Lecture
People are not born too similar to one another; their nature and abilities differ. Therefore, it is possible to accomplish more and more easily if one performs a particular job in accordance with one's natural abilities.
In 1795, Nevil Maskelyne, director of the Greenwich Observatory, dismissed his assistant Kinnebrook for alleged carelessness, as the latter recorded the time of a star's transit almost a second later than he did. Maskelyne reprimanded the assistant and told him to be more attentive. However, despite this, the discrepancy only increased further. Twenty years later, the German astronomer Bessel, who became interested in this conflict, cleared the assistant of the charge of carelessness. He concluded that there are no two astronomers whose observations would not show involuntary differences. The difference in readings between individual observers was called the "personal equation". Thus, practice established an important psychological phenomenon – individual differences in reaction time.
Psychological diagnostics, translated from Greek, means "recognition". Psychological diagnostics is intended to improve the content of the management of people.
Psychodiagnostics – is a field of psychological science that develops methods for identifying the individual psychological characteristics of a person.
The term psychodiagnostics appeared in 1921 and belongs to the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach (1874-1922). "Psychodiagnostics – is a field of psychology that develops methods for identifying individual characteristics and prospects for personality development".
Psychodiagnostics – is a field of psychological science that develops the theory, principles and tools for assessing and measuring the individual psychological characteristics of a person (L. D. Burlachuk).
The history of modern psychodiagnostics begins in the first quarter of the 19th century, that is, with the beginning of the so-called clinical period in the development of psychological knowledge. This period is characterized by the fact that physicians began to play a key role in obtaining and analysing empirical psychological knowledge about human beings (before them, this was done by philosophers and writers). Physicians were interested in the causes of the hard-to-treat mental illnesses and neuroses that had become widespread in those years in the developed countries of the world. Psychiatrists began to conduct systematic observations of patients in the clinics of Europe, recording and analysing the results of their observations. At this time, the methods of psychodiagnostics were observation, questioning and document analysis. However, on the whole, psychodiagnostics in those years still bore a non-rigorous, arbitrary character, which manifested itself in the different conclusions and inferences reached by physicians observing the same patients and studying them using the same methods. This happened, in particular, because the methods of psychodiagnostics at that time were still qualitative in nature.
The beginning of the creation of quantitative methods of psychodiagnostics should be considered the second half of the 19th century – the time when, under the leadership of the German psychologist W. Wundt, the world's first experimental psychological laboratory was created, where various technical devices and instruments began to be used for the purposes of psychodiagnostics. This same period saw the discovery of the psychophysical law, which, by showing a quantitative connection between physical and psychological phenomena, accelerated the creation of quantitative psychodiagnostic tools. The basic psychophysical law opened up the possibility of measuring psychological phenomena, and this discovery led to the creation of so-called subjective scales for measuring sensations. In accordance with this law, sensations became the main object of measurement, and for a long time, right up to the end of the 19th century, practical psychodiagnostics was limited to the measurement of sensations.
The initial period of the formation of modern methods of psychodiagnostics concerning the basic psychological processes, properties and states of a person should be considered the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. During this time, those areas of probability theory and mathematical statistics on which the scientific methods of quantitative psychodiagnostics would later rely developed quite actively, not without the participation of professional psychologists. However, mathematical statistics was initially applied not in psychology but in other sciences: biology, economics, medicine, and so on.
Somewhat later, the creation of special tools for the quantitative psychodiagnosis of psychological phenomena began, for example, factor analysis.
It was first used for the psychodiagnosis of personality traits and the level of intellectual development.
The first psychometric institution was established in England by the outstanding English psychologist F. Galton. In 1884 he founded the Anthropometric Laboratory, one of whose tasks was to obtain statistical data on human abilities. Visitors to this laboratory had the opportunity to measure their abilities, and about 10,000 people passed through this psychometric experiment. F. Galton was the initiator of the application of statistics in psychology, and the credit for developing the statistical methods themselves belongs to him.
One of the first statistically grounded intelligence tests was developed and published in 1905-1907 by the French scientist A. Binet. Later, together with another French scientist, T. Simon, he improved this test, which entered the history of psychodiagnostics as the Binet – Simon test.
In the second half of the 1920s of the current century, new psychological tests, including intellectual and personality tests, began to appear, making it possible to carry out psychodiagnosis of various human processes and traits. Historically, the last quantitative psychodiagnostic tools to emerge and enter practice were those connected with socio-psychological research. This is the sociometric test created by the American psychologist J. Moreno, and a number of measurement techniques developed by a group of American social psychologists.
The 1950s and 1960s of the 20th century account for the bulk of the various psychodiagnostic techniques. As a result, psychology quite quickly became enriched with new, more reliable theories, and became not only a respectable academic discipline but also a practically useful science. Wide opportunities opened up for the development of applied fields of knowledge based on psychodiagnostics, including occupational psychology, psychophysiology, engineering and medical psychology, and educational psychology.
Modern psychodiagnostics has emerged as a separate field of scientific and applied psychological knowledge. Many psychodiagnostic techniques have been created, and their number continues to grow rapidly. Modern methods of mathematics and physics, as well as electronic means of psychodiagnosis, such as computers, are finding increasingly wide application in psychodiagnostics.
The formation and development of psychological testing did not go unnoticed by Russian psychologists. In pre-revolutionary Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, tests were well known and popular. Educators showed particular interest in tests, hoping to use them to obtain information about the degree of giftedness of students and the characteristics of their personality, and to carry out the diagnosis and prognosis of mental development. Attempts were made to organize offices at schools for the experimental psychological examination of students. Supporters of the natural-science direction in psychology (A.P. Nechaev, N.E. Rumyantsev, G.I. Rossolimo, and others) actively promoted the spread of the idea of testing, often, like their Western colleagues, placing excessive hopes on tests.
Work on psychological testing in Russia before 1917 is primarily associated with the names of the outstanding psychiatrists and psychologists G.I. Rossolimo and F.E. Rybakov. In 1908, Grigory Ivanovich Rossolimo published a scale for measuring the level of development of general abilities, which entered the history of psychology and psychodiagnostics under the name «Psychological Profiles». In constructing the test, he did not follow an empirical path, but developed a system of theoretical concepts about the structure of personality and intelligence. The author considered the main purpose of his test to be the development of criteria for distinguishing normal children from those with varying degrees of mental retardation.
This problem was successfully solved in a form new to psychological testing of that time - a test consisting of 11 subtests. The subtests were based on the identification of 11 mental processes, which were divided into five groups: attention, receptivity, will, memory, associative processes), and made it possible to represent the data obtained in the form of a profile. The tasks varied according to the categories of subjects examined (children, intellectually developed adults, non-intellectual adults). For the first time, a formula was proposed for converting the profile from a graphical language into an arithmetical one. The «Profiles» received high praise from the scientific community and were translated into several languages.
No less interesting is the research of F.E. Rybakov, who developed a test for determining the level of development of spatial imagination. The «Rybakov Figures» quickly became known throughout the world, and numerous tests based on their model were created and are still used today, for example the intelligence test proposed by R. Meili in 1955. The fate of all pre-revolutionary Russian test-development work was the same – oblivion at home, but use and further development (often under other names) abroad.
Just as abroad, calls for a sober assessment of tests were also heard in Russia at that time, calls that accompanied the development of psychological testing in every country and testified, above all, to the enormous social significance of this research. In 1912, G.I. Chelpanov repeatedly emphasized that «psychological tests are of exclusively scientific significance, that is, they may be applied solely for scientific research, but not for practical purposes». This opinion of Chelpanov, one of the founders and the first director of the Institute of Psychology, was based on the fact that tests provide knowledge only about individual manifestations of personality, which, moreover, require not a one-time but a prolonged study, something testing does not provide.
During the Soviet period, in pedology and psychotechnics in the 1920s-1930s, testing practice gained momentum. Tests came into the widest use, above all in educational institutions. M.Ya. Basov, M.S. Bernstein, P.P. Blonsky, A.P. Boltunov, S.M. Vasilevsky, S.G. Gellerstein, V.M. Kogan, N.D. Levitov, A.A. Lyublinskaya, G.I. Rossolimo, I.N. Shpilrein, A.M. Shubert, and others worked fruitfully in the field of psychological testing.
In Ukraine, A.M. Mandryka and M.Yu. Syrkin published their innovative research. Their work focused primarily on the theoretical aspects of applied statistics in psychological testing, as well as on criteria for the accuracy of test trials and the correlation of the data obtained with social factors. The contribution of L.S. Vygotsky deserves special mention.
The doctrine of psychological diagnosis, its features and stages, developed by this outstanding psychologist, retains its significance to this day.
The profession of HR manager has become quite widespread nowadays, and economists, sociologists, and psychologists alike find their place in this field. This is a complex type of activity, since the tasks of such a specialist are dictated by the requirements of the organization in which he works. However, it is obvious that competent, highly professional activity in applying psychological technologies to personnel selection is available primarily to specialists with basic university-level psychological training.
The main tasks of an HR manager are:
a) obtaining the maximum amount of information about job candidates, carefully checking the documents provided (if necessary, unofficial channels are also used);
b) applying modern methods, in particular computerized testing (to create a psychological portrait of job candidates), which makes it possible to confidently judge the main character traits and predict their probable actions in various situations;
c) the use of modern psychological methods to evaluate various factors that may facilitate hiring candidates or assigning them to specific positions.
To successfully carry out professional activity, an HR manager needs the following psychological knowledge and skills:
command of the methods and technologies of psychological analysis of professional tasks and situations;
orientation in the psychological typology of professions and occupations and, in general, in the psychology of professional work; knowledge of the fundamentals of modern social psychology, of the psychology of interpersonal communication (knowledge of the types, structure and levels of communication, and indicators of its optimality);
command of theoretical knowledge in the field of personality psychology and differential psychology; knowledge of specific testing techniques and command of the theories and technologies for constructing new psychodiagnostic methods, and of statistical methods for verifying their reliability and validity (suitability);
the ability to diagnose the psychological characteristics of a personality, mental processes, and motivation.
Based on the analysis conducted, conclusions can be drawn about the requirements the HR manager profession places on an individual's psychological properties: success in this professional field can be achieved by people who are energetic, capable of withstanding increased emotional strain, possessing a high level of general culture, developed attention, freely shifting their attention during an interview to different aspects of the candidate's behavior, and observant. Also important are a good memory, developed communicative and organizational abilities, readiness for reasonable risk, clear speech, courage, decisiveness, reliability, self-criticism, patience, competence, and a sense of humor.
Psychological contraindications include: unwillingness to work with people, an authoritarian communication style, rigidity, inattentiveness, impatience, irritability, and inconsistency. This work is not recommended for persons suffering from cardiovascular or nervous system diseases (hypertension, angina, manifestations of neurotic reactions), as well as those with speech defects and pronounced external physical shortcomings.
Possibilities for personnel diagnostics.
As a result of conducting personnel diagnostics, the manager will be able to obtain reliable information about the employee being assessed and about how to make optimal use of the following characteristics:
manageability,
preferred leadership styles,
the ability to set priorities,
creativity,
degree of responsibility and the ability to take responsibility upon oneself,
stress resistance, reaction to stress,
types of behavior in conflict, reaction to a conflict situation,
loyalty and honesty,
recommended type of corporate culture,
teamwork skills, preferences regarding working relationships,
planning abilities,
motivational preferences,
criteria for evaluating one's environment,
level of self-esteem and its adequacy,
communicative competence,
persuasion and influence skills.
As a result of the diagnostics, the manager will be able to:
Obtain a detailed diagnosis of the employee, based on the characteristics of the company and the work performed.
Achieve a high level of validity (reliability) of the information.
Obtain recommendations for building a system of situational leadership.
Obtain information and practical developments for building the company's corporate culture.
Obtain practical recommendations for building a system of non-material and material motivation
Optimize the composition and work of the team.
Give employees practical recommendations for working with external and internal clients.
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