Employee Appraisal: Importance and Necessity
Arguably, employee appraisal has become the cornerstone of any organization that is an option to hire employees in the current dynamic and most competitive world (Beckmann and Wood, 2017, p 1486). As importantly, the direct and albeit effects of personal differences and assessment in an organization has increasingly become the core target; and its necessity grows big day by day. Employee assessment is crucial to the growth, achievement and the general realization of a firm's objectives and visions; as it helps in identifying the right kind of people to fit the available position (Uher, 2013, p 3).
Importance of Personal Assessment in Recruitment and Selection
Needless to emphasize, activities such as recruitment and selection process are commonly known to utilize personal assessment as there is a great need to understand individual differences (Beckmann and Wood, 2017, p 1486). Additionally, there is a need for personal assessment since many companies are adopting diversity in their workplace and thus in order to effectively manage the diverse workforce, it is vital to understand the personal difference of each employee for high performance and this can only be achieved through personal assessment (Barbot, 2018, p 4). Among the factor which is cardinal in conducting personal assessment and which have a direct impact on personal difference include demographic aspects, intelligence or abilities and lastly the personality. In order to understand the variance in personality and consequently perform an individual assessment, there are many methods and approached which have been developed.
The Nomothetic Approach to Personality Assessment
Amongst the psychological approach which has been developed include Nomothetic Approach (Beltz et al., 2016, p 447). Consequently, this paper will assess the effectiveness and drawbacks of Nomothetic Approach In performing a personal assessment. However, to hinge the debate, the paper will start off by giving a brief review of the Nomothetic Approach to personality and later will discuss benefits, disadvantages and recapitulate with a conclusion of the submissions made.
Nomothetic Approach to Personality Overview
Commonly, personality denotes what individuals do and say, significantly, it essentially reflects the manner in which individuals do what they opt to do (Barbot, 2018, p 2). Since personality is determined by heredity factors as well as environmental factors it ain not constant and thus the character of an individual is likely to change. Therefore, in order to understand personality, there are two main theories developed but this paper will focus on one approach that is known as nomothetic. Evidentially, many psychologists have advocated the use nomothetic approach to understand and assess the personality of individuals (Barbot, 2018, p 4).
Primarily, the nomothetic approach is grounded on the premise that individual exhibits similar traits and thus can be comparable and whole explainable why they tend to differ periodically. The core assumption of this approach is based on Extroversion of different personality traits and thus the distinctiveness of personal trait is due to the common traits they exhibit (Beltz et al., 2016, p 448). Proponents of Nomothetic Approach assumes that personality is largely predicated through inheritance and thus easily determines and asses using genetics or biochemistry of brains (McAdams, 2006, p 11). As a result, the supporters argue that personality and individual characters which ought to be assessed are biological and thus cannot be altered less if not by life experiences and social impacts (Beckmann and Wood, 2017, p 1486).
Generally, the approach has got different building blocks or traits which are used in performing the personal assessment. The first tenant is known as extroversion versus introversion which is used to assess the extent to which a person is oriented in relation to outside world (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567). The next trait is conscientiousness which attempts to explain and assess how a person is well organized. Agreeableness is the next trait which is used to assess the degree to which an individual can be regarded as a being friendly, reliable or even co-operative socially (Barbot, 2018, p 3). Fourthly, we have an emotional stability which is used to assess the tolerance of person to stress and ambiguity. For instance, during the personal assessment, it is assumed that individuals with emotional stability are presumed to be highly calm, safe and self-confident. The last component is individual openness in relation to experience. In performing a personal assessment, psychologists assume that open personality has a higher tendency of exposing creativity and are deemed to be highly curious (Hallquist and Wright, 2014, p 256).
To recapitulate, nomothetic personal assessment is concerned with establishing a common law through scientific means which can later be generalized to a given group of individuals. The concept utilizes quantitative methods to analyze data and as a result; experiment, psychometric tests, and correlations are used to perform personal assessments. Additionally, the aspect of comparability in regard to traits is highly valuable in the approach as it adopts that psychological traits have same implications across the board (Hallquist and Wright, 2014, p 257). Accordingly, the approach assumes that individuals differ only in terms of each trait; and thus the uniqueness they possess (Uher, 2013, p 34).
Benefits of using Nomothetic Approach in Personality Assessment
Contrasted with other methods of conducting a personal assessment, Nomothetic Approach is regarded as being scientific in nature (McAdams, 2006, p 12). Generally, the approach has been termed as a social science. Being a social science, the method utilizes the scientific method to collect, analyzed and performs the personal assessment (Hunsley and Meyer, 2003, p 447). Cardinally, the strength of this method in performing personal easement is embedded in its ability to use scientific methods especially quantitative techniques as well as a controlled measurement to predict individual behavior with precession. For instance, Milgrim's experiment has been credited with its ability to replicate to a different group of persons and the results have been used to predict the law of obedience among individuals (Lamiell, 2014, p 1248).
Moreover, the application of science means that a controlled experiment exists and validity results have been established upon which replicability of the assessment can be made. Moreover, since Nomothetic Approach is s scientific in nature, meaning that it collects and analyzes human behavior scientifically through tested methods, it less subjective and thus it is highly regarded as being objective in obtaining the precise assessment outcomes (Lamiell, 2014, p 1249). The deviance from human perceptions and intuition in this approach ensures that empirical evidence regarding human behavior is assessed in relation to how different persons respond to the same tests. Subsequently, while conducting the personal assessment, the objectivity of the entire process is vital as it attempts to examine the change of behavior and trait among people who are subjected to same test and assessment so that the best candidate is selected (Lamiell, 2014, p 1248).
Furthermore, the objectiveness of the approach has played a major role in assisting psychologists to develop personality assessment theories which can be empirically and scientifically be validated thus helping those who are concerned with personality test robust methods to evaluate their teams (Hunsley and Meyer, 2003, p 446).
Lastly, scientific methods are concerned with ideal generalization across groups of individuals for easy evaluation. As a result, the aim of using Nomothetic Approach in personality assessment is to generate trait and behavior which can be used to generalize the conduct of given group of people for easy assessment (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567).
Disadvantages of using Nomothetic Approach in Personality Assessment
Although science has pervaded every aspect of life and plausibly helping in doing sophisticated researchers which have direct effects and implication on the human life ranging from food, technology medicines among many other areas where it is profoundly regarded essential, and it In this case important to all, science, however, is not the best way to give answers to questions, giving their explanations and definitely using a causal relationship to predict the relationship between individual traits through assessment (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567). Therefore, it is inappropriate to vividly quantify the benefits of science in providing answers and explanations and causal relationship in regard to personality assessment. Consequently, the discussed below are propositions which challenge the effectiveness of Nomothetic Approach in conducting personality tests (McAdams, 2006, p 12)
An unrealistic assumption of human behavior: Essentially, science assumes that in a given set up, objective inferences or decisive conclusions can be attained inasmuch as the researcher and in this case, the person carrying out the study or a given observation is purely objective meaning that the person fully disregards his or her emotions (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567). Conversely, this is fallacious as it is difficult at any given point in time separate a person from the activity being done; meaning his or her behavior always affects the process in one way or another. Human behavior is an automatic effect which naturally comes out and thus affecting a given scientific answer for an explanation (Kirwan et al., 2014, p 2). Needless say that science has encouraged the researchers to remain objective at all times, no sufficient guaranteed is placed on it that this will be an ideal position and thus cannot be capitalized on to answer questions and explain the causal relationship in traits (Uher, 2013, p 12).
Secondly, science assumes that causal relationship and resultant effects can empirically be measured by human traits and behavior (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567). The assumption is unsubstantiated because there is no way a given trait will relate to the same group of people as time goes by. The relationship between personality traits at one point in time is usually contingent upon given conditions which might not be present in a separate set up and thus by generalizing and assuming that such relationships can be measured or tested without focusing on the changes in variables over time is unrealistic (Kirwan et al., 2014, p 2). Consequently, a causal relationship cannot be effectively quantified as in nature, there exists diverse realities which are continually changing and therefore hitches in accurately establishing causes from effects in human behavior which affects the overall personal assessment and thus performance (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567).
Thirdly, science assumes that every aspect of nature or a phenomenon can be subjected to test and measurements which are gauged against already consistent measurement so that the treatments are standardized too (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567). This too is improbable and cannot be relied on as in nature, there are several aspects and realities which can be holistically be studied and subsequently hard to predict them or subject to an experimental standard which was developed many centuries ago. In doing this, flexibility in personality traits is totally precluded from being taken care of as science gives no room for such changes in behavior or traits to be explained, and thus incompatible in giving answers and explanations for an effective personal assessment (Hunsley and Meyer, 2003, p 446).
Fourthly, ideal trait assessment can only be achieved in the laboratory set up under ideal conditions which are established within a room. However, in the real world, these ideal conditions are seldom to be attained. Consequentially, human behavior and traits are vulnerable to change and thus unsuitable in conducting the personal assessment (Lyon et al., 2017, p 567).
Conclusion
Summatively, the premise of this paper was to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages associated with Nomothetic Approach in relation to personality assessment. In doing so, the paper reviewed some of the benefits of using the approach to conduct personality test which include scientific data collection and analysis, ability to generalize scientifically assessed evidence over a group of people, the objectivity of the approach in assess trait difference among individuals and lastly the ability of the method to replicate the assessment of different personal trait over time. Likewise, the disadvantages were discussed which include overgeneralization of traits during assessment and unrealistic assumption about human behavior.
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