Forced-choice and conventional personality assessment: Each may have unique value in pre-employment testing

Forced-choice (FC) personality scales are purported to predict criteria such as counterproductive work behavior (CWB) incrementally beyond conventional personality measures in pre-employment testing situations. Unfortunately, the research upon which FC tests’ claims of superiority are founded, relies upon undergraduate participants in highly artificial scenarios. Moreover, the possible predictive advantages of FC personality scales with regards to important contextual performance (CP; Borman & Motowidlo, 1993) criteria have not been investigated. We used a sample of call center employees to investigate the incremental validity of a FC personality scale over a conventional personality scale (and vice versa) with CP measures, and CWB, as criteria. Our FC and conventional personality measures were highly correlated, but each still offered unique predictive value with regards to CP or CWB. Thus, contrary to past research with student samples, in field settings FC personality scales may not be clearly superior to conventional personality scales. Moreover, contrary to widespread concern that FC measures’ predictiveness is attributable to their overlap with general mental ability, the unique predictive value of our FC measure remained even when variance due to general mental ability was statistically controlled.

► Personality assessment is essential in pre-employment testing.
► Job applicants’ tendency to distort personality item responses may lower validity.
► Forced-choice personality tests (FC) reduce distortion but still need field testing.
► Also, FC tests’ predictiveness of contextual job performance is unknown.
► Field research showed FC and conventional personality tests’ had unique predictiveness.