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 created by John Geier in the 1970s, when Geier was a faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Health Sciences. Geier was the first to analyze the profiles produced by the system at that time, extract 15 different shapes, and comment on them from observations of participants.
The origin of the PPS can be traced back to the AVA system. PPS was built from earlier work on the Self Discription created by John Clever and team in the 1960s. The technique was not IP-protected, and thus many versions started to emerge from this first version.
Self Description was itself inspired by the work from the AVA (Activity Vector Analysis) from Walter Clark in the 1950th. Clark was mostly influenced by the Louis Thurstone work on factorial analysis and his finding of five basic clusters of adjective descriptive of personality traits[1], rather than the often claimed, Moulton Marston’s work[2]. But the latter was more popular and more convenient to relate to. In any case, the four dimensions of the PPS come from the first work on the AVA, which is also at the origin of other popular techniques that used the factors from that period.
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, It 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 and being replicated by publishers.
Assessment
The PPS functions the same way as all other DISC versions with the 28 force-choice propositions.
Originally, the results were shown with a graph like the one here on the right. The profile representation were later dropped in favor of reports, or the graphs were sometimes mentioned in in some reports.
Wiley’s Everything DiSC version, has since replaced the profiles with a circumplex representation.
Statistics have been computed in 1996, that revealed the interdependence of the factors, and the overlap between the three graphs and other limitations of the measures. Test-retest have only been computed on small periods of time.
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 its reports, which, over the years, have been copied and embellished in many other DISC versions.
Critics
The intention of the original forced-choice technique by selecting the most and the least was apparently to reduce biases and eliminate the variance created by participants’ response style. At the same time, the forced-choice constrains the measures. It prevents an accurate calculation of a factor’s intensity and of the efforts it takes to adapt behavior.
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.
The dimensions lack orthogonality. The factors were devised long before the discovery of the universality of behavior factors in the 1990s and more about them that came after.
The system doesn’t measure the efforts it takes to adapt one’s behavior to the environment and how people are engaged. This is a critical aspect that connects the person to their environment, their job demand that’s not taken in account by PPS (and DISC in general).
The measurement of the four dimensions is forced-choise and ipsative, but then, how the dimensions relate to each other is influenced by the scales being used and how each dimension relates to a larger population. This is an important aspect referred to as as normativity. It’s doubtful that the force-choise technique, by construction, can ever make accurate account of how the dimensions relate to each other.
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 is no capabilities to analyze the potential fit and adjustments needed form the candidate or the position. There is no study made on non-descrimnations, further preventing the use of the PPS in recruitment.
The representations with the three graphs, when used in addition to the text, are in fact representing 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. The three graphs were later dropped in favor of a circumplex representation.
Please see general information about DISC and Everything DiSC for more details about DISC or more recent versions, that also apply to earlier versions like PPS.