and has been linked to several assessment tools”.[17] Job seekers and employers answer questions on form outlining skills, abilities and knowledge needed to perform the job.[18] Responses are calculated and a composite job requirement statement is produced.[19] In a study of the comparative of 4 job analysis methods, PAQ method is structured to allow for easy quantification. The study also indicated it was closest and compatible to receive important information about an applicant[20] The format of this method include in both data collection and computer analysis and can yield results much faster than the other methods. It has been shown to be extremely reliable, results usually replicate on a second administration.[21] Because PAQ is worker oriented, it does not qualify if work is actually getting done on the job. Task differences on the job is not picked up because PAQ primarily focus on behaviors.[22]

The Occupational Analysis Inventory (OAI) contains 617 "work elements."[23] It was designed to yield more specific job information than other multi-job questionnaires such as the PAQ while still capturing work requirements for virtually all occupations. The major categories of items are five-fold:

1. Information Received
2. Mental Activities
3. Work Behavior
4. Work Goals
5. Work Context

OAI respondents rate each job element on one of four rating scales: part-of-job, extent, applicability, or a special scale designed for the element. The OAI has been used to gather information on 1,400 jobs selected to represent five major occupational categories. Reliabilities obtained with the OAI have been moderate, somewhat lower than those achieved with the PAQ”.[24]

Job analysis as a management technique was developed around 1900. It became one of the tools by which managers understood and directed organization[25] the website’s findings state, “Beginning in the 1940s, functional job analysis (FJA) was used by U.S. Employment Service job analysts to classify jobs for the DOT (Fine & Wiley, 1971). The most recent version of FJA uses seven scales to describe what workers do in jobs:

1. Things
2. Data
3. People
4. Worker Instructions
5. Reasoning
6. Math
7. Language

Each scale has several levels that are anchored with specific behavioral statements and illustrative tasks. Like other job analysis instruments, FJA is a methodology for collecting job information. While it was used for many years as a part of the DOT, the Department of Labor is replacing the DOT with O*NET and will not be using FJA in O*NET. There is no current database of jobs (other than the DOT) containing FJA data for jobs in the national economy”.