BANDWIDTH-FIDELITY DILEMMA IN PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT FOR PERSONNEL-SELECTION

This paper presents a discussion of the bandwidth-fidelity dilemma in personality measurement for personnel selection purposes. Should job a pplicants be assessed on fine-grained personality variables or on broa der personality variables, such as the Big Five dimensions of personal ity? Most human resources practitioners and researchers appear to assu me that more specific and narrow measures of personality traits result in better and more fine-grained understanding of the person, and ther efore ought to be preferred over global measures. We review evidence t hat when the criterion of interest is job performance, broader persona lity measures may be preferable over narrowly focused ones. It appears that the alleged advantages of narrowly defined traits and narrowly c onstructed measures are mainly due to erroneous conventional beliefs p redicated upon statistical artifacts. In personnel selection research and practice, we advocate the use of broader personality traits for bo th better prediction and explanation.