How To Ensure Personality Fit and Guarantee Superior Job Performance

Have you ever wondered why that great candidate that you recently hired quickly turned into a flop? Or why your managers’ results have been less than desirable? Have you been experiencing the loss of good people lately? Or have you wondered why you could never seem to keep good people for very long in the first place? Morale down? Training costs up? Perhaps the causes of these common business problems are the result of an employer-employee “personality mismatch”.

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Organizational Culture and Personality

People often talk about organizational culture, but they typically have a difficult time defining what organizational culture really is. One could argue that the culture of a company is shaped by the shared beliefs, values, and assumptions towards acceptable work behaviour by all organizational members. While individual work personalities shape these attitudes, the overall culture of any organization is actually the product of the combined work personality patterns of all its members. If this is accurate, it would then be wise to ensure that the ‘work personality’ of any newly hired manager or employee closely matches that of the organizational culture to ensure a productive integration into the work environment.

Unfortunately, it is in the definition of personality that many hiring decision-makers fall short when staffing their organizations. Too often the hiring decision is limited only to educational qualifications, similar past employment experience and industry awareness. While all are essential ingredients in the selection process, the neglect of a significant analysis of the candidate’s ‘personality fit’ to the available position, opens the door to critical hiring mistakes, and an ill-informed decision by the job seeker as to whether they want to join the organization in the first place. When there is not a true match between the pre-determined personality traits that would be required for someone to be successful in the particular position and those of the hired employee, the mismatch will reveal itself in numerous undesirable ways (low productivity, increased errors, motivation and morale issues, increased training and management costs, lower retention, etc.), which will negatively impact individual and organizational performance, and thus profitability.

Performance Is Based On Personality Fit

An individual’s employment personality is the combination of numerous interrelated personality traits. How a person initiates and maintains their motivation in their specific work activities, the internal mental processing that an individual utilizes in certain situations, how they interact and communicate with others in the workplace, how they react to stress, how they make decisions toward appropriate action, and how they respond to the environmental conditions of the workplace are crucial to employment performance. When the individual’s personality traits closely match the required personality traits of the position and the work environment (culture), above-average employee performance and job satisfaction will be the result. Therefore, for sustained above-average performance to occur the employee must have a combination of the skills and abilities necessary to do the work (supported by appropriate education), and also be motivated to do the work while feeling comfortable with the environmental conditions in which they will be performing the work. Missing out on any of these criteria is a recipe for disaster.

?Career oriented employees are motivated by a combination of: the challenge of the work, the potential of the position, the potential of the organization, internal mobility options, employment stability, a balance in life, fair remuneration and, of course, a personality match with the organization. Companies that provide a career-satisfying work environment, rooted in a real employer-employee based personality match, are attractive to high quality personnel – who in turn offer superior expertise, service and profitability to their employers.????