Leadership Assessment Tools
Psychometric tools can be used during the hiring for the assessment of leadership potential and as part of the leadership development process.
Assessment of Leadership Potential: Identification of individuals who have the potential to be effective leaders based on measuring traits that are believed to be critical for successful leadership.
Leadership Development: Identification of strengths and weaknesses to create development plans that target weaknesses as areas for improvement and strengths as a foundation to build on.
I made a review of the most popular psychometric tools used nowadays. If you just want to see the summary in a neat table, click here.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
Intended Purpose
To identify an individual's (and team members’) behavioral style and preferences to learn to communicate more effectively, resolve conflicts, and work more efficiently in teams.
History
MBTI was created by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. Neither Myers nor Briggs had formal education in the discipline of psychology, and both were self-taught in the field of psychometric testing.
After studying “Psychological Types” by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung Isabel Myers was particularly fascinated by the concept of introversion but felt the book was too complex for the general public, and therefore she tried to organize the Jungian cognitive functions to make it more accessible.
They began creating their indicator during World War II in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them. The “Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook”, published in 1944, was re-published as "Myers–Briggs Type Indicator" in 1956.
Validity
Despite its popularity, MBTI has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community as the indicator exhibits significant scientific (psychometric) deficiencies.
Psychometric specialist Robert Hogan wrote:
"Most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie...".
Researchers also confirm that MBTI has poor predictive validity of employees' job performance ratings. After all the MBTI measures natural preferences for certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, rather than the actual ability to perform specific tasks or skills.
CliftonStrengths
Intended Purpose
To identify an individual's personality characteristics with a focus on strengths to put them to maximum use to achieve success and fulfillment, rather than trying to fix weaknesses.
History
CliftonStrengths (former StrengthsFinder) was developed by Don Clifton. He taught and researched educational psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln from 1950 to 1969. He researched what distinguished talented people from others and identified that successful people had certain personal attributes that benefited them in their work. When Clifton left the university, he founded Selection Research Inc. (SRI) helping companies with employee selection.
Clifton's firm SRI acquired Gallup Inc. in 1988 and Clifton became chairman. Under Clifton, Gallup expanded beyond public opinion polls, entering the management consulting business. Gallup consulted companies on ways to improve their businesses by homing in on their employees' strengths.
In 1999, Clifton created the online assessment tool StrengthsFinder which focuses on 34 themes that make up a person's personality. The results of the test are intended to help individuals understand their unique strengths and how they can use them to achieve their goals and improve their performance.
In 2006, Gallup researchers completed a review of the Clifton StrengthsFinder psychometrics and revised it to bring a new version StrengthsFinder 2.0 that brings a "personalized" explanation of a person's Top talents.
Validity
While Gallup Inc. is the primary source of research on CliftonStrengths, there have been independent studies conducted as well. The results showed that people who used CliftonStrengths had higher levels of self-awareness and self-efficacy, as well as greater career decision-making self-efficacy, than those who did not use the tool. The studies also found that the benefits of using CliftonStrengths were consistent across different demographic groups.
DISC
Intended Purpose
To identify an individual's behavioral style and preferences to communicate more effectively, resolve conflicts, and build stronger relationships.
History
The groundwork for the DiSC assessment was created by Dr. William Moulton Marston, Harvard scholar, and psychologist. He published a book in 1928 called “Emotions of Normal People” where he suggested that normal emotions led to behavioral differences and presented four behavioral styles:
Dominance (Drive): results-orientation, decisiveness, and focus on achieving goals
Inducement (Influence): openness, sociability, enthusiasm, and enjoyment of working with others
Submission (Steadiness): patience, cooperation, and preference for a stable and predictable environment
Compliance (Caution, Conscientiousness): an analytical approach, detail orientation, and focus on accuracy and precision
These four styles became the building blocks for the DISC model of human behavior and later led to the modern-day DISC assessment. Since then, many researchers and practitioners have contributed to the development and refinement of the DiSC model.
Although Marston built the groundwork for DISC, it wasn’t until the 1950′s that an actual DISC personality profile test was created by Dr. Walter Clark, an industrial psychologist.
Validity
Research suggests that while DiSC assessments may be moderately valid and reliable for measuring certain aspects of behavioral style and preferences, their accuracy and usefulness may be influenced by a range of factors. In relation to other outcomes, such as leadership effectiveness and team performance results are mixed with some studies showing moderate levels of validity and others showing lower levels.
There are also several versions of DiSC assessments available now making it even harder to reliably use DiSC assessment.
Hogan assessment
Intended Purpose
To identify an individual's personality characteristics, including traits related to interpersonal interactions, work style, and values particularly as they relate to job performance.
The assessment consists of several components:
Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), which measures broad personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience
Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which identifies potential "derailers" or negative tendencies that may impede an individual's success in a leadership role
Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI), which assesses an individual's underlying values, motivations, and preferences.
History
Hogan's assessment was created by Robert Hogan, an American organizational psychologist known for developing socioanalytic theory that fuses Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and role theory with evolutionary theory. Whereas Freud believed that how we think about ourselves determines how we interact with others, role theory argues that our interactions with others determine how we think about ourselves. Both theories predict that many of us will have trouble in these areas—and we will not know why. Hogan’s socioanalytic theory concerns three questions:
in what meaningful ways are people alike—human universals;
in what meaningful ways are people different—individual differences;
how to explain anomalous or self-defeating behavior.
Job performance
Building on his distinction between identity and reputation, Hogan developed a socioanalytic perspective on job performance. Performance evaluation, he observed, depends on workplace interactions, after which each person will assess how rewarding the other person was to deal with. According to Hogan, rewardingness—being interesting and agreeable, meeting the other person’s expectations, satisfying their desires, and promoting their agenda—forms the basis for performance appraisal.
Expanding on the five-factor model of personality, Hogan identified seven dimensions as an initial taxonomy of personality variables needed to predict job performance, which formed the foundation of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI). Job performance is ultimately a function of the perceptions of others.
Validity
It has been validated over several decades, and it has been shown good predictive validity of :
personality characteristics, including traits related to interpersonal interactions, work style, and values;
job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover.
The assessment measures a range of personality characteristics, including traits related to interpersonal interactions, work style, and values. Studies have shown that the assessment accurately measures these traits and that the results are consistent over time.
Summary table
There are only 2 psychometric tools confirmed by research: Hogan Assessment and Cliffton Strength. They can be useful even if you test only yourself or a few team members as you will be able to better understand how to more efficiently interact with people.
As I am a believer in Gallup's approach to people management (in detail explained in Gallop’s ‘First break all the rules’ book) where the focus is set on strengths to put them to maximum use instead of trying to fix weaknesses I would recommend ClifftonStrengh.
I would appreciate it if you would let me know what worked well for your teams if you have a moment.
