Big Five for work and organizations: FLORA (Role Related Personal Profile), an Italian personality test based on the Five-Factor Model and developed for the assessment of candidates and employees

The needs for personality assessment in organizations are peculiar. For example, personality measures for the assessment of candidates or employees should be related to job performance. Even strong correlations between personality tests and job performance might not be sufficient, though, because some tests make use of a language people working in organizations are not accustomed to and, therefore, the personality profiles obtained by those tests may sound meaningless or even abstruse to organizational managers and decision makers. The paper reports the results of the qualitative actions and the quantitative operations carried out in order to create and validate a new Italian personality test (named FLORA) based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM) and expressly developed for the assessment of specific professional profiles in organizations. The qualitative actions consisted of 32 interviews with 16 job profiles. Content analyses of interviews led to the identification of 28 personality traits distributed into the 5 categories of the FFM. For each trait, 6 items were generated. Another 8 items were added to form a Lie Scale. The quantitative operations involved a validation sample of 407 employees, a confirmation sample of 418 other employees and the monitoring of the concurrent validity with another test (n = 1028) and job performance (n = 220). After analyses, FLORA seems to meet the criteria to be a test based on the FFM and usable for the assessment of specific professional profiles as its dimensions are uncorrelated with the Lie Scale and correlated according to hypotheses to both another test and job performance.