Today, many employers ask job applicants to take a personality test before they decide if they are right for the position. This has also become a popular trend in the world of professional sports. Many athletic officials ask athletes to take this type of assessment in order to see if they would be a good addition to the team and have the right characteristics to be a superior performer.

For example, the recent NBA Final's champions, the Dallas Mavericks, have their own sports psychology coach, ESPN reports. While they are the only NBA team to have this full-time addition to their staff, many other teams call upon Eric Weiss, the director of research and analysis for Sports Aptitude.

In recent years, Weiss has given psychological tests to about 600 NBA prospects for almost half of the teams in the league. After taking this assessment, ESPN writer Henry Abbott said that it closely resembles a standard personality test.

During these assessments, Weiss looks to see if potential NBA players have certain qualities that would be ideal for an athlete to possess. These characteristics include leadership potential, internal motivation, awareness, dominance, mental toughness, ability to accept instruction and team identity, according to the news outlet.

However, the NBA is not the only organization that uses personality tests in order to find prospective players. According to The Star-Ledger, the New York Giants, an NFL team, also use this method before deciding which players they will pick in the draft.

For example, before he was chosen as the Giant's second round draft pick in 2009, offensive tackle Will Beatty said he had to complete a personality test that consisted of hundreds of true/false questions, according to the news source.

By using these assessments, along with clinical interviews, NFL teams feel that they can get a sense of the players who can help the team on the field and also fit well socially with the rest of the group.

Robert Price, a sports psychology consultant who assists the Giants, told the news outlet that although psychological interviews and personality tests are only about 10 percent of a team's final decision, they remain an important asset.

"You don’t make it because you do well in an interview," he told the news provider. "But if you don’t have a good grade, you will drop off someone’s draft board pretty quickly.”

Although some individuals remain skeptical that personality tests and other psychological assessments have a place in the athletic realm, research shows that they are in fact valid tools for predicting an athlete's success.

For example, in 2010, a group of Canadian researchers published a 15-year study on NHL players. Before becoming draft picks, these athletes each took a personality test that measured traits such as the need for achievement, potential, self-confidence, coachability and competitiveness. Based on these results, they were given a score that shows whether or not they are considered a top performer.

After measuring many aspects of the players' performances for 15 years, researchers found that those who did well on their personality tests had more accomplishment on the ice than those who did not do as well. In their report they wrote that they believe their results show that personality tests can be "a prediction of athletic success."

Additionally, a 1997 study by researchers at the University of Delaware indicates that team athletes tend to have personality traits that are measurably different from other individuals. For instance, athletes usually rank lower than others when it comes to anxiety, but higher than the general population in the area of impulse sensation seeking.

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