PPS

Introduction

PPS stands for Personality Profile System, not to be confused with the PPS, which stands for the Proactive Personality Scale. The PPS is the origin of the DISC version that’s the most used today, published by Wiley and Sons under the name Everything DiSC (with a lowercase “i”).

History

The PPS was developed by John Geier in the 1970s when he was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Health Sciences. He was the first to analyze the system's profiles at that time, identified 15 different shapes, and commented on them based on observations of participants.

The origins of the PPS trace back to earlier work on the Self Discription created by John Cleaver and his team in the 1960s. Since the technique was not protected by intellectual property, many versions emerged from this initial foundation.

Self Discription was itself inspired by Walter Clark’s work on AVA (Activity Vector Analysis) in the 1950s. Clark was mainly influenced by Louis Thurstone’s work on factorial analysis and his identification of five basic clusters of adjectives describing personality traits , rather than the work by Moulton Marston, which is often claimed. The latter was more popular and easier to relate to. In any case, the four dimensions of the PPS derive from that early work on AVA, which also influenced other popular techniques that used factors evidenced from that era.

Geier formed a company called Performax, which was later acquired by the Carlson Learning Company in 1984. The company was renamed Inscape Publishing at Carlson’s death in 2000. Since 2012, Inscape has been part of the Professional Development division of Wiley & Sons. Personal Profile Solutions remained Wiley distributor and owns the right to discprofile.com website. The PPS was named PPS 2800 (Personal Profile System 2800 Series) after statistics made in 1994. The PPS DISC version is still in use at some companies.

Assessment

The PPS functions the same way as all other DISC versions with the 28 force-choice propositions. The four dimensions with GRI’s a priori correspondance are the following:

Dimension	Description	GRI a priori
Dominance (D)	Strong-willed and competitive. Action-oriented. Strive for success. Enjoy challenges. Push for their opinions.	High 1, low 3, low 4
Influence (I)	High-spirited, lively, optimistic, warm, and social. More likely to shape their environments by influencing or persuading others.	High 2, low 4
Steadiness (S)	Calm, peaceful, even-tempered, dependable and enjoy collaboration. Show a great deal of concern for the feelings of the people around them.	High 3
Conscientiousness (C)	Objective analysis, determination to stick with a problem until it's solved, strong critical thinker, skeptical and self-controlled.	High 4, low 2

Originally, the results were shown with a graph like the one here on the right. The profile representation was later dropped in favor of reports, or the graphs were sometimes mentioned in some reports. Wiley’s Everything DiSC version, which is an evolution of the PPS, has since replaced the profiles with a circumplex representation.

The 1996 technical report published by Inscape Publishing revealed the interdependence of the factors, the overlap between the three graphs, and other limitations of the measures. Four response groups were added to the 24 original groups.

Use

The PSS is used for personal development, coaching, team building, and management training, but not in recruitment. Although we still see it used by consulting companies, from time to time, in various regions of the world, it’s often been replaced by newer DISC versions or other systems.

The PPS is essentially used with reports, which, over the years, have been copied and embellished in many other DISC versions. The system is quick to take and simple. The results are produced immediately. The number of dimensions, four, is parsimonious. PPS early version, however, as it emerged before the Internet age, lacks a decent user interface and may still be seen on paper.

Critics

Scales

The intention of the original forced-choice technique by selecting the most and the least was to reduce social desirability biases and eliminate the variance created by participants’ response style; Also, to take account of the effects of people scoring on the higher or lower ranges of scales when using Likert rating scales. But the forced-choice constrains the measures and prevents an accurate calculation of a factor’s intensity, which could be obtained by normative scoring and standard deviation scales.

Orthogonality

The dimensions lack orthogonality. The factors were devised long before the advent of more sophisticated calculations that came with the FFM model (Five Factor Model) and the discovery of the universality of behavior factors in the 1990s, and more understanding about those factors that came after this period, but which partially converged with early findings from Thurstone and Clark, and later taken by Geier into the PPS model.

Ipsativity

The measurement of the four dimensions is forced-choice and ipsative. Choosing one factor over three others, the system cannot, by construction, account of how the four dimensions accurately relate to each other. It measures the preference of one dimension over the three others. It may evidence the least preferred dimension. But it cannot know how the two other dimensions relate to the two others.

Adaptation

The PPS model doesn’t take into consideration the behaviors that people feel the need to act out in order to adapt to the environment. PPS measurement thus mixes the two aspects of natural and adapted behaviors into one measurement. In PPS model the person’s natural self is biased by perceived adaptation, as in fact adaptation only reflects the person’s reality at the time they answered the survey. How people adapt their behavior and how they are engaged are critical aspects that connect the person to their environment, their job demand, and that’s not taken into account by PPS (and DISC in general).

Work relatedness

Although the AVA from which the PPS emerged was devised for work applications, the PPS was not, doesn’t consider how the measures relate to job demand, restricting its ability to be used in recruitment. There is no technique to measure expectations in jobs, and thus, there are no capabilities to analyze the potential fit and adjustments needed from the candidate to the position, or from the position to the candidate, or for a development plan. There is no study made on non-discrimination, further preventing the use of the PPS in recruitment.

Representation Model

The representations with the three graphs, when used in addition to the text, are in fact the same dimensions. The idea that one graph could represent adaptation or the “shadow” personality, as some called it, didn’t stand the test of time. Only the third graph remained in use. The third graph was later dropped in favor of a circumplex representation.

With its representation, the PPS only values one side of the dimensions being measured. That’s, for instance, measuring “Dominance” rather than “Agreeableness” (as the FFM assesses it). This other lower side of the continuum is only taken into account when it is the most extreme, along with another remaining dimension on the other side of the continuum. In short, the system cannot account for the four factors’ intensity, factors that should be measured along their continuum on both sides.

General validity

People may generally agree with the informationcoming from the reports and through feedback sessions. This corresponds to the the general experience that people agree to the information they provided about themselves through the survey and corresponds with their knowledge of their self. However, looking at the reports and by comparison with GRI’s adaptive profiles, the narraiteve where either imprecise and misleading (45%), neutral (35%), or valid (20%), the three mixed together. Additionally 60% of the propositions were repetitive.

Orher information are available about DISC and Everything DiSC that apply to earlier and more recent versions like PPS.