Development and validation of a HEXACO situational judgment test

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a construct-based situational judgment test of the HEXACO personality dimensions. In four studies, among applicants, employees, and Amazon Mechanical Turk participants (Ns = 72–305), we showed that it is possible to assess the six personality dimensions with a situational judgment test and that the criterion-related validity of the situational judgment test is comparable to the criterion-related validity of traditional self-reports but lower than the criterion-related validity of other-reports of personality. Test–retest coefficients (with a time interval of 2 weeks) varied between .55 and .74. Considering personality is the most commonly assessed construct in employee selection contexts (Ryan et al., 2015), this situational judgment test may provide human resources professionals with an alternative assessment tool.

Acknowledgments

We thank Danny van der Horst, Myckel Cremers, Barbara Rosa, Tirsa van der Linden, Barend Koch, Diederik Gosewehr, and Antonet Lajqi for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Note, however, that this research may confound method (e.g., response format) with construct (e.g., personality, work attitudes, job knowledge) effects.

2. Because it is unlikely that in every SJT item the four response options would cover the entire trait continuum, we also used a more elaborate scoring approach, that is, by assigning scores based on trait loadings as rated by the three authors of this article. The ICCs (3,3) of these ratings were substantial: .96 for Honesty-Humility, .96 for Emotionality, .99 for Extraversion, .98 for Agreeableness, .95 for Conscientiousness, and .99 for Openness to Experience. However, this alternative scoring approach showed highly similar results to the ones reported in terms of reliability and validity in all studies. For reasons of parsimony, we report only the results for the original scoring approach as suggested by Lievens (2017).

3. Apart from the six domain scales, these two versions (a full and half-length version) contain two interstitial facets, Altruism and Proactivity. Results on these two facets can be obtained from the first author.

4. Note that we had to remove one item of the Honesty-Humility scale for the CFA analyses, because this item did not show any variance.