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 in the end of 2001. He formed a vision of
bringing the practices of developed countries into China for
the mutual benefit of employees and companies, and he organized
an international team in Shanghai to develop a test that would
really work in the Chinese corporations. The team built 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 China 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.
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 advance 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, but 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, Intellectance, 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 received
award from University of Bielefeld, received the Provost's
Collaborative and Curricular Innovations Special Recognition
Program Award, received first place of STAR Project Award
and received 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 adopting 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 name
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 the non-psychologists in interpreting the results.
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