Personality Assessment

There are two main types of integrity tests: overt tests and covert tests. The overt test asks about past behavior and attitudes about theft and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). The covert tests are personality-based measures of personality traits that are associated with counterproductive work behavior.

One advantage of covert integrity tests is that it is more difficult for job candidates to manipulate and it is more predictive of CWB than overt tests.

Personality is a set of individual attributes that consistently differentiate persons from each other in the ways they think, feel, and act. That is how covert integrity tests infer the likelihood of bad behavior based on associated personality traits.

One of the most well-known tests to understand and measure human behavior is the “Big 5” model. Big Five personality characteristics is widely used for describing how a person engages with the world. The model includes five primary dimensions:

The Big five factors have been defined as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, often represented by the acronyms OCEAN. Neuroticism (sometimes named by its polar opposite, Emotional Stability).

Research found that integrity tests were consistently correlated with three of the Big Five dimensions: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.

Conscientiousness seems to be the biggest personality predictor from the Big Five personality traits that help to predict personality with relation to employment.