Personality and Adaptive Performance: How organizations can use employee assessments to drive adaptive performance behaviors

Organizational changes can be unpredictable. New technological advances, transforming work-cultures due to hybrid work models, and challenges like Covid-19 have all recently given evidence of how difficult it is to adapt. Employees have to transition and adapt into a different working environment and are also expected to perform at a high level. Employee diversity comes with diversity of personality traits that may play a role in adaptation and the success of the organization. If employees are able to adapt to significant changes due to their specific personality traits that are more responsive to change, organizations would be better at attaining goals without decreasing work productivity and job performance during times of disruption. Each person’s personality plays a vital role in their success during times of change, and therefore, how successful the organization will be. 

Role Breadth: Are Two Roles Better Than One?

When I was younger, I worked at a fast-food restaurant. I noticed that while most of my peer coworkers and I each held the job title of “restaurant team member”, we performed very different jobs and all had very different responsibilities. I mostly worked at the cash register and interacted with customers over the drive-thru intercom. Other employees were trusted with cooking, baking and preparing orders, and a couple of employees were trusted with being slotted into any sort of role. Often, this last group had been with the restaurant longer and had accumulated a variety of job-related skills during their tenure. These were the employees who were given priority for overtime shifts and were flagged for promotion into management positions at other store locations. In other words, the employees who performed the greatest variety of job tasks were also considered the “best” employees.

The term role breadth is used to describe how many different tasks or projects a person performs in their job.

Is your employee assessment strategy Army Strong?

The US military has pioneered selection methodology for years and continues to do so with an increasing amount of accuracy and sophistication.