Last month I exhibited at the POP (Postgraduate Occupational Psychology) and DOP (Division of Occupational Psychology) conference in Brighton. The Conference was themed ‘Science and Practice: Developing our Profession for the Future’ and was attended by over 500 psychologists and psychology students. The Conference provided a great opportunity for us to get amongst these professionals and learn from them.
There were a number of interesting workshops over the four days but one really sticks out in my mind - the ability of personality psychometrics to predict values and how this correlates to age.
A topic of particular interest to us here at Consulting Tools is the predictability aspects of personality psychometrics, so for this reason I decided to go to this workshop. The bit I found really thought provoking however, was to learn about how age affects values.
They concluded that as people mature they are more likely to join organisations with values in line with their own personal ones. They propose that when people are over the age of 50 , they are more likely to work for an organisation with their own cultural preferences. As employee demographics shift, this finding may prove to be rather an important factor in recruitment and retaintion. There are already studies popping up showing the changes in social values and how they differ between generations. Could this be an indication of possible schisms within the workplace perhaps?
As a side note, I was chatting to a chap at my stand who was presenting a paper at the event. It was based on his longitudinal study looking at assessment centre scores and the likelihood for being spotted for talent management and succession programmes. The key finding was that scoring high on situational tests (for example role play tasks) shows a positive correlation with selection for internal promotion. The same could not be said for the candidates ability/ cognitive scores. When I think about it, this isn’t a surprising find - if a person is comfortable doing role-play, they’re more likely to be self-promoters – making sure they are seen and heard regardless of their cognitive ability. So this is highlighting a potential pitfall companies really need to keep in mind when selecting their key employees for development.
