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Robert Hogan, John Johnson, and Stephen Briggs (Editors). Handbook of Personality Psychology. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1997, 987 pages, $150.00 hardcover, $75.00 softcover.
Personality is staging a comeback in industrial-organizational psychology. The 1998 program for the annual conference of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) includes abstracts of posters to be presented, 28 of which indicate that the poster includes a personality-job performance correlation (I should know, because I scrutinized all the abstracts in the program). Further, there have been many symposia on the role of personality in the workplace conducted at SIOP in the past 10 years, and there are no signs that the interest in the role of personality in the workplace is waning. This inference is further supported when one looks at the program of other conferences (e.g., annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, Academy of Management) or at the contents of many journal issues. Personality is definitely enjoying a resurgence in industrial-organizational psychology.
In this background, a handbook of personality psychology should be very useful to personnel managers as well as to researchers and students of personnel psychology. In fact, Robert Hogan in his preface, explicitly celebrating the resurgence of personality in social and industrial-- organizational psychology, claims that (a) the Handbook is designed to cover every field of personality psychology, and (b) the chapters were written with students in mind in that the authors were enjoined to write in a way that would be accessible to intelligent non-psychologists. Before evaluating whether these claims are met, I will summarize the contents of the Handbook.
The Handbook is divided into eight parts. Part I includes two chapters, one on the history or stages of development in personality psychology, and the other on the use of biography in the study of personality. Part II includes five chapters on the conceptual and measurement issues in personality assessment. Units of analysis, the usefulness of traits, the importance of individual differences, reliability, and validity are discussed. Part III consists...