As the title suggests, this article takes a broad perspective on personality as it is conceptualized and measured in organizational research, and in the spirit of this Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology journal, we framed the article as a series of 7 questions. These 7 questions deal with (1) personality and multidimensional models of performance, (2) personality taxonomies and the five-factor model, (3) the effects of situations on personality–performance relationships, (4) the incremental validity of personality over cognitive ability, (5) the need to differentiate personality constructs from personality measures, (6) the concern with faking on personality tests, and (7) the use of personality tests in attempting to address adverse impact. We dovetail these questions with our perspectives and insights in the hope that this will stimulate further discussion with our readership.

The goal of our focal article was to provide a current perspective on personality testing and its use in organizational research and to elicit constructive discussion and suggestions for future research and practice. The present article caps off the discussion by integrating the main ideas presented in the commentaries within our original framework of questions and topics, with the immodest hope of advancing our understanding of personality and its measurement in the context of industrial–organizational psychology. In short, we recommend continuing to take advantage of the organizing framework of the Big Five while also pursuing more “bottom-up” approaches that examine facet-level relationships with multidimensional performance outcomes, in addition to developing process models that include more proximal motivational and situational variables. Work along these lines is valuable to both organizational science and practice.

The focus of this article is on implicit beliefs that inhibit adoption of selection decision aids (e.g., paper-and-pencil tests, structured interviews, mechanical combination of predictors). Understanding these beliefs is just as important as understanding organizational constraints to the adoption of selection technologies and may be more useful for informing the design of successful interventions. One of these is the implicit belief that it is theoretically possible to achieve near-perfect precision in predicting performance on the job. That is, people have an inherent resistance to analytical approaches to selection because they fail to view selection as probabilistic and subject to error. Another is the implicit belief that prediction of human behavior is improved through experience. This myth of expertise results in an overreliance on intuition and a reluctance to undermine one’s own credibility by using a selection decision aid.