Darth Vader? The dark side of using personality tests

When Lorna Rooke was likened to Darth Vader during a team-building exercise, the fallout was anything but science fiction. The comparison led to a UK tribunal ruling that the association caused her “significant distress.”

Ultimately, Rooke was awarded nearly £29,000 (C$53,000) in damages.

The case serves as a reminder of how personality assessments can be used, and misused, in the workplace.

“Probably one of the big criticisms is where people take ideas that have a good scientific basis — like personality testing has a really strong, long, good scientific history and basis in fact — and then they take them in the directions that they probably shouldn't go,” says Frederick Morgeson, Eli Broad professor of management at Michigan State University.

From team bonding to legal damages

The UK incident occurred during an August 2021 session at National Health Services (NHS) Blood and Transplant. Rooke, a training and practice supervisor, had been absent briefly when a colleague filled out the personality assessment on her behalf, according to the Guardian. Upon her return, it was revealed she had been “typed” as Darth Vader.

While intended as a playful analogy, the employment tribunal thought otherwise, calling it “upsetting”: “Darth Vader is a legendary villain of the Star Wars series, and being aligned with his personality is insulting.”

Rooke said the experience made her feel isolated and ultimately contributed to her resignation a month later. While her claim of constructive dismissal was dismissed, the tribunal upheld that she suffered a detriment at work following a protected disclosure, said the report.

Misuse of assessments

Morgeson says cases like this are emblematic of a broader issue: the misuse of non-scientific assessments in professional settings.

“There's a whole scientific field devoted to personality assessment and testing. No one in that field would say you can classify people according to Star Wars characters, movie characters or TV characters,” he says, adding this approach is more like a gimmick.

When the stakes are high — such as getting a job or promotion, or being identified as a leader — those tests have consequences should always use a proven, tested, validated assessment, he says.

“If you just want to have fun and share information with each other, in the team development sense, there's probably less harm in that.”

Using assessments properly

If used within a validated and structured selection system, the assessments “can be a tool in HR professionals' toolbox,” says Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

However, the effectiveness goes back to HR — not necessarily the institution of personality assessments, he says.

“Anybody who's worth their salt as an HR professional doesn't put all their eggs in one variable, right? We know they need to put people through areas of assessment. They need to gather as much information as possible, triangulate things and use lots of different data to make a decision,” says Roberts.

“If you've done your job analysis, and you've done your homework, and you know what kind of dimensions you want to get to, a personality inventory can add to that system quite nicely to help increase the ability of an organization to hire people in a certain way.”

Morgeson stresses the need for organizations to contextualize assessments within broader selection systems.

 “Any decision you make, obviously, you have to be careful… Don’t rely on any single source of information,” he says. “If you don’t do it the right way, you’re just hurting yourself.”

If you can demonstrate the two metrics of reliability and validity, then these kinds of assessments work well, says Morgeson, emphasizing the importance of basing assessments on validated science.

“Understand what those tests can and can't do, and if you do that, you'll have good results, and if you don't do that, you'll have a lot of issues,” he says.

Accuracy of personality assessments

One challenge is when people fake their responses, which is a particular concern in high-stakes hiring contexts, says Roberts,

“Somebody is going to guess what type of qualities you’re looking for and then answer untruthfully.”

However, many hiring managers rely on unstructured interviews, which can also be easily faked, he says.

“A personality inventory is simply the most exhaustive and structured interview that you can go through. Instead of five questions about what you like and what you don't like, you get 150 questions.”

There are also “less empirically sound” arguments that these tests don’t predict the outcomes you’re interested in, says Roberts.

“The tests themselves, depending on the quality, can be of poor validity and reliability and, in that case, misused,” he says, citing criticism that has been leveled at the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for its “psychometric weaknesses.”

For example, it features 16 personality types, but they’re all positive, according to Dan McAdams of Northwestern University in a 2021 article: “There are no psychopaths in the Myers-Brigg world. There are no mean, aggressive people. Everybody is happy there and positive, so who wouldn’t want a personality type that validates you?”

But Roberts says that misunderstandings about MBTI’s capabilities contribute to its misuse.

“[Recruiters] treat them as if they are some special category, something qualitatively different than [what] we ask in interviews, and they’re not… within a well-designed selection system, personality trait measures would be fine.”

Big Five personality traits

Not a fan of the MBTI, Morgeson prefers the Big Five personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — as a scientifically supported framework for assessing personality.

“It can give you important information, in the context of a work environment,” he says, citing conscientiousness as an example, a trait that “reflects how hard working, how dependable you are.”

In trying to hire a salesperson, you might be looking for the Big Five trait of extroversion, which means the person is more social, more talkative, says Morgeson: “Those are things that have been shown to be related to a salesperson performance.”

A well-developed and validated personality assessment is an important part of understanding a job applicant or potential leader, he says: “It’s one piece of data amongst others.”

We all have different ways of orienting to each other in our workplace — whether it's how we communicate, how we work or our preferences — and this is one way to “surface those in a systematic way,” says Morgeson.

“The better the quality of the test, the better developed it is, the better that insight is.”

Predictive power of personality tests

There’s also concern about how rigid interpretation of these assessments can stifle diversity. For example, does a salesperson always have to be extroverted? Does that trait lead to higher sales volume, for example?

“If the answer is yes, then the organization will be better off hiring people who possess that characteristic,” says Morgeson. “It doesn't mean that all extroverted people will be successful and all introverted people will be unsuccessful. It just means that the general tendency is that being extroverted is helpful in those environments.”

But caution remains paramount. As Morgeson puts it, “You want to use tests that are work-related, so designed for that work environment, for the specific industry in which you’re working.”

He points to his own work in healthcare, where assessments tailored to the sector have proved valuable.

“We have a tremendous amount of evidence showing that it works to predict things like performance and retention in the job,” he says.

Developmental perspective

Using personality tests to gauge “culture fit” may inadvertently filter out candidates who don’t mirror the dominant personality profiles, even if they bring valuable cognitive or experiential diversity.

Roberts pushes for a developmental perspective instead. Most organizations use personality testing, like MBTI, as a signal to the employees that they're cared about, he says, but they don't take the information to create a plan.

“Instead of asking what you have in terms of your trait or your disposition, we’re asking what you’re capable of,” says Roberts.

“For example: ‘Hey, this is where you're at, is that good for you? Or would you like to grow in a different way? If you want to grow in a different way, what can we do to help?’”

It’s shifting to recast personality as a skills-based system, he says.

“Instead of going at it [like] ‘Well, you're not very extroverted, so you're not going to be successful.’ You say, ‘Well, you could be stronger on social engagement skills, let's look at what kind of things we can do to help you acquire some of those skills so that, later on down the line, you become a leader.’”

In the end, there are appropriate and inappropriate uses for all these tools, and that's the challenge, says Morgeson.

“When you design them and implement them in the right way, they can be very effective. Similarly, if you design them and implement them in the wrong way, they can be very destructive or maybe just not helpful.”