Personality Testing and Industrial–Organizational Psychology: A Productive Exchange and Some Future Directions

Abstract

The goal of our focal article was to provide a current perspective on personality testing and its use in organizational research and to elicit constructive discussion and suggestions for future research and practice. The present article caps off the discussion by integrating the main ideas presented in the commentaries within our original framework of questions and topics, with the immodest hope of advancing our understanding of personality and its measurement in the context of industrial–organizational psychology. In short, we recommend continuing to take advantage of the organizing framework of the Big Five while also pursuing more “bottom-up” approaches that examine facet-level relationships with multidimensional performance outcomes, in addition to developing process models that include more proximal motivational and situational variables. Work along these lines is valuable to both organizational science and practice.