Organization Behavior 330 - Employee Management

Organization Behavior 330

Kronos Case

Hiring effective employees is perhaps the greatest challenge both upstart and mature businesses face. Unlike a new server, policy, or business strategy, employees come with a host of ideas, personalities, abilities, and quirks of their own. In a perfect world, these traits help build the value of the business. However, in the real world often as not they conflict and contrast with both the employers goals as well as employees around them. So how can an organization successfully hire candidates that have traits which promote business goals, and avoid hiring those that don't? When faced with this question, many major corporations turn to Kronos, a business based out of Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Kronos attempts to help solve this dilemma through a proprietary test which evaluates applicants' personality.

When designing and implementing such a test, a few questions must first be asked. What sort of personality is the organization looking for in a candidate? How should the test score the individual, and what score is desirable? What weaknesses does the test posess? Kronos has attempted to answer these questions with their current implementation. This document will evaluate both the ramifications of such questions, as well as Kronos effectiveness at dealing with these questions.

Personality is defined as 'the structures and propensities inside people that explain their characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior'. From an organizations perspective, there are three keys here: thought, emotion, and behavior. All three of these can have significant impacts on the output of an individual inside an organization. However, this definition is a bit imprecise in its current format. Thus behavioral psychologists break personality into five dimensions known as 'the big five': conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion.

Of these factors, conscientiousness is arguably the most significant to an employer. As an employer, what your business does or outputs is of paramount importance. Finding a successful business owner who lacks conscientiousness would be nearly impossible. For this reason, an employee who doesn't care, and has no desire to perform good work on behalf of the company stands no chance of sharing the same goals as his/her employer.

While arguably less important than conscientiousness, agreeableness is also a key factor in determining a personality that works well for a position in the company. An employee who lacks agreeableness may have their own ideas about the way the company should operate. This makes it difficult to implement initiatives; such an employee will tend to go in the direction they see fit best for them. This conflict of interest leads to lost time and resources, as well as potential for undesirable behavior.

Neuroticism likewise has potential for being less important than the other factors. This factors relevance largely depends on the position in question. Jobs that deal with the public or other business professionals in an interactive, social way, will want to avoid such a trait. However, positions that are more solitary would be less affected by such a trait.

Openness, like neuroticism, really depends on the position with regard to significance to an employer. In a job such as construction, such a trait would seem almost useless, as convention, inartistic, and traditional tend to have strong positive correlations with construction work. However, a position heavy in problem solving may require a great deal of openness.

Finally, extraversion fits right in with neuroticism and openness. While a job in sales or real estate would like require huge amounts