Lecture
Purpose of the topic: to define the concept of psychodiagnostics in personnel management, its stages, directions, working principles, and the ethical requirements placed on the diagnostician.
Topic outline:
1.1 The place and role of psychodiagnostics in the personnel management system.
1.2 The concept of psychodiagnostics and its stages.
1.3 Directions of psychodiagnostics in personnel management.
1.4 Working principles and professional ethics of the diagnostic specialist.
For enterprises and organizations, turning to psychodiagnostics is relevant as a necessary factor in personnel management and in the development and expansion of production and companies.
Assessment of personnel qualities. At present, a personality-oriented approach to personnel management is being actively developed, and its main principles and ways of implementation are being discussed. One of the essential principles of this approach is taking into account the individual characteristics of each employee.
To do this, managers need to have diagnostic «tools» in their arsenal that allow them to gain a deeper understanding of the internal state of personnel, their emotional state, and their current and potential capabilities. Only with accurate information will a manager be able to purposefully plan and carry out the process of developing the qualities needed, best suited to each employee. It should not be forgotten that the formation of the desired qualities in employees is influenced not only by methods, but also by the manager's own personality.
Any manager must have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of psychology, and of the psychology of work and management, in order to solve the problems of managing his organization's rational selection, placement, and use of personnel. And from the point of view of a psychologist specialist, he must make use of the whole body of knowledge acquired in order to work successfully with people, to create a favorable atmosphere within the team, and to achieve more effective and productive activity of the entire organization.
Selection and allocation of personnel at industrial enterprises is a fairly extensive area of application for psychological testing.
Goals of applying psychological testing to personnel:
- selection of personnel when hiring (at present, production suffers precisely from a shortage of qualified workers);
- forming capable, effective «teams» whose members would complement one another;
- preparation for various activities on one topic or another;
- self-analysis by the manager, his striving for self-development, when he independently uses one method or another to identify his strengths as well as his reserves.
The psychodiagnostic technology of an organization's personnel management covers a whole range of activities of the HR services, which includes hiring, selection and recruitment, vocational guidance, appraisal, labor adaptation, management of innovations in personnel work, training, professional development, and retraining of personnel, and career management. For example, career management using knowledge of psychodiagnostics makes it possible to more accurately carry out the motivation and monitoring of an employee's career growth based on his goals, needs, and capabilities.
A.V. Batashev asserts that modern psychodiagnostics is being applied ever more widely in such areas as personnel placement, professional selection, and vocational guidance. This is because knowledge of temperament types and the conclusions drawn from the analysis of an individual's psychological characteristics are of undoubted interest to executives and managers and contribute to effective management, competent personnel policy, and the correct distribution of job duties among employees.
In organizations that do not manage, or improperly manage, an employee's career, weak motivation to work occurs, the employee does not work at full capacity, and does not strive to raise his qualifications. All this leads, on the whole, to inefficient operation of the entire organization, since the professional growth of each employee drives the development process of the whole enterprise.
Psychodiagnostics in personnel management — is a field of psychology within which methods are developed and implemented for identifying and measuring the individual psychological characteristics of a personality — the subject of professional activity and labor relations.
Stages of psychological diagnosis
Deciding to use psychological tests in consulting work when assessing personnel means the need to include a technological chain consisting of a number of consecutively implemented stages:
Stage 1 — professiographic. The study, analysis, and systematic description of professional activity is carried out.
The results of such an analysis are usually: a professiogram (a comprehensive description of professional activity, compiled taking into account the goals set by the administration (for example, professional selection, development of a training and skills-development system, automation of technological processes, etc.); a psychogram (a list of the psychological, professionally important qualities of an employee that affect his effectiveness in the process of achieving a professionally significant result).
Stage 2 — criterial. The results of the analysis of work activity make it possible to formulate criteria that can subsequently be used in: 1) developing a procedure for professional psychological selection; 2) creating programs for the adaptation, training, and development of the organization's employees; 3) forming systems of material incentives and personnel appraisal.
The listed procedures are especially important in a situation where an organization operates under conditions of fierce competition and its employees carry out complex professional activity.
Stage 3 — technological. The development of a technology for psychological examination is carried out. Methods are selected to match the criteria for psychological assessment, a “test battery” is compiled, an algorithm for analyzing and interpreting the results is worked out, and the form and structure for presenting the results are developed.
Methods aimed at studying and measuring the psychological indicators of a person's aptitude for a given professional activity must meet certain requirements:
1) they must allow diagnostically significant information to be collected in a short time;
2) they must provide information not about a person in general, but about his specific psychological qualities;
3) they must present the information collected in such a form that a quantitative and qualitative comparison of the persons tested can be carried out;
4) the information obtained by means of the test must be useful from the point of view of predicting the development, communication, and effectiveness of the person examined in one activity or another.
Let us consider the main qualities that are tested in production and in organizations.
Communicative abilities are the ability to easily enter into contact with other people and subsequently maintain optimal relations with them. Any employee will be more successful if he is sociable, communicative, and treats everyone he works with in an equally friendly manner. Ineffective communication with employees hampers their relationships and, thereby, worsens the quality of work. Diagnostics makes it possible to identify the level of sociability and give employees recommendations for developing their communicative abilities, if this is necessary.
Intelligence is the general ability to cognize and solve problems. A person's level of intellectual development determines the success of any activity and underlies other abilities. An employee with a high level of intelligence is capable of acting rationally and effectively in a new environment, and of quickly orienting himself in a changing situation. What distinguishes a master craftsman among employees is precisely a striving for new solutions in professional activity, rather than blindly following stereotypes and habitual methods of interaction.
A necessary complement to a high level of intellectual development in an employee is his creative ability. Having creative ability implies sensitivity to problems and to gaps in existing knowledge, the ability to define these problems, to search for solutions, to put forward a wide range of hypotheses (which may sometimes seem crazy to others) and test them, and to obtain a new, original result.
Another important quality of a good employee is reflection - the ability to recognize and analyze one's own behavior, feelings, and thoughts. It is obvious that good work requires the ability to analyze the causes of success and the shortcomings of one's activity in order to raise one's level of professional mastery. It is precisely at identifying employees' ability to analyze their own activity that some of the psychodiagnostic methods used in organizations are aimed.
In the course of collective activity and communication, employees absorb certain relationships within the team, and interpersonal relations take shape. Communication between employees of different departments will be positive and fruitful only given a favorable psychological climate within the given organization. One of the main manifestations of the psychological climate is the well-being of each employee within the team. An employee's well-being within the team is satisfaction with the existing relationships, the degree of participation in joint activity (not necessarily professional), inner calm, and the experience of a sense of «we». All this can be defined as emotional well-being, which is an essential condition for the effective functioning of the organization.
A well-selected labor collective of a company should represent a team of like-minded people and partners capable of understanding and implementing the intentions of management. The innovative nature of a modern company's activity and the priority placed on the quality of services are changing the requirements placed on the employee and increasing the significance of a creative attitude to work and a high level of professionalism. This has already led to substantial changes in the principles, methods, and socio-psychological issues of personnel management.
Testing conducted among employees leads to the emergence of new departments in a number of organizations. These new departments are usually created on the basis of traditional ones: the personnel department, the department of labor and wage organization, the department of labor protection and safety, and others. The tasks of the new departments consist in implementing personnel policy and coordinating activity in the management of labor resources within the organization. In this connection, they begin to broaden the range of their functions and move from purely personnel matters to developing incentives for work activity, managing professional advancement, preventing conflicts, studying the labor market, and so on.
The objective needs of innovative development have given rise to a new concept of personnel training. At its foundation is the formation and development of a creative personality. Expenditures on personnel training are viewed not as costs of labor, but as long-term investments necessary for the company's prosperity. The educational process is not limited to conveying to trainees the necessary sum of knowledge and skills for a given profession, but is aimed at developing in them the ability and desire to master new fields of knowledge and acquire new specialties. In other words, in the course of training the creative element is significantly strengthened, and the trainee acts not as a passive object receiving information, but as an active subject developing his own abilities. An important component of the new concept is the task of self-realization of the personality.
Thanks to the achievements of psychology and sociology, it is possible to increase the effectiveness of an organization's activity. Among the innovations in this sphere is the resolution of such important questions as the optimal size of professional groups (primary teams, brigades, departments) and team formation; their functional structure; the psychological compatibility of team members; and motivation for work, including managerial activity, and so on.
Assessing the «level of conflict-proneness» of a professional group, the quality of its functioning, and many other psychological and social factors that have a direct effect on the level of functioning of both individuals and groups, is important and necessary in the process of comprehensive analysis. It is also known that «...intragroup conflicts, as a rule, originate in the informal structure and then move into the sphere of formal relations, throwing the team out of its normal working mode» (Shchebetenko A.I., 2003).
At the stage of psychological assessment of a group's personnel composition, it is typical to use comprehensive psychological instruments to determine the character accentuation of individuals, psychological potential, level of conflict-proneness, and so on.
The role of communication in the formation of personality and its main structural components is also emphasized by the well-known psychologists B.G. Ananiev and B.F. Lomov. Thus, B.F. Lomov notes that it is precisely the process of communication that plays an especially important role in the exchange of ideas and interests, in the transmission of character traits, and in the formation of a personality's attitudes and positions. Greater attention must be paid to personality as a reflection of social relations. This makes it possible to develop methods and forms of collective communication, and to study the socio-psychological nature of a labor collective, its structure, and the socio-psychological processes accompanying the development of a working group into a collective.
M. Lieberman identified six characteristics of groups that are unique and give rise to change:
- the ability to evoke a sense of belonging and involvement;
- the group's ability to control, punish, and reward its members;
- the group's ability to define reality for each member;
- the group's ability to evoke, display, and release strong emotions;
- the distribution of power and influence occurring within the group;
- the group's ability to create a basis for social comparisons and the exchange of information.
It is quite difficult to identify and designate all the characteristics and group phenomena that may act as stabilizing factors. One such attempt was made using the method of systems analysis, in which the group was viewed as an integral system while at the same time taking into account the particular features of the individuals composing it.
In the process of the formation of the formal and informal structures of groups and their interference, numerous conflicts may arise. A conflict that turns into a problem is one the group attempts to resolve through discussion and classification of the causes of the situation that has arisen.
Often this means a struggle between part of the group and its informal leader. The outcome of such a confrontation has substantial significance for the further fate of the group's functioning. In such cases, discussion is often conducted to clarify and understand such a phenomenon as rivalry. Procedures used, such as psychodrama, role play, and behavioral training, intensify group processes, help employees change their behavior, experiences, and mode of thinking, and contribute to solving the common task. The climate and emotional atmosphere prevailing in the group are formed and change depending on the normative pressure of the group, intragroup conflicts, the dissatisfaction of individual needs, and the restraint of the aspirations of individual participants.
A professional group consists of individuals differing in demographic characteristics (age, education, profession, etc.), physiological features, and individual characteristics. The latter two categories are significant for the functioning of the group. Each member comes into the group with his own experience, values, hopes, aspirations, needs, judgments, abilities, and style of behavior, along with his own types of psychological adaptive mechanisms and contrasting social and individual skills. Based on the experience he has (often based on a fragmentary or superficial perception of similarity to significant others), an individual attributes certain characteristics to particular members, treats them accordingly, and responds to them accordingly.
Differing in level of activity, hierarchical-structure accentuations, degree of interest shown in others, popularity and authority, resistance to stress, and striving for leadership or dependency, individuals create a complex network of relationships that undergo change. This means that the composition of the group affects the behaviour of individual members and the group's functioning, as well as the process of learning, which plays an important role but proceeds differently among participants. Some show passive assimilation of knowledge through imitation, others accumulate the information provided to them; still others add to their knowledge through research activity and work.
The existing similarities and differences between participants can, in turn, produce opposite consequences, depending on the group's goal and the tasks facing it.
When analysing the psychological aspects of a professional group, attention must be paid to such factors as the structure and composition of the group, its extensive communication network, the generalization of emotional phenomena, and the impact on individuals of norms created both by the group in the course of its development and by the organization.
Alongside a comprehensive social and psychological assessment of a professional group, it is also important to determine the level of intellectual abilities of both the individuals and the group as a whole (there are many methods for assessing intelligence).
World practice has developed a system for diagnosing mental abilities based on the test method, which provides for a qualitative assessment of intelligence. Common sense and life experience do not allow one to ignore the abundant evidence that some people cope with certain kinds of tasks more successfully than others. A group oriented toward the optimal use of human potential is interested in the adequate assessment and the fullest development and realization of human abilities, intellectual ones first and foremost.
The great scholar Jacob Levy Moreno maintained that «...all members of a group influence one another. Complete healing of each is impossible without the healing of all. We are born from communication, and our life consists of external and internal communication...». Consequently, the cohesion of a group is measured by the degree of cooperation and interaction of as many subgroups and their members as possible, for the sake of the purpose for which the group was formed. The experimental method in human social situations helps solve a great many problems, including economic ones.
A sociometric test is, above all, a study of the ways professional groups act and behave. Moreno's hypothesis was that human social structures (and a professional group is one such structure), formed by real individuals, have a characteristic form of organization, which has been repeatedly confirmed by experiments and statistical analyses. Among individuals there is a factor that impels them to form positive or negative relationships, dyadic relationships, triangles, chains, and so on. In this sense sociometry is not merely a sum of various techniques applied in one circumstance or another; its ideas are a source from which theoretical constructs and concepts arise.
1.4 Principles of Work and Professional Ethics of the Diagnostic Specialist
Effective and accurate psychodiagnostics of employees requires adherence to two basic principles: comprehensiveness and continuity of diagnosis.
The principle of comprehensiveness calls for studying the features of an employee's behaviour across different spheres of their life activity, in particular in the spheres of the work process, communication, relationships, management and self-management, and activity within the collective.
The principle of continuity (constancy) of diagnosis means that, in studying an employee, one cannot limit oneself to a single administration of psychoanalysis, that is, to identifying only their current state. It is necessary to trace, as in any other system, the stages of formation, development, flourishing, and transformation of the personality.
Conducting psychodiagnostics requires the fulfilment of the following conditions:
- a friendly, trusting atmosphere - the employee should perceive the testing situation not as an exam on which a failing grade can be received, but as an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of themselves and to chart a path for professional growth;
- sincere answers - it is necessary to explain to employees that there are no «correct» or «incorrect» answers, only individual differences between people and different ways of looking at the same things;
- confidentiality of information - the results of a given employee's diagnosis may not be disclosed to a third party without their consent; only aggregated data for a subdivision or department may be «made public» (for example, the percentage of employees in a given department with a low or high level of development of the trait being diagnosed);
- the results obtained are not a verdict but an occasion for reflection and for work with the collective, and, for the employees themselves, for work on themselves.
The basic principles of the diagnostic specialist's work are as follows:
do no harm;
maintain the secrecy of the psychological diagnosis;
confidentiality;
impartiality;
informed consent.
Self-image is an important internal factor determining the professional fitness and professional longevity of psychologists. A psychologist's personal formation and the shaping of a proper «self-image» are linked above all to overcoming a number of moral "temptations" lurking within the profession of psychologist. The most typical "temptations" were identified by M.N. Rosenko (2002).
The temptation of power. A psychologist must not turn knowledge of psychology into a peculiar means of manipulating people or making them dependent on himself.
The temptation of responsibility. A psychologist must not take upon himself responsibility for the fate of the person being examined. He directs all his professional knowledge and skills toward developing in the examinee a readiness to make independent decisions and a readiness to answer for themselves. A psychologist must not deprive the examinee of the right to answer for their own actions and deeds, the right to make their own mistakes and to overcome them.
The temptation of self-display. A psychodiagnostician must not use knowledge of psychology to demonstrate their own superiority over people.
The temptation of following "methodological fashion". A psychodiagnostician is obliged to keep abreast of the latest advances in psychology and in disciplines related to it. At the same time, they must not, in the chase after "novelties", neglect the depth and thoroughness of study and of diagnostic tools.
The temptation of "rewards". The results of experimental studies are known that prove the greater effectiveness of paid psychological services. An examinee who has paid a considerable sum takes a more responsible attitude toward the work being done with them.
The temptation of excessive experimentation. A psychodiagnostician must not, in pursuit of their own research goals or scientific inquiries, overload the psychodiagnostic examination or extend its duration. It is undesirable to turn the examinee into «statistical material» and to relegate their psychological problems to the background.
The temptation of emotional and somatic burnout. The humanistic orientation of psychology, the dominant significance of the other person's self, and emotional involvement in the work must not prevent the psychodiagnostician from taking care of their own mental and physical health. Excessive absorption in the examinees' problems, engaging not only consciousness but the subconscious in solving them, constant additional (often telephone) consultations, and refusal to use elementary techniques of psychohygiene can adversely affect the psychological comfort of the psychodiagnostician themselves, their family well-being, and ultimately their professionalism.
The temptation of speculation. The need to produce an objective and reliable conclusion does not protect the examinee from the application of inadequate psychodiagnostic methods and techniques to the resolution of their problems. The absence of generally accepted criteria for the effectiveness of a psychodiagnostic examination and of measures of accountability for an unqualified diagnosis increases the importance of the psychodiagnostician's own personal standards and of their own professional conscience.
Questions on the Topic
What is the place and role of psychodiagnostics in the personnel management system?
Give the concept of psychodiagnostics.
Name and characterize the stages of psychodiagnostics.
List the areas of psychodiagnostics in personnel management.
What are the principles of work of the diagnostic specialist?
Name the principles of professional ethics of the diagnostic specialist.
Comments