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Objective personality testing began with Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet in 1917. That test was developed to identify soldiers prone to nervous breakdowns during enemy bombardment in World War I (WWI). Soon after, many competing personality tests were developed for use in industry. Many of these tests, like Woodworth’s, focused on the construct of employee maladjustment and were deemed important in screening out applicants who would create workplace disturbances. In this article, the authors review the history of these early personality tests, especially the Bernreuter Personality Inventory and the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, and discuss the implications of personality testers’ obsession with the construct of employee maladjustment. In addition, the authors discuss the industry’s obsession with emotional maladjustment and how this obsession coincided with a cultural shift in norms relating to cultural expression.

Personality testing has been an integral part of industrial-organizational (I-O) and vocational psychology for the last 85 years. Since the creation of the first formal personality inventory, the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet (WPDS; Woodworth, 1917), personality testing has endured many controversies, transformations, and threats. Currently, personality testing is viewed as crucial to understanding the overlapping fields of vocational psychology (Tokar, Fischer, & Subich, 1997) and I-O psychology (Hough, 2001). Personality inventories are used in vocational counseling and employee selection and are important components in theoretical models of work behavior. Despite its long history and importance, however, there has been little historical scholarship investigating the early days of personality testing.

In this article, we examine the beginnings of the relationship between personality testing and industry. We document the evolution of personality testing from the 1917 WPDS test up until tests of the 1940s after which personality testing became much more established and commercially accepted. We focus on the obsession that personality test developers (and their managerial consumers) had with the construct of adjustment while they ignored other aspects of personality that are now viewed as important for predicting work-related...