THE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL DESIRABILITY AND FAKING ON PERSONALITY AND INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT FOR PERSONNEL-SELECTION

A review of the extant literature and new empirical research suggests that social desirability is not much of a concern in personality and i ntegrity testing for personnel selection. In particular, based on meta -analytically derived evidence, it appears that social desirability in fluences do not destroy the convergent and discriminant validity of th e Big Five dimensions of personality (Emotional Stability, Extraversio n, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness). We a lso present new empirical evidence regarding gender and age difference s in socially desirable responding. Although social desirability predi cts a number of important work variables such as job satisfaction, org anizational commitment, and supervisor ratings of training success, so cial desirability does not seem to be a predictor of overall job perfo rmance and is only very weakly related to specific dimensions of job p erformance such as technical proficiency (r = -.07) and personal disci pline (r =.05). Large sample investigations of the moderating influenc es of social desirability in actual work settings indicate that social desirability does not moderate the criterion-related validities of pe rsonality variables or integrity tests. The criterion-related validity of integrity tests for overall job performance with applicant samples in predictive studies is .41. Controlling for social desirability in integrity or personality test scores leaves the operational validities intact, thereby suggesting that social desirability functions neither as a mediator nor as a suppressor variable in personality-performance and integrity-performance relations. Theoretical explanations of why social desirability does not influence criterion-related validity are reviewed.