Page 44 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS560 Haniza Yon et al.
describes personalities along five dimensions: openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. However,
there are researchers who have identified more comprehensive frameworks of
narrow personality traits such as those of NEO-PI-R by Costa, McCrae & Dye
(1991), and the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) by Goldberg et al.
(2006). Drasgow et al. (2012), on the other hand, identified 21 narrow
personality facets that can be categorised under the hierarchical structure of
the five-factor personality model. As in the aforementioned research, our
approach identified a large number of factors (15), and these are shown as the
row headers in Table 1.
Despite evidence that the five-factor personality model can predict
workplace success, there has been little research addressing the relevance of
personality measures in a 4IR work environment. The Future of Jobs report
published by the World Economic Forum (January 2016) discussed the skills
that 4IR would demand of future workers. The top ten skills identified for
workers in 2020 were complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity,
people management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence,
judgment and decision making, service orientation, negotiation, and cognitive
flexibility (World Economic Forum, January 2016). Creativity was projected to
be one of the top three skills by 2020. Active listening was projected to drop
out of the top ten and to be replaced by emotional intelligence.
Some researchers have explored the use of forced-choice items to combat
faking on personality tests (Gordon, 1951; Ghiselli, 1954). Forced-choice
personality tests normally present participants with pairs of descriptive
statements, each statement in the pair representing a different desirable
personality trait. Participants are to select the statement that describes them
better. This method produces ipsative test scores – that is, it compares the
strength of different constructs within each individual rather than comparing
them across individuals (Hicks, 1970). Advances in modern psychometrics,
however, have made it possible to obtain normative test scores using forced-
choice measures (Stark, Chernyshenko & Drasgow, 2005; Stark & Drasgow,
2002).
This paper aims to investigate patterns of behaviour among employees in
the Malaysian financial services industry, with a focus on attributes that are
important in a 4IR work environment in which FinTech is taking centre stage.
First, we describe our sample of test takers, our forced-choice instrument, and
our methods of data analysis. Next, we present measures of the psychometric
and statistical properties of our instrument, as well as of its construct validity.
Finally, we give an overview of the implications of the results. Throughout, we
take gender as the main independent variable to be studied.

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