Ep. 110 Can personality tests predict safety performance?

The Safety of Work

The paper reviewed in this episode is from the Journal of Applied Psychology entitled, “A meta-analysis of personality and workplace safety: Addressing unanswered questions” by Beus, J. M., Dhanani, L. Y., & McCord, M. A. (2015).

Discussion Points:

• Overview of the intersection between psychology and workplace safety
• How personality tests may predict safety performance
• Accident proneness theory to modern behaviorism
• Research on personality and safety performance
• Personality traits influencing work behaviors
• The influence of institutional logic
• Personality tests for safety performance
• The need for further research and standardized measurement methods
• Examining statistical evidence linking personality to safety performance
• Personality traits and their impact on work behavior
• Analysis of research findings on personality and safety performance
• The practical implications of the research findings
• The intriguing yet complex relationship between personality and safety
• Takeaways:
• While not total bunk, we definitely don't understand the impact of personality on safety nearly enough to use it as a tool to predict who will or won't make a safe employee
• There are lots of different ways that we could use personality to get some insights and to make some contributions
• We need people using those measurements to find out more about the relationship between personality and behavior in different situations in different contexts with different choices under different organizational influences.
• The answer to our episode’s question – Maybe. It depends. Sometimes, in some places not yet. I don't want to say no, but it's not yes yet either.

Quotes:

I have to admit, before I read this, I thought that the entire idea of personality testing for safety was total bunk. Coming out of it, I'm still not convinced, but it's much more mixed or nuanced than I was expecting. - Drew

If there was a systemic trend where some people were genuinely more accident prone, we would expect to see much sharper differences between the number of times one person had an accident and all people who didn't have accidents. - Drew

I think anything that lumps people into four or five categories downplays the uniqueness of each individual. - David

There are good professionals in HR, there's good science in HR, but there is a huge amount of pseudo-science around recruiting practices and every country has its own pseudoscience. - Drew

Resources:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

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