Using Personality Profiling To Improve Morale In Organizations: An Essay.

Concept of Personality Profiling

Explore the current literature on the validity of using personality profiling in organisations to improve morale

Using the information through personality profiling of the employees, the management can focus on establishing the work environment which is more conducive to productive for the employees to boost up the employees' morale. For the management, the information of the employees can help them to make decisions about the professional development, promotions and hire opportunities (Wisniewski et al. 2017). The thesis statement of the essay is to highlight the validity of using the personality profiling in organisations to improve morale. In the first sections, the concept of personality profiling is explained using the current literature and the techniques of the personality profiling are also described. In addition, the theories of personality profiling within the organisation have been described. In the final section, three recommendations are provided with practical implications of using the personality profiling within the organisation targeting the audience of HR managers.

The organisations use personality profiling to identify the potential leadership features and qualities of the employees that can help someone to be suited for an alternative or new role within the organisation. As stated by Watson et al. (2015), each of the personality type has advantages and disadvantages as personality profiling is about recognising the own strengths and weaknesses. Personality profiling of the employees assists the management to figure out the way to work together with the employees so that the employees can best perform the role. As an HR manager or the leader; it is very significant to make out own leadership style to impact on the effectiveness of the team. According to Sang et al. (2016), conducting the personality assessment to all the departments has become common practice and through this; the companies unlock the potential of the employees that they contain. Personality profiling brings the result of the staff person and it can help in building the morale and learning opportunities for the employees. The authors further stated that personality profiling can improve the ways teamwork and it can involve the development of the team mentality. Personality profiling allows the better communication that promotes the productivity and business can use personality profiling to engage the employees to recognise the unique needs. This process can allow identifying best performer of every team and it can make the balanced team along with help to increase collaboration of team. During the recruitment; the management can take the personality profiling as it allows gaining comprehensive insight of the candidates. This process allows the interviewer having the idea what to expect from the candidates. As pointed out by Rong et al. (2015), personality profiling is helpful as it lays the groundwork for the discussion on employees' weaknesses and strengths of the characters. The authors further stated that personality profiling is necessary within the organisation to allow better communication among the hierarchy to improve the collaboration.

Techniques of Personality Profiling

Today’s organisations use tools to conduct personality profiling to improve the productivity and communication.

DiSC profile is one such non-judgemental tool and it is used for the description of the individuals' behavioural differences. In this profiling test; the employees will be asked to complete the series of questions which will provide a detailed report of the individuals' behaviour and the personality. According to Jokela et al. (2017), DiSC profile helps to enhance self-knowledge and improve the working relationship by identifying the communication needs of the team members. In addition, DiSC profile facilitates better teamwork to teach productive conflict. DiSC develops the stronger sale skills through identifying and responding the priorities of the employees along with the team members. This test helps to get the idea of persons’ dominance to identify the behaviour of emphasis on accomplishing the results, confidence and bottom line. Influence stands for showing the enthusiasm and to show the persuading nature. Steadiness puts emphasis on the sincerity, cooperation and dependability. Lastly, conscientiousness emphasises the quality and accuracy of the people on competency and expertise. 

Big Five Personality test is another tool to measure the personality profile of the individuals and this test is based on the five-factor model of personality. There are altogether 60 questions that the individuals need to answer. There are five broad dimensions and this test is widely recognised as the robust way to narrate the personality differences. Big five personality test clears the five personality dimensions; such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. As opined by Hancock (2016), big five personality test increases evidence to bring out the five big personality traits of the individuals and these traits can bring result from the environment and hereditary circumstances.

Behaviour is the reflection of individuals' interactions among a wide range of underlying factors that include the effect of the person's past experience and bodily state of the individual. 

Interview: In the interview; the candidates under assessment can be given considerable latitude to tell the story. In addition, interviews have both verbal and nonverbal components and the HR manager has the ability to gather information. The aim of the interview is to gather the information of the candidates about the specific attitudes, work experience and occupational goal. Face-to-face interviews help the management to get the knowledge of the employees regarding the fears, attitudes, expectation and unreliability of the employees.  

Rating scale: Rating scale can present the users with multiple items and the management asks them to select the choice. The rating scale is used by the observers about the self-reporting and it permits the convenient characterisation of the behaviour. The observation lends the people towards the identification of the behaviour.  

Theories of Personality Profiling

Self-report test: Convenient intelligent test can provide quantitative indexes and reliability to measure the personality of the people. Procedures of self-report can vary in the degree to which they can achieve the score convenience and reliability (Rahim 2017).

The memorable part of the assessment test is when the employees get the result and share them with others. The facilitators take time to explain the personality profiling and personality type brings out the common strengths of the employees. Participants can be reminded that assessment results are full of generalisation (Buraya et al. 2017).

The validity of using personality profiling in organisations to improve morale

Personality testing has been becoming the $900 million industry in the global arena and 72% of the UK based organisations consider the psychometric test as part of the recruitment (Chelladurai 2017). The popularity of the personality profiling can suggest that Australian managers just do not believe performance is the ultimatum; however, the personality of the employees plays an important role to bring out the productivity. Personality profiling of the candidates and the employees clear out the strengths and weaknesses of the personality and it injects the morale of the employees. The employers get to know about employees’ strengths and weaknesses before they hire the candidates. Therefore, the employers can be sure which post would be suitable for the employees before they recruit the employees by taking personality assessment tests (Anglim and Grant 2016). As argued by Wringht and Chin (2016), individuals’ personality issues can be segregated into two ways; critical analysis as well as theoretical status. Personality traits are mainly used by managers within the organisations to recognise the personalities and the personality disorder of the employees. Personal intelligence can be sort of guidance about the functioning and the knowledge of the team members can help the morale of the team leaders. The team leaders can track the team members' strengths and weaknesses as it will be crucial to building the successful team. Team collaboration will be improved and morale of both team members and team leaders will be high; while the productivity will be enhanced.

 Jung generalises the source of psychic energy that motivates the range of behaviours of the individuals. Conscious is the storehouse of the repressed memories specific to the individual and ancestral past (Jung 2017). Past experiences of behaviour can lead to the future aspiration. Jung put stress on the importance of unconscious in personality. In today’s organisations, the managers need to understand the typology of the human beings as managers should understand whether the employees are introvert or extrovert. The interaction may drain the energy whereas being alone can energise the people. As stated by Flekova and Gurevych (2015), managers must identify the sociable qualities of the employees that they can use in making a partnership with the employees. Personal consciousness is about temporally forgotten information, whereas collective consciousness is about the latent memories of the past.  

Recommendations with Practical Implications

Social cognitive theory talks about psychology, communication and education that are directly related to the experience, social interactions and outside of the media experience. As stated by Badura (2014), individuals have low or high self-efficacy towards the behaviour as the learners must believe that personal abilities can complete the behaviour. Behavioural response of the individuals receives when the individuals get their performance behaviour. Environmental aspect can influence the persons' ability to complete the behaviour. In the workplace, the managers can focus on the cognitive process that engages the employees in learning. Personality profiling finds out the weaknesses of the employees and social learning theory helps to engage the employees to gather learning. Social cognitive learning is the process through which someone acquires the skill or behaviour from someone by seeing the actions someone closely (Akers 2017).

HR managers within the organisation should use personality profiling during the recruitment and they can use it within the organisation for the existing the employees. Personality profiling can improve personal and team effectiveness and it helps to do better recruitment and effective management process.

Hiring trained facilitator: It is not an easy work to conduct personality profiling within the organisation and the HR management can hire the trained facilitator to take the personality profile. The senior management and the HR executives may not be able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the employees. The hired facilitators will understand the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates and employees so that they can prescribe the training to the employees. Personality profiling feedback from the facilitator can allow the management to improve more efficient strategies for the leaders and solve the problems. The facilitators can set the goals for the employees and the management regarding the personality improvement and inject morale.   

Using personality profiling tools: The HR executives can take personality profiling test of the candidates so that the management can get to know about the decision-making, characteristics traits, behaviour, education and recreation of the people. Personality profiling tests like Myer-Brigg and DiSC analysis can help the HR executives to recruit right employees as assessment is the informative and important part to ensure that the executives must find the ‘fit’ employees.

Proper communication: HR management can use the personality profiling as through the personality profiling the strengths and weaknesses of the employees can bring into the light. The strategic personality profiling tools being out the ‘thinking vs. feeling' type and these tools can bring out the insight of the language. Personality profiling sends the proper communication to the management of the employees and the first impression of the employees will be set through this. Proper communication can also boost up the morality of the employees.         

Benefits of Personality Profiling for Employees

Conclusions

The organisations’ HR management can use the personality profiling as it is helpful to manage the people and understand the employees very well. The HR management considers using personality profile to develop and recruit the employees. The HR management can use personality profiling as most of the employees are unaware of the benefits of personality assessment tests. The employees may not have access to the internet and the employees do not have the personality profiling that is needed to develop and adapt to the organisation. In addition, the costs of the personality profiling are low which is acceptable for the employers. Most importantly, categorisation through personality profiling will motivate the employees and improve the morale as well. 

Reference List

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Anglim, J. and Grant, S., 2016. Predicting psychological and subjective well-being from personality: Incremental prediction from 30 facets over the Big 5. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17(1), pp.59-80.

Bandura, A., 2014. Social cognitive theory of moral thought and action. In Handbook of moral behaviour and development(pp. 69-128). Psychology Press.

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Chelladurai, P., 2017. Managing organisations for sport and physical activity: A systems perspective. London: Taylor & Francis.

Flekova, L. and Gurevych, I., 2015. Personality profiling of fictional characters using sense-level links between lexical resources. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp.1805-1816.

Hancock, D., 2016. To test or not to test: Assessing personality traits. Practice Management, 26(5), pp.23-25.

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Jung, C.G., 2014. Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 17: Development of Personality: Development of Personality (Vol. 17). Princeton University Press.

Rahim, M.A., 2017. Managing conflict in originations. Abingdon: Routledge.

Rong, W., Peng, B., Ouyang, Y., Liu, K. and Xiong, Z., 2015.Collaborative personal profiling for web service ranking and recommendation. Information Systems Frontiers, 17(6), pp.1265-1282.

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Watson, B., Watson, A., Siskind, V., Fleiter, J. and Poole, D., 2015. Profiling high-range speeding offenders: Investigating criminal history, personal characteristics, traffic offences, and crash history. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 74, pp.87-96.

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