The Effects of Social Desirability and Faking on Personality and Integrity Assessment for Personnel Selection

Abstract

A review of the extant literature and new empirical research suggests that social desirability is not much of a concern in personality and integrity testing for personnel selection. In particular, based on meta-analytically derived evidence, it appears that social desirability influences do not destroy the convergent and discriminant validity of the Big Five dimensions of personality (Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness). We also present new empirical evidence regarding gender and age differences in socially desirable re- sponding. Although social desirability predicts a number of important work variables such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and supervisor ratings of training success, social desirability does not seem to be a predictor of overall job performance and is only very weakly related to specific dimensions of job performance such as technical proficiency (r = -.07) and personal discipline ( r = .05). Large sample investi...