As Published in Business 2 Business, June 2007

Predicting Violent Workers: To Use or Not To Use Personality Testing?

By Ira S Wolfe

In the aftermath of Cho Seung-Hui’s mass killing of 32 people at Virginia Tech, the question that is dominating discussions from the water cooler to the halls of Congress is: How could this have been happened and what can we do to prevent it from happening again?

Prevention analysis always seems to follow the two-step paradigm of trying to assess an individual's propensity for violence and then excluding the potential perpetrator from the organization based on the risk.  While this makes intellectual sense, both steps of assessment and exclusion pose a risk for employers who wish to exclude high-risk candidates from their workplaces.

The assessment aspect has especially captured the most attention.  Psychological testing for the workplace got its start nearly ninety years ago. The Surgeon General's staff administered intelligence and personality tests during World War 1 to the almost two million recruits of the American Expeditionary Force. The soldiers were given the Wordsworth Personal Data Sheet, a 125-question inventory, that was supposed to detect personalities that would crumble under fire. Although this test led to mixed results, it spawned a revolution in psychological research and the creation of predictive personality models and assessments. 

The majority of these early assessments, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index (MMPI), were clinical in nature, constructed and validated to diagnose psychiatric disorders.  The MMPI is considered one of the most researched psychological tests and, as a result, remains consistently ranked as one of the most reliable psychological instruments used by psychologists today.

With that endorsement you would expect every employer, college president and school superintendent to be ordering up MMPI evaluations as fast as shoppers flock to malls the day Christmas.  If only it were that easy. 

Despite the requirement that employers provide a safe environment for their workers, government regulations place an even higher priority on protecting the rights of the individual.

The ADA is the principal legal restriction on employment actions by an employer or school against individuals with "psychiatric disabilities,” says Michael Moore, employment law attorney with Russell, Krafft & Gruber, LLP.  

Moore emphasizes that “in the context of screening individuals for violent potential, the ADA applies to the application process, interviews and pre-employment examinations, specifically medical examinations.”  The ADA limits pre-employment medical screening, including psychological testing, to job relatedness and even then the proper time is post-job offer. 

In two landmark cases - Karraker v. Rent-A-Center and in Saraka v. Dayton Hudson, courts decided against the employer.  They determined that the test used, MMPI, was a "medical examination" under the ADA because it was designed to reveal mental impairment. As a medical test, the employers who used it as a pre-employment test violated the ADA. On the other hand, in Miller v. City of Springfield, a court determined that the MMPI was an appropriate job-related screening tool that was used by a police department in a manner that was consistent with business necessity.

An important distinction must be made at this point between tests like the MMPI and “personality tests” commonly used by employers.  The MMPI is considered a clinical assessment, constructed to diagnose psychiatric disorders.  This is in distinct contrast with five-factor personality assessments that are constructed specifically for job placement which infers that personality traits and abilities are compared to others in the “normal” population. 

For example, consider the measures of restlessness and excitability which are measured as part of the five-factor model.  This psychometric model is commonly used for workplace selection.  ASSESS® and Prevue® are two examples of five factor EEO-compliant assessments. One of the five factors is called stability (also known as neuroticism).  

Despite the temptation to use this stability scale to predict violent tendencies or behaviors, it is not a diagnostic tool.  It merely describes an individual who may have a short fuse, is impatient and frustrates easily. Lack of stability does not predict the conditions of depression, psychoses, or psychopathy, all possible diagnoses for the killers at Virginia Tech and Columbine. Stability traits merely identify potential behaviors that might lead to workplace disruptions ranging from tears or anger to temper tantrums to bullying.  

This leads us to an important legal distinction that is drawn between a "violent profile" and actual conduct that amounts to "threats of violence". Conduct in the workplace, regardless of the cause, that violates an employer's policies may be disciplined even if the individual may be "disabled". While not considered predictive of violent tendencies, five-factor personality assessments can identify traits that pit one employee against another or drive an individual to unacceptable workplace behavior.  These personality differences although subtle are often the root cause of conflicts between employees that lead to charges of harassment or discrimination.

Despite the legal limitations on the MMPI and other psychological testing that prevent employers from using them to screen out potentially violent individuals, Moore advises, “there is still a place for pre-employment testing to ensure that candidates have the qualifications and abilities or potential to do the job and demonstrate compatibility with the culture.”