Orientations toward personnel selection: Differential reliance on appearance and personality.

Abstract

In two studies we examined the hypothesis that the psychological construct of self-monitoring would identify people who adopt distinctly different strategies in personnel selection. In both experiments, undergraduates examined information about the physical appearance and personalities of two applicants for a specific job and then decided which applicant should receive a job offer. In Study 1 information about the applicants' physical attractiveness and job-appropriate dispositions was varied. In Study 2 job appropriateness of the applicants' physical appearance and of their personalities were both varied. In each study, high self-monitoring individuals placed greater weight on information about physical appearance than did low self-monitoring individuals. By contrast, low self-monitoring individuals put greater weight on information about personal dispositions than did high selfmonitoring individuals. We discuss the implications for understanding personnel selection as well as for decision making in interpersonal contexts. Some of the most important and consequential decisions in people's lives are made by other people. Who to befriend or avoid, marry or divorce, acquit or convict, hire or fire are all decisions about others with potentially significant consequences. A natural concern, therefore, is how these decisions are made. Recent research strongly suggests that people adopt systematically different approaches to gathering, weighing, and acting on information about other people when initiating personal relationships. At least one set of differing orientations may be identified with stable differences between individuals in their self-monitoring propensities (Glick, 1985; Omoto, DeBono, & Snyder, 1987; Snyder, Berscheid, & Glick, 1985). These investigations on the initiation of romantic relationships were guided by the psychological construct of self-monitoring (see Snyder, 1979, 1987). High self-monitoring individuals typically strive to be the type of person called for by each situation in which they find themselves and thus are particularly sensitive and responsive to interpersonal and situational specifications of behavioral appropriateness; they use this information to monitor and control the images of self that they project to others in social situations. As investigations on the initiation of personal relationships indicate, high self-monitoring individuals also appear to carry this concern with their own public appearances to a concern with the images conveyed by people with whom they may be