The Provocation
Personnel selection has always had one primary criterion: job performance. The entire infrastructure of validity research, the meta-analyses, the corrected coefficients, the debates about general cognitive ability and personality reviewed throughout this series, has been built around a single question: which candidates will perform best? König and colleagues (2025) argue that this singular focus represents a substantial and increasingly unjustifiable limitation, and they call for a paradigm shift.
The Argument
The case has two strands. The first is ethical. If organisations knowingly select people into roles that are likely to damage their wellbeing, they are treating employees as instruments for organisational goals rather than as ends in themselves. König and colleagues point to Gallup’s 2025 global report, drawing on over 227,000 respondents, which found that four in ten employees worldwide experienced significant stress during much of the previous day (König et al., 2025). Selecting people purely for performance while ignoring whether they are likely to flourish in the role sits uncomfortably alongside principles of human dignity and the growing body of occupational health legislation.
The second strand is empirical. Wellbeing and performance are related but not synonymous. Job satisfaction and performance correlate at around ρ = .30, meaning that selecting for high performance does not reliably mean selecting for high job satisfaction. A correlation of .30 implies that among 100 candidates identified as high performers, only around 65 would be expected to also be satisfied in the role (König et al., 2025). Work engagement and performance correlate more strongly at ρ = .43, but still leave substantial independent variance. High performers and flourishing employees are overlapping but distinct populations.
The Practical Dimension
The argument is not only ethical and statistical. There is also a business case. Organisations that attend to wellbeing in selection are likely to reduce turnover, absenteeism, and the downstream costs of stress-related ill health. Proactive assessment during selection is likely to be more cost-effective than reactive intervention after problems have emerged. And organisations that create anxiety-inducing selection processes may be losing candidates who anticipate that the selection experience predicts the work experience (König et al., 2025).
Why It Matters
The field of personnel selection has spent decades refining its ability to predict who will perform well. The question König and colleagues raise is whether performance alone is the right criterion, or whether a more complete account of what organisations owe their employees requires also asking who is likely to thrive. This is a genuine provocation rather than a settled empirical finding, but it points toward a reorientation of selection research that connects meaningfully to the wider evidence on leadership, wellbeing, and work conditions reviewed throughout this series.
Reference
König, C. J., Krumm, S., Bipp, T., Debus, M. E., et al. (2025). Why personnel selection should target job performance AND well-being. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 34, e70037. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.70037
