Performance Assessment FAQ

Integrity testing is a tool used in pre-employment selection procedures as a method of screening less desirable candidates (those who are more likely to engage in counterproductive work behaviors, including theft, absenteeism, violation of work rules, and hostile behavior).

Integrity tests tend to contain a mixture of "overt" content (items focused on individuals' attitudes toward theft, organizational misconduct, etc.) and "covert" content (items focused on personality traits and behaviors related to work outcomes).

Integrity tests have been in existence since the 1940s and became popular with employers after polygraph testing was banned in employment settings by the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection Act. Although integrity tests are used in a wide variety of settings, they are most commonly used for screening applicants for entry-level jobs where employees have access to money or merchandise. Recent estimates place integrity test use at more than 5 million tests administered per year.

Integrity testing can predict employee productivity (both in terms of quantity and quality), absenteeism, and inventory shrinkage and can also help cut back on unsafe employee work behaviors. These uses can lead to significant savings for an organization. Additionally, group differences (e.g., between blacks and whites) in integrity test scores tend to border on the trivial. Therefore, integrity tests do not raise concerns of adverse impact for minority groups (e.g., blacks, Hispanics) in the way that measures of cognitive ability can.

Yes. Research repeatedly has shown the validity—the ability of a test to measure what it is intended to test—of integrity tests for predicting overall job performance, counterproductive work behaviors, and work safety/risk-taking behaviors. This validity has been documented across a variety of work settings, job applicants, and incumbent employees, with both overt and covert types of integrity tests.

See "What the Performance Assessment Measures."