In today’s global workplace, compatibility and chemistry can matter as much as competence and creativity. Hiring processes frequently turn into grueling marathons of test projects and psychometric profiling. As The Wall Street Journal recently noted, “The use of online personality tests by employers has surged in the past decade as they try to streamline the hiring process, especially for customer-service jobs. Such tests are used to assess the personality, skills, cognitive abilities and other traits of 60% to 70% of prospective workers in the U.S., up from 30% to 40% about five years ago, estimates Josh Bersin, principal of consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte, a unit of auditor Deloitte LLP.”

The concatenated rise of social media, Big Data, and the predictive analytics championed by human capital gurus such as Google’s Laszlo Bock virtually assures that testing will play an ever greater role in the selection and management of employees and their managers.

But what’s sauce for the human resources goose ought to be sauce for the corporate governance gander. The same economic logic and efficiencies that drive organizations to test their employees for temperament and fit should encourage shareholder activists and regulators to demand directors and boards to be similarly profiled. This isn’t a simple—or simple-minded—call for fairness; it’s explicitly acknowledging that the psychology of fiduciaries and boards matters as much to shareholder value as the psychology of managers and employees. Indeed, even the President of the New York Federal Reserve reportedly declared that the nation’s largest financial services companies suffered from institutional pathologies at the very top. Personality testing for boards and their committees would make a creatively cost-effective first step for sussing them out.

Just as managers and executives seek greater psychological insight into their employees, shareholders are entitled to seek greater insight into the psychology of the fiduciaries who oversee their investments. “It’s not a crazy notion at all,” asserts Robert J. Kueppers, managing partner of Deloitte’s Center for Corporate Governance. “We do suffer from the relative opacity of governance….The biggest impediment, of course, is that many boards would find this intrusive and invasive….There might also be legal issues around discoverability.” Deloitte offers diagnostic tools to assess managers but doesn’t do so for board members.  Nevertheless, says Kueppers, “business chemistry” of personality types could be useful in thinking about boardroom chemistry.

As with virtually all forms of psychometric testing from IQ to Myers-Briggs, privacy is a serious concern. But regulators who champion transparency as a virtue should be willing to explore how best to balance the privacy rights of fiduciaries with shareholder needs to better know the temperaments of the directors representing them. Too much comity may breed a risky groupthink; too much boardroom fractiousness can undermine culture and strategy. Shareholders worldwide may not just have a right but a duty to insist that their boards—not just the employees—agree to take personality tests for the sake of enterprise efficiency and effectiveness.

Perhaps, as with “say on pay” initiatives that have so profoundly influenced executive compensation debates worldwide, savvy activist investors will push proxies calling for “test for best” initiatives. That is, advisory shareholder votes strongly suggesting that directors make themselves psychometrically accountable for their performance. Auditors or other outside parties might be empowered to assess whether the whole of the board and its various committees is better than the sum of their individual director parts.

Would the benefits of such testing outweigh the risks? That question and concern is absolutely legitimate. But, at the same time, boards need to remember that they have either tacitly or explicitly supported such testing for the managers and employees of the firms they oversee. If those tests are necessary for future workplace efficiency, the odds are they will prove essential for boardroom effectiveness.

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 11/10/2014.

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