ABSTRACT

The recruitment situations lead to putting questions about the value of the candidates for a job, in terms of social desirability and social utility. This leads to two questions: will this candidate be useful to the organization? Will the members of the organization want to work with him? Knowing that personality is one of the main aspects of any recruitment situation, and, that this personality can, according to a quasi-consensus, be divided into five major bipolar factors (the Big Five model), the recruitment is seen in the assessment of candidates according to each of these factors. This assessment, however, requires previously an estimate on the value of knowing the positioning of candidates on each of these five factors: before asking ourselves if the candidate X is “good” at the level of the extraversion for example, it is necessary to have a clear head about the importance to be attributed to extraversion. This study aims to estimate this value. More exactly, it aims to know if the information about the personality traits, regardless of the trait considered and of its pole, is the subject of the same estimate of value, both in terms of utility and desirability. We proposed to a number of 400 students a list of 100 adjectives referring to the 5 big dimensions of personality, and we told them that they should meet a person whom they knew nothing about, except one of his personality characteristics summarized by one of these adjectives. The task of our students was to check the degree of utility and the degree of desirability of this unique information, then to explain the reasons of their assessment. The results allow us to determine, the degree of agreeableness and of social utility of the descriptive information and to study the relationship between these two dependent variables. These results highlight the very low frequency of negative utility reasoning, regardless of the possible disagreeability of the information provided. Also, these results show that all the dimensions are not subject to the same assessments and that there are numerous evaluation differences between men and women.

KEYWORDS: Big Five, personality, value, social desirability, social utility.

PAGES: 143-167