Abstract

Ten years of discussion in business journals and seminars have established the principle that employee appraisal should be based not on personality traits, but on job performance, on attainment of objectives and on achievement of results toward planned goals. Readers of the professional literature are familiar by now with the many faults of appraising personality: perceptual errors and weighting biases; the inability to place randomly chosen traits in any kind of conceptual scheme; the triviality of the values; the failure to relate personality traits selected to the job to which the individual is assigned and the incompetence of most businessmen to do anything about the personality of an employee even if they find out what it is. We have come to recognize that personality is not an assembly of discrete modular "parts" which can be removed and replaced at will, but an organism of complex interrelations. Recent studies of leadership and management have also emphasized teachable skills, flexibility and plurality of leaders rather than the charismatic qualities of the few.