lt /A Winning Personality Wins: /

By Katrina Osleja
Managing Partner
Talentor Latvia

In the time of crisis or turbulent change, employees’ and leaders’ personal characteristics become crucial for a company’s survival and success. Alongside with knowledge, skills and experience, personal qualities, values and attitudes have a tremendous effect on a person’s and, by extension, a company’s productivity and ability to cope with changes or competition.

Each person possesses a unique set of personal traits, which make out the core of his or her personality. This core frequently determines a person’s behaviour in critical situations, which are often also decisive for a company’s success. For instance, in customer service, personal qualities may determine how an employee resolves a conflict with a customer. Personal qualities of management team members may be largely responsible for the management’s ability to effectively motivate the staff during financially difficult times, when all material incentives have already been exhausted and when there is a need to find alternative sources of motivation. Sometimes a leader’s charisma is sufficient to mobilize the employees toward new achievements. Spontaneous behaviour, so-called outbursts of personality, may sometimes influence an employee’s own and his or her co-workers’ performance levels and produce results that are beneficial both for the individual and for the company.

Through my more than ten year experience of working in personnel management I have come to the conclusion that most company managers do not consider personality to have a serious, leave alone crucial, effect on work productivity. Instead, personal effectiveness is most frequently associated with previous professional experience, education and field expertise. This view is often reflected in recruitment and assessment procedures designed to emphasize these latter factors.

I have noticed that when they recruit managers of different levels, our clients can easily define their requirements for the candidates’ education and previous work experience, but they usually have only a vague and very general idea of necessary personal traits. All of us in the recruiting business have seen some very impressive CVs of managers and specialists, who can boast of having studied at top universities or of having worked for very successful companies. We also know that sometimes such people may nevertheless fail to produce the expected results and that they may cause disappointment, even frustration to their employers. This means that one may not rely on CVs and cover letters exclusively in trying to secure the most efficient work force for a company. Personality and personality-driven behaviour must be considered among key factors of future success.

Only in the recent years, when both academic and field studies have revealed the huge impact of personality on success, more enlightened company managers started to pay serious attention to assessing, evaluating and developing personal qualities of their key employees.

One such study, entitled Patterned behavior description interviews versus unstructured interviews: A comparative study¹, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Opren, C (1985), which convinced me of personality’s important effect on productivity, was based on a comparison of two groups of sales experts. One group consisted of 33 persons, all of whom were recruited to specific jobs through special interviews designed to assess personality and behavioural patterns (the evaluation method that was used is simple enough to be mastered by any manager). Meanwhile, the second group consisted of 41 employees, who were selected for the jobs in sales without reference to any special methods. Or, rather, the simplest and one of the most common methods of all, a fifteen-minute interview, was used. Such interviews allow covering the CV’s content, but leave little time for anything else. The study results showed that personnel recruitment which was based on personality assessment tests produced significant return of investment, by 1) improving work performance, and 2) reducing employee turnover. Both groups were monitored for 3 years, during which time the group members’ sales results were carefully measured. The number of members to be dismissed due to unsatisfactory work performance, and the number of members to resign due to failure to perform or as a result of dissatisfaction with the job were noted for each of the groups.

The final results can be summarized as follows: there were 3 dismissals and/or resignations in the first and 17 in the second group. Every quarter, performance results increased by 18.7% in the first, and by 10.5% in the second group.

This study establishes a clear link between the use of personality testing for recruitment purposes and improved work performance, and ultimately also between personality and work performance as such.

Since 1970, the world has seen 124 bank crises² . This has given the scholars, who study human behaviour in crisis situations ample opportunity to establish that in difficult times, companies that continue to invest in people and that consider both personal qualities and business competences during selection have better chances of survival and winning competition. Eventually, the current crisis will be overcome as well. When it happens, companies that have carefully selected and nurtured their personnel will be able to address new growth and development challenges immediately, while others will be looking to reinstate recently dismissed employees, restart developing their competences, restore their psychological damages and rebuild their commitment and trust. I believe that not only people, but also companies have personalities, and that the companies with winning personalities, i.e. the companies that attract and nurture the best work force, ultimately win.

Spausdinti