A new organizational initiative involved assessing and hiring individuals based on their goodness-of-fit with the team they would be joining. Team members as a group conducted interviews with each candidate

April 29, 2019

Case:
A new organizational initiative involved assessing and hiring individuals based on their goodness-of-fit with the team they would be joining. Team members as a group conducted interviews with each candidate, after which each member had an equal vote in the decision to hire or reject the candidate. Candidates had to receive at least 75% of yes votes to be hired, and the vote of the team was considered final. Based on legal and other considerations, a new system designed by a psychologist replaced the team vote approach and was based on a personality assessment. The applicant’s match to the group average on work-related personality measures among existing employees was used as the basis for hiring. Those with optimal fits across five major personality dimensions (the so-called Big Five) of the group were hired; those whose profiles were more distal were not. Rejected candidates were not informed that they were being rejected on the basis of their personality “fit.” The system did not take into account adverse impact of the measure on protected classes. Nor was productivity of the group measured at the individual level, as data on the correlation of person fit to team output was not available

Case Discussion:
The goal of industrial–organizational psychology is to ensure that selection techniques are reliable and valid for their intended inferences. To the extent that the described approach was formally validated against job-related outcomes, the practice might have been defensible. But an important question concerns whether the practice adversely affected the employment opportunities of protected classes. In the United States, selection methodologies are required not to disadvantage protected classes such as women, defined minorities, individuals older than age 40, and so on. The case also raises complicated technical issues that have ethical implications.Teamcohesionisanimportantmediatororoutcomevariabletothe extent it is associated with positive workplace outcomes such as effectiveness and efficiency. Some types of work are more dependent on team outcomes than on individual efforts, and many rely on both. A literature on team selection is emerging. To rely solely on the fit of applicants to the group as the criterion for selection should be carefully considered in light of two factors: available evidence of the strength of this connection to desired outcomes, and the sacrifice of other potentially more important individual level predictors. Additionally, the transition from the old to the new approach would require careful consideration as to how best to minimize possible adverse reactions to the new procedures that might be experienced by the team members.

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