HEXACO personality predicts counterproductive work behavior

HEXACO personality predicts counterproductive work behavior and organizational citizenship behavior in low-stakes and job applicant contexts

By Jeromy Anglim, Filip Lievens, Lisa Everton, Sharon L. Grant, Andrew Marty

In this paper: Personality testing for employee selection offers the potential to identify job applicants who will contribute positively to workplace culture and abstain from damaging behaviors such as fraud, theft, and harassment. However, job applicants are understandably motivated to make a positive impression on employers and tend to engage in response distortion when completing personality tests. This raises the question of whether job applicant response distortion reduces the predictive validity of personality measures in high stakes settings.