Personality, Weak Signals, and Workplace Relevant Morality

Employers use applicant signals to help solve an important asymmetric information problem in organizations. Educational attainment is the classic example of a job market signal, but weaker signals, such as information on extracurricular activities, personality traits or personal habits/history are also commonly used by employers. In this paper, we conducted controlled online experiments to examine the relevance of using validated Dark versus Light personality trait measures to predict behavior across multiple dimensions of interest to organizations: task effort, honesty, and reciprocity. In complementary fashion, a second study examined how these same behaviors are predicted by two weak signals: regular participation in religious activities (public and private) and a history of time in prison. Our first study indicated that Dark relative to Light types were more likely to cheat and shirk in the honesty task, put forth less task effort (i.e., were less productive), but neither type showed evidence for negative cross-task reciprocity (i.e., a spillover from one task to another). In Study 2, ex-Prisoners were more productive than Religious participants in the effort task, and more likely to have shirked but not cheated in the honesty task. Additionally, ex-Prisoners were more likely than Religious participants to exhibit negative crosstask reciprocity. These findings indicate that both Dark types and ex-Prisoners exhibited behaviors (shirking, or dishonesty, or negative reciprocity) that would be considered undesirable or counterproductive in the workplace, which validates the effectiveness of such traits as behavioral signals. Key Words: Experiment; Personality traits; Honesty; Personnel Economics; Screening; Effort