Personality Testing Australia
Personality Testing vs Behavioural Testing
Unlike personality, behaviour can change over time, based on a number of different factors that enable us to adapt and manage workplace behaviour.
Many organisations are using testing of all styles (aptitude, personality, behaviour and suitability testing) to help make decisions about people and teams within organisations. The benefits of introducing the right type of testing into the workplace, whether for recruitment or for personal and team development may include:
Providing a less biased and holistic view of an individual within the important context of the organisational culture.
Helping individuals to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. The composition of bespoke information for people to help manage careers and performance.
Analysing working relationship fit between individuals and also suitability for jobs, so people can identify how to best deploy strength, and target training or development to minimise weakness.
Building relationships and teams of individuals at work, who can collaborate harmoniously and importantly also productively together.
Belbin Team Roles – Behaviour or Personality testing?
Belbin is concerned with behaviour as opposed to purely personality: behaviour is what others in your team see and experience.
Whilst the behaviours we exhibit at work will be influenced by personality, this is definitely not the only factor and it is best not to consider it in isolation.
During the 1970s, Dr Meredith Belbin and his research team at Henley Management College set about observing teams. As the in-depth research progressed, it revealed that the difference between success and failure for a team was not dependent on factors such as intellect, but more on behaviour. Hence the success of the model itself and the profiling and reporting tools are anchored in the actual behaviours occurring at work.
The research team identified separate and clear clusters of behaviour, each of which formed distinct team contributions or “Team Roles”. A Team Role came to be defined as:
A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.
It was found that individuals displayed different Team Roles to varying degrees based upon many different factors, personality being but one.
Moreover, the behaviour assumed might not correspond with what others observe. Whereas many personality and psychometric tests rely on self-reporting, the Belbin assessment uses 360° feedback to give you an accurate idea of how you fit in your team
The Belbin Model and profiling tools thus work with observed behaviour at work, and not personality.
Whilst personality is one of many factors that will contribute to the workplace behaviours that underpin working relationships, performance and engagement, it is by no means the only one.
To seek to measure personality alone, or to lean too heavily upon tools that purport to do so for important work-related decisions we feel has great limitations.
In a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, journalist Caitlyn Fitzimmons wrote in her well-researched article “Are personality tests like Myers-Briggs just corporate astrology?”
“Yet the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was not devised by anyone with either psychological or statistical training. It was developed in the 1940s in the United States by a mother and daughter with an amateur interest in the personality theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
You don’t have to look far online to find professional psychologists deriding it as meaningless. Your Myers-Briggs type is meant to be fixed for life, revealing innate personality preferences you’re born with, but in reality people can get quite different results each time they take the test.
Professor David J. Pittenger, currently Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Marshall University and a veteran researcher of psychometric testing, has written that even when people retake the test just five weeks later, half of them will get a different result.
Which type of test is best for your organisation?
You need to decide exactly what your aims are and what it is that you hope to gain from profiling individuals, or a team.
What information or advice do you wish to obtain that will help you with the organisation’s recruitment or personal development project?
How will line managers, HR, trainers or consultants be using the information provided and to what end?
Many psychometric or personality tests provide results which focus on an individual’s score for a series of personality traits. Bear in mind that whilst information regarding personality traits may be edifying for the individual concerned, it is not necessarily the most useful form of feedback for the organisation. Instead, it may be more advantageous to retrieve practical advice which is grounded in 360-degree peer reviews and which is orientated towards a work setting.
What is a Psychometric Test?
There are many tests that focus on an individual’s personality. Aspects such as extroversion/introversion, thinking/feeling are measured and are considered relatively fixed. They are based on an individual’s answers to a range of questions. There is no 360-degree view, so one could say that the outcome is only as good as an individual’s self-knowledge.
The question to ask is whether the outcome of a psychometric test has a great deal of bearing on the individual’s performance in the workplace? Does it matter than a member of staff can be labelled an extrovert, or is it more useful to see how that staff member contributes in a particular work situation?
At Belbin, we feel that the latter is more useful and thousands of organisations worldwide agree.
Of course personality is a factor, but it is only one of many that influence an individual’s behaviour.