Personality Assessment for Employee Development: Ivory Tower or Real World?

The acceptance and popularity of personality assessments in organizational contexts has grown enormously over the last 40 years. Although these are used across many applications, such as executive coaching, team building, and hiring and promotion decisions, the focus of most published research on the use of personality assessments at work is biased toward assessment for employee selection. Reviews have therefore tended to use criteria that are appropriate for selection, neglecting the additional and different criteria that are important in relation to employee development. An illustration of the often-discussed scientist-practitioner divide is that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most widely known and used personality assessment in organizations, despite harsh criticism by the academic community. This article reviews this debate, and draws implications for the appropriate choice of personality assessments for use in individual and team development, and a new direction for scientific research.