Personality development goals at work: A new frontier in personality assessment in organizations

Abstract

There is a long and successful history of personality research in organizational contexts and personality assessments are now widely used in a variety of human resources or talent management interventions. In this tradition, assessment typically involves describing (future) employees' personality profiles, and then using this information to select or adapt work roles to optimally meet employees' traits. Although useful, one limitation of this approach is that it overlooks employees' motivations and abilities to develop themselves in their pursuit of greater person-environment fit. This paper therefore argues for a new type of personality assessment that goes beyond the current descriptive approach. Specifically, we propose assessing employees' Personality Development Goals (PDGs) at work to complement the traditional assessment of “who are you?” with information about “who do you want to be?”. We first briefly summarize the current approach to personality assessment and highlight its limitations. Then, we take stock of the research on PDGs in clinical and personality literatures, and outline the reasons for translating this into organizational applications. We end by describing the key principles that should inform the implementation of PDGs at work and propose a number of future research directions to support and advance this practice.