Self-Assessment Validity

Tests for hiring and recruiting processes may not always be valid determinants of who the best employee would be. Applicants looking to get hired for a sales job, for example, have every opportunity to lie about their personality to look more desirable to potential employers. Sales jobs will look for extroverts who are ambitious and competitive. An applicant could easily answer the questions on the test to match these personality traits rather than answering truthfully.

Career Assessment

Students use personality trait measurement tests to decide what careers they may be well-suited for. Students who are unsure of what major or career they would like to pursue can use the test results to narrow the options. The test attempts to match the student to potential careers that would be a good fit based on the student's personality. School counselors encourage students to take this test for a greater understanding of strengths and weaknesses when deciding on a major for college.

Future Behavior Predictions

Personality trait theories are limited in scope and are unable to accurately predict future behavior. A person with a specific personality trait may not behave in the manner associated with that trait in all interactions. It is expected that behavior will vary between personal and business situations. You may act very different around your friends versus people you are meeting for the first time. For these reasons, personality trait theories are not always capable of accurately predicting behavior, because they focus mostly on traits but not interaction of traits and external variables (situations).

Change and Development

Another criticism of Traits theories is that they give not enough information about trait development and no information about changing of traits. While statistics may be strength of trait theory, the statistical data captures the state of the tested people at a single-time – it does not describe development and change of personality.  Thus, from the perspective of change Trait theories do not provide insight into long-term future behavior.

When making a decision to implement Traits theories in organization a manager should bear in mind all their advantages and disadvantages in order to fully utilize strong aspects of the theories and avoid use of theories in situations where they have limitations.

Personality and Traits theories have not seen wide-scale application in organizations yet, nevertheless along with more research in the field, organizations tend recognize the importance of personality and increase their use and application of Traits theories, which prove to be very helpful in an attempt to understand the ways of how person can interact within the organizations more effectively. The Big Five Factor Model and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are among the most popular theories practically applied in organizations with the former being effective when making hiring decisions and later being effective for assessing current employees. Traits theories have limitations in their effectiveness, however when applied correctly they can prove to be a powerful tool for increase of organizational effectiveness.