An important part of every human resources department is understanding how to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their employees. Understanding how someone works within a work environment can be difficult, with a variety of different group and personal dynamics impacting an individual’s relationships with their co workers and their team.
However, this process is simplified today by a variety of different analytical tools and tricks that human resources workers have at their disposal. Some of the most useful of these are simple personality tests. A whole industry has developed around personality testing and assessment, with tests using a broad range of psychological theories and common sense wisdom to give their two cents on a person’s characteristics and development. Human resources experts would do well to take advantage of these tools and apply them to ease the difficult task of balancing team dynamics in the work place.
One useful example of this would be the DISC Personality System. The DISC Personality system comes from the work of writer and psychologist William Marston. Marston developed a 4 prong theory of personality built around behavior types. He believed all behavior could be reduced to the categories of dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. This was later developed into a test by industrial psychologist Walter Clarke in 1957.
Participants take a test comparing groupings of words to their own self-assessment of their personality, picking those that most and least represent them. It paints a picture both of how participants view themselves, and how others view them.
The DISC profile’s validity has been called into question over the years, but so has the validity of many different personality tests. Human resources professionals may find that by administering a variety of different tests alongside something like the DISC they may be able to paint a much fuller picture of their employees’ strengths and weaknesses than they would by using one test alone.