Background of the FiT In™ Professional Personality Profile
"Hiring decisions are the most important decisions any leader or manager makes."
Peter Drucker
Human Resource problems are a major headache for managers all
across the world, and especially so in the challenging Chinese market.
Mr. Gabor Nagy, founder and Managing Director of HRO, recognized
the need of companies in China for advanced personality tests at
the end of 2001. He organized an international expert team in Shanghai
to develop a test that would be truly effective in Chinese corporations.
The team relied on the IPIP personality item pool created by Dr.
Lewis R. Goldberg at the Oregon Research Institute, and made significant
revisions to make it suitable for the Chinese market. The collective
work of developing the test took more than one year, until finally
a personality inventory - FiT In™ - that can be confidently
applied in China was created.
FiT In™ Professional Personality Profile incorporates the latest results of personality psychology and organizational research. FiT In™ - Five Trait Inventory - is a Five Factor Model based personality questionnaire. The emergence and broad acceptance of the Five Factor Model of personality, commonly referred to as the "Big Five" has been the greatest single advance in personality research (Digman, 1990; Hogan, Hogan, & Roberts, 1996). FiT In™ benefited a lot from the Big Five research, especially from the IPIP research conducted by Dr. Lewis R. Goldberg and Dr. John A. Johnson.
The major problem of the Big Five is lacking resolution: just five dimensions are not sufficient to model the colorful diversity of behavior at work. FiT In™ addresses this issue by including five traits in each dimension of the Big Five, resulting
a model of 25 primary traits.
FiT In™ is extremely robust against "faking" (manipulation
of test results). Its ipsative test structure is not easy to see
through, and it has four levels of additional security measures.
The accuracy, ease of use, the well selected 25 primary scales and
intuitive reports of FiT In™ made their name outside of China
as well, and more and more practitioners use it in the UK, Germany,
Malaysia and Australia. In 2009 FiT In™ has seen a major revision,
and the current 2.0 version was released.
Five Major Dimensions of Personality
In the last decade there have been a series of advances which unequivocally demonstrate that personality, as assessed through standardized instruments, has a predictive relationship with job performance approaching, and in many cases exceeding that of cognitive ability. The major driving force of accelerating research has been the emergence and broad acceptance of the Five Factor model of personality, commonly referred to as the "Big Five" (Digman, 1990; Hogan, Hogan, & Roberts, 1996), the greatest single progress in personality research.
Psychologists studied human traits with the purpose of predicting behavior for more than 100 years (a trait is a temporally stable, cross-situational individual difference). The new paradigm now for studying personality traits is the five-factor model (FFM) or Big Five Dimensions of personality. The FFM and the Big Five are conceptually distinct models, however, they are closely related in practice.
The five factors of FFM were derived from factor analyses of a large number of self- and peer reports on personality-relevant adjectives and questionnaire items. The factors of the Big Five were derived from factor analyses of natural language, based on the lexical hypothesis that most salient and socially relevant individual differences will come to be encoded as terms in our language. Even though FFM and Big Five have different origins, they identified the same 5 dimensions of personality.
The Five Dimensions:
| Big Five Dimension |
Alternate Names |
Sample Associated Trait Descriptions- Positive Pole |
Sample Associated Trait Descriptions- Negative Pole |
| Extroversion |
Surgency, Assertiveness |
Sociable, Gregarious, Assertive, Talkative, Expressive, Enthusiastic, Outgoing, Self-Confident |
Quiet, Reserved, Shy, Retiring, Taciturn, Inhibited |
| Conscientiousness |
Conformity, Dependability |
Careful, Thorough, Responsible, Planful, Persevering, Achievement Oriented, Efficient, Self-disciplined, Diligent |
Inconsistent, Impulsive, Undisciplined, Unreliable |
| Emotional Stability |
Neuroticism |
Calm, Relaxed, Steady, Easy-going |
Anxious, Depressed, Angry, Worried, Insecure, Tense, Vulnerable, High-strung |
| Agreeableness |
Likeability, Friendliness |
Courteous, Flexible, Cooperative, Tolerant, Caring, Trusting, Supportive, Altruistic, Sympathetic, Kind, Modest |
Spiteful, Self-Centred, Self- Aggrandizing, Hostile, Indifferent, Cold, Coarse, Mean-spirited |
| Openness to Experience |
Culture, Intellect, Inquiring Intellect |
Imaginative, Creative, Curious, Cultured, Sharp-witted, Broad-minded, Inventive, Insightful, Complex |
Simple, Concrete, Narrow, Imitative, Unimaginative |
Some Important Characteristics of the Five Factors:
- The factors are dimensions, not types, so people vary continuously on them, with most people falling in between the extremes;
- The factors are stable over a 45-year period beginning in young adulthood (Soldz & Vaillant, 1999);
- The factors and their specific facets are heritable (i.e., genetic), at least in part (Jang, McCrae, Angleitner, Riemann, & Livesley, 1998; Loehlin, McCrae, Costa, & John, 1998);
- The factors probably had adaptive value in a prehistoric environment (Buss, 1996);
- The factors are considered universal, having been recovered in languages as diverse as German and Chinese (McCrae & Costa, 1997);
- Knowing one's placement on the factors is useful for insight and improvement through therapy (Costa & McCrae, 1992).
Comparison between the MBTI and the Big Five:
| |
MBTI |
Big Five |
| Origin |
Based on the personality theory of Carl Jung (1921), and developed in the 1940s by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. |
Based on experience in factor analysis, popularized by Goldberg (1993), Digman (1990), John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf (1988), McCrae (1992) and others. |
| Psychological model |
A four-dimension model with sixteen independent types. |
Five dimensions of personality, where each dimension can contain a number of independent traits (FiT In™ includes 26 traits); An emphasis on individual personality traits and their relations (the type concept is gone); A large number of possible personality profiles. |
| Complexity |
Relatively simple. |
Relatively complex. |
| Field of use |
Career development, team building;Must NOT be used in recruitment and employee assessment. |
Can be used in all HR areas, including recruitment and employee assessment. |
Comments on the Big Five from Significant Authors
"In order for any field of science to advance, it is necessary to have an accepted classification scheme for accumulating and categorizing empirical findings. We believe that the robustness of the 5-factor model provides a meaningful framework for formulating and testing hypotheses relating individual differences in personality to a wide range of criteria in personnel psychology, especially in the subfields of personnel selection, performance appraisal, and training and development.".
- Murray R. Barrick & Michael K. Mount, Dept. of Management and Organizations, University of Iowa. "The Big Five Personality Dimensions and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis." Personnel Psychology, 1991, 44, 1-26.
"The major aim of this article has been to provide sufficient evidence to alleviate any qualms about the generality of the Big-Five structure. To this end, findings were presented to demonstrate factor robustness within a near-comprehensive set of 1,431 trait adjectives across a wide variety of factor-analytic procedures... In no case was any additional factor of any substantial size, and in Study 2 no additional factor demonstrated any significant amount of across-sample generality."
- Lewis R. Goldberg, University of Oregon and Oregon Research Institute, Eugene. "An Alternative 'Description of Personality': The Big-Five Structure." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990, 59(6), 1216-1229.
"The comprehensive analyses in Dutch have provided so far the strongest cross-language evidence for the Big Five. Results from a study of English-German bilinguals indicate that the Big Five form internally consistent and relatively independent dimensions in German as well.... Finally, factor analyses of translations of Norman's...20 scales have replicated the Big Five in Japanese...."
- Oliver P. John, University of California at Berkeley, & Alois Angleitner & Fritz Ostendorf, Universität Bielefeld, Germany. "The Lexical Approach to Personality: A Historical Review of Trait Taxonomic Research." European Journal of Personality,1988, 2, 171-203.
"A series of research studies of personality traits has led to a finding consistent enough to approach the status of law. The finding is this: If a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is almost completely accounted for by five robust factors."
- J.M. Digman & J. Inouye. "Further Specification of the Five Robust Factors of Personality." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986, 50, 116-123.
"The past decade has witnessed an electrifying burst of interest in the most fundamental problem of the field--the search for a scientifically compelling taxonomy of personality traits. More importantly, the beginning of a consensus is emerging about the general framework of such a taxonomic representation. As a consequence, the scientific study of personality dispositions, which had been cast into the doldrums in the 1970s, is again an intellectually vigorous enterprise poised on the brink of a solution to a scientific problem whose roots extend back at least to Aristotle.... It should be clear that proponents of the five-factor model have never intended to reduce the rich tapestry of personality to a mere five traits. Rather, they seek to provide a scientifically compelling framework in which to organize the myriad individual differences that characterize humankind.... It might be argued that the hallmark of a compelling structural model is that it is initially disliked; thereby stimulating numerous attempts to replace it with something more attractive--all of which fail. In any case, so it has been with the Big Five model of perceived personality trait descriptors. Most of the present proponents of the model were once its critics, and some of its present critics contributed to its success."
- Lewis R. Goldberg, University of Oregon and Oregon Research Institute, Eugene. "The Structure of Phenotypic Personality Traits." American Psychologist, January 1993, 48(1), 26-34.
"Personality psychologists who continue to employ their preferred measure without locating it within the five-factor model can only be likened to geographers who issue reports of new lands but refuse to locate them on a map for others to find.”
- D.J. Ozer & S.P. Reise, “Personality Assessment,”Annual Review of Psychology 1994, 45, 357-388.
“Among personality psychologists there is a rapidly growing consensus that the domain of individual differences in adulthood, as measured by rating scales and questionnaire items, is almost completely described by five broad factors....”
- Halverson, C.F., Jr., Kohnstamm, G.A., & Martin, R.P. (1994). The Developing Structure of Temperament and Personality from Infancy to Adulthood. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fit In™ and IPIP
FiT In™ is based on the International Personality Item Pool and multiple personality constructs created by Lewis R. Goldberg, Ph.D. at the Oregon Research Institute (Goldberg, 1991). This item pool has been used in the construction of a range of assessment tools for the US Airforce and for corporations in the US and in Europe. The IPIP-NEO inventory has been administered to more than 200,000 people all over the world by Professor John A. Johnson, and is becoming one of the most popular Five-Factor personality inventories.
Dr. Lewis R. Goldberg, a senior scientist at Oregon Research Institute and Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality & Individual Differences, the European Journal of Personality, and the Journal of Personality Assessment. He has more than 100 publications in the field of personality psychology.
Dr. John A. Johnson is professor at the Pennsylvania State University; his main research field is personality tests during personnel selection. He presented an award by the University of Bielefeld, received the Provost's Collaborative and Curricular Innovations Special Recognition Program Award, first place of STAR Project Award and Alumni/Student Award for Excellence in Teaching. Besides numerous publications in journals, he also published a book: Hogan, R., Johnson, J. A., & Briggs, S. R. (1997). Handbook of personality psychology. San Diego: Academic Press.
Chinese Localization: a significant development work and achievement!
When applying the IPIP, the HRO team has done much more than careful translation. The task was not only to adopt it for Chinese conditions, but also extracting a construct most suitable for HR professionals. The localization work included:
- Selecting and expanding relevant traits. The final FiT In™ construct includes 26 traits that are all closely related to predicting work performance, and the correlation is supported by both common sense and sufficient research.
- Terminology. Some IPIP scale names sound strange for non-psychologists (for example Neuroticism). HRO modified those names, made them easier to be understood by HR professionals.
- Item work. The HRO team not only translated inventory items, but also rewrote many of them to better suit corporate use, to better suit Chinese culture and to address the issue of social desirability.
- Reports. HRO developed various reports and graphical charts
to help non-psychologists in interpreting the results.
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