Last month Personnel Today reported research from Frankfurt University showing that ‘professional smilers’, such as flight attendants, sales personnel, call centre operators, waiters and others in contact with the public for extended periods of time, were at risk of seriously harming their health. Professor Dieter Zapf, a psychologist and researcher into human emotions at Frankfurt University, said that fake friendliness led to depression, stress and negatively affected the immune system. The implication of the findings was that every time a person is forced to repress their true feelings, there are damaging consequences for their health.
This is hardly surprising, but for me puts the spotlight on recruitment decisions – those of both candidate and recruiter. For the recruiter, it’s critical to know what you’re looking for and how to identify it in the candidate. For example, if you are looking for a friendly, sociable flight attendant you need to understand the enduring personality characteristics that drive the behaviour you are looking for, as well as checking that the person has the skills to interact with passengers effectively. If someone has a personality characterised by high levels of neuroticism and introversion they are very unlikely to behave in the manner you require – no matter how well they perform in the role play at the assessment centre. Learnt skills can mask true personality in the short-term, but it never lasts.
Which brings me to the candidate’s responsibility in these situations: No matter how much someone wants the job there is no point in them pretending to be someone that they are not. If you like to spend time quietly problem-solving, analysing data or writing reports you are unlikely to enjoy the kind of work that requires a lot of human contact, outgoing behaviour and constant smiling. So it’s important to be honest with yourself and the recruiter and to self-select out of the process when this kind of mismatch occurs.
For people, who are naturally outgoing (in personality terms, extroverts who are open to experience and have low levels of neuroticism) I doubt that working in these roles would be inherently stressful, as the Frankfurt study claims. However, for someone who wasn’t completely honest during the recruitment process, or got the job as the result of a poor selection decision by the employer, these kinds of roles could become excruciating. I’d like to see the results of a study like this that controlled for personality type.
August 27, 2008 at 3:03 pm
[...] I saw an interesting piece in Personnel Today in June that I’ve been meaning to post something on. Tony Pettengell reported a development programme run by Spring Partnerships and training company Choose2B called Horses for Courses – which uses the art of ‘Horse Whispering’ to develop authentic leadership, a topic I touched on at the beginning of July (http://carycooperblog.com/2008/06/19/authentic-is-always-best/) [...]