Introduction
There are several types of jobs where emotional intelligence (EI) assessment could be effective in personnel selection. Moreover, high EI is necessary for highly demanding jobs (Gardner & Dunkin, 2018). For instance, according to Pelt et al. (2018), lawyers and file clerk, who face a lot of emotional labor during their day-to-day work, may fake their chances of securing a job position or use interpersonal interactions. However, such jobs as accountants and welders, which have little to no emotional labor, do not depend on emotional skills. In essence, medical careers such as nursing or medical practitioners are among the top jobs where EI assessment for personal selection could be effective.
EI assessment could also be effective in personnel selection when it is applied to such jobs as social workers. According to Sherman (2020), high empathy is vital for social workers as they often deal with other people’s life challenges and problems. In this case, since the social worker’s job is emotionally draining because of its high emotional labor, performing an EI assessment for such a job’s personnel selection is important.
HR professionals may not effectively measure or predict EI via testing methods. For instance, on the psychometric test for EI, it is impossible to predict EI as it is a measure of cognitive intelligence rather than EI. According to Campion (2019), the use of practice employment tests is significant in improving recruitment and personnel selection outcomes for highly demanding job positions. Therefore, HR professionals who are ardent about using psychometric tests for EI may discover that they are faced with a perplexing and confusing number of options, making this not an effective method to measure or predict EI.
Testing in Personnel Selection
Personality testing is utilized in a variety of situations. Personality tests, for example, can be used in fields including individual and relationship counseling and psychotherapy, workplace health and safety, and customer relations, such as sales. In this situation, the industry necessitates the development of special abilities in addition to hard skills, making screening for specific roles necessary (Pelt et al., 2018). For example, rather than recruiting someone with the necessary hard skills, organizations frequently teach their staff from the ground up in sales or customer service positions. As a result, before investing the resources planned to educate such persons, Human Resource (HR) experts should ensure that the employee’s personality is capable of handling the job’s responsibilities and are within the scope of job requirements within their specific organization.
Personality is a statistically established predictor of job success, and evaluating a candidate’s behavioral traits in the workplace helps recruiters to determine whether they will be top achievers. However, personality testing, on the other hand, offers both advantages and drawbacks as a method of selection. Personality assessments can help the company recruitment process be more legally sound (Gardner, & Dunkin, 2018). Of course, HR professionals must follow the same rules as any other hiring selection process, which means that as long as the evaluation is job-related, it is allowed to utilize it. It also gives users objective statistics to make optimum decisions. Despite personality assessment’s widespread usage in commercial and therapeutic contexts, validity issues plague personality testing. As a result, not all personality tests are appropriate for hiring. HR may make incorrect judgments or get themselves into legal issues if the evaluation is not psychometrically validated for recruiting and selection.
Orientation and Onboarding
Onboarding from a holistic viewpoint considers how the new worker’s abilities and talents may have a substantial impact on the business, in addition to the firm’s demands. Instead of assimilating the new employee into the agency’s current culture and values, holistic onboarding encourages the new worker to contribute to the creation of unique services, ideas, or technologies. Organizational socialization, for example, describes the process through which new workers transition from being organizational loners to organizational members (Hall-Jones et al., 2018). According to Peacock and Ruppel (2019), human resource psychology research indicates that socialization is a key influence on whether an individual feels like they belong in a new business and, as a result, if they want to stay in their new role. Holistic onboarding refers to the procedure through which an employee obtains the social competencies required to perform an organizational function.
Organizations must establish cultures that encourage cooperation, support engagement and promote demographic compatibility for generations to work effectively together. This allows each generation’s particular capabilities to be exploited for the greater benefit of the entire workforce. For example, according to Peacock and Ruppel (2019), Margie provides unique cooperation with a newbie at the library by emailing Rebecca a checklist as indicated by the HR manager. In the office and the commercial sector, learning how to interact with different generations might help to avoid big clashes and misunderstandings. As highlighted in Peacock and Ruppel’s article, acknowledging the diverse demands of people at different phases of their lives and careers may boost workplace efficiency (2019). As a result, managers must be aware of the peculiarities of different generations in the company, as demonstrated by Margie to Rebecca, and behave appropriately.
Psychological Contract
Organizational socialization, as opposed to onboarding, refers to the overall training and adaptation processes that people go through when they transition to a new function. As a result, new staff socialization takes place at multiple points within the business, notably at the unit or work group stage, and as a result, the onboarding process for new workers of a firm. Even though there may be a conflict between the organization’s willingness to mold and structure individuals to obtain productivity improvements, new staff can still compartmentalize a psychological contract during the organization’s onboarding process (Welander et al., 2020). For example, a person’s drive to fit in and thrive, as well as his or her goal to preserve freedom and self-expression inside an organization, can be adopted by a company’s need for higher uniformity to improve efficiency, as well as its concurrent need for adaptability.
In this sense, organizational socialization initiatives geared at new workers, such as realistic job briefings, formal training sessions, and mentorship, are most beneficial to newcomer integration. Furthermore, research indicates that employers play a significant role in the socialization of new members (Peacock and Ruppel, 2019). According to Peacock and Ruppel (2019), Margie and Rebeca built a relationship once Margie returned to work and got to know one another better. Furthermore, with Rebeca’s email and methodical list of subjects she would have discussed with Rebeca, including Rebeca’s insights into her Generation Y attitude, newbie Margie felt connected to the library. In this scenario, Margie’s connection with Rebecca demonstrated how she was committed to the company via her hard effort and ability to grasp skills by ensuring that Rebecca completed the ONE Boise State induction.
Performance Appraisal Systems on Employee Behavior
Within the public service, performance management is a big challenge. In the private sector, several performance management methods have been established, such as the balanced scorecard theory, although they place more emphasis on financial objectives and a small number of partners. The public sector has a considerably broader set of goals and stakeholders. However, performance measurement based on SSM has been identified in previous studies. In contrast, Zheng et al. (2019), in their research, used a group of internal and external project participants to balance personal interests that were either autonomous, complementary, or competing. Zheng et al. (2019) pointed out various stakeholders and their interests at each stage of an institution using the technique in a case study centered on a Chinese hospital and then emphasized their viewpoints in terms of four aspects: aim, function, stakeholder, ability, and KPIs. As a result, essential stakeholder interests must be examined and balanced.
The balanced scorecard technique is appealing because it offers a variety of options for managing welfare during strategy development. However, because the interests may be discovered and balanced in a variety of ways, particularly for different stakeholders in organizations, further research into how to reconcile the interests in various scenarios is required (Fischer et al., 2020). Furthermore, it is important to recognize that any resources spent on stakeholder involvement and balancing may result in opportunity costs because they cannot be used to enhance efficiency in other ways.
Conclusion
Despite the prevalence of other ethical workplace attitudes that existed before genuine ethics training, ethics in the workplace may be educated and trained among new workers. According to the Peter Principle idea, an employee who is promoted to their maximum degree of incompetence without having the necessary abilities to succeed in their new job has a greater likelihood of failing (Benson et al., 2019; Villegas et al., 2019). For example, Jack, an award-winning salesperson, failed in his role as assistant manager due to his inability to handle the ethical standards of a high-level management position (Villegas, 2021). Jack’s recruiting manager’s failure to establish training, operational, and management objectives for the new position could also have resulted in Jack’s failure in the new role (Villegas, 2021). Consequently, ethical training is inherently required for total skill development.
A range of ethics-violation situations supplements effective ethical instruction. Such breaches give chances for additional training or modifications to codes of conduct. To educate ethics in the workplace effectively, a variety of strategies must be used. Whatever method a corporation chooses to teach its staff the code of ethics, a refresher program should be made accessible (Lubbe et al., 2019). This is done to guarantee that everyone knows the requirements of the code of ethics and has the chance to make a great first impression on their knowledge of the issue. As a result, an organization’s members should employ a code of ethics as daily guidance. Even if it is not used every day, it should be at the center of staff’s minds while making everyday choices. As a result, it should not be a one-time discussion during instruction, but rather a documentation that is used regularly at all management levels.
References
Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085–2134.
Lubbe, D., Lubbe, I., & Nicolaides, A. (2019). Medical practitioners’ perceptions regarding ethical behaviour of employees of the medical devices industry in South Africa.The Journal of Medical Laboratory Science and Technology of South Africa, 1(2), 21-30. Web.
Villegas, S. G. (2021). A managerial dilemma: An ethical case study regarding employee termination.Journal of Business Cases and Applications, 29(1). 1-9. Web.
Villegas, S., Lloyd, R. A., Tritt, A., & Vengrouskie, E. F. (2019). Human Resources as ethical gatekeepers: Hiring ethics and employee selection. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 16(2). Web.