Three Competing Models
Introduction
For decades, researchers and the personality assessment industry have studied and refined various methods for measuring personality in organizations. These methods are used for hiring, personal development, coaching, and more, including in clinical settings. We at GRI have reviewed these methods by analyzing their effects and benefits on individual and organizational performance, how they were developed, and by studying their users: traditional users like human resources managers, recruiters, coaches, and clinicians, as well as managers and executives.
In social matters, unlike in technology, change happens slowly. As for assessment techniques, particularly with personality, as their history shows, understanding their true potential takes time[1]. This extended process may be due to a combination of factors: the abstract nature of the concepts being measured, the effort needed to learn these techniques, and the emotional attachment people develop toward them.
Assessment techniques can reveal their real capabilities through actual cases that genuinely matter. These cases usually come from organizations that care not only about performance in finance and production but also about how these outcomes are delivered from behavioral, cognitive, and emotional perspectives.
Using both qualitative and quantitative methods has helped us gain a detailed understanding of assessment techniques' capabilities and limitations: what they truly measure, how these measures are represented and used, and the questions they seek to answer. These topics are discussed below.
The Three Models
Three models clearly emerge from analyzing assessment techniques used in organizations and research labs that account for the majority of them. The three models are the following:
- Factor models. The factor approach emerged in the 1950s but did not gain widespread acceptance until research from the 1970s to the 1990s promoted a limited number of factors to explain behavioral traits. We had to wait for the 2010s to start seeing their use in organizations.
- Trait models. These models were among the first to be used in psychiatry and clinical practice in the late 1800s. They were soon employed for large-scale recruitments in the 1920s, and later for executive search.
- Type models. Although the first typologies date back to ancient times, their statistical evaluation is more recent, starting in the 1940s, and their use has grown significantly with the rise of coaching in the late 1980s.
The three models offer different understandings of how people function from behavioral, emotional, and cognitive standpoints. Although each can be useful for addressing questions about people, they also have limitations and should be used wisely. Seeing people in context, or not, and with varying nuances, the three models ultimately carry a different vision of how people can be understood, how they possibly show up, grow, and perform.
Measurement and Representation
The three models, Factor, Trait, and Type, are used to both measure and represent behaviors, but the two aspects, measurement and representation, need to be considered separately, because a technique may use one model for measurement, but its representation may be based on one or a combination of the other two models.
For instance, some techniques measure factors and are thus factor-based. Whatever scales they use, which may vary greatly between the decile and standard deviation scales, they convert the measures of factors into traits or types and use the results as such, rather than using the factors themselves. The same happens with techniques that measure traits, which are represented as types.
The techniques end up being used as they are represented, but not for what they measure. Because of the combinations we see among the models, we differentiate them based on how they are both measured and represented.
Adaptation
Adaptation is an important aspect of what the three models deal with, because the object of their measure and representation, behavior, is in constant flux. There is always something happening out there: a critical or minor event, radical change, disruption, crisis, drama, etc., and also from inside: health issues, lack of sleep, just a bad day, personal challenges, etc., that constantly ask us to act, as actors do on stage.
Additionally, there are always expectations, from ourselves and others, including management or HR, or from our role in the organization at large, to behave in a certain way and adapt our behavior accordingly.
This important aspect of adaptation has repercussions for how one envisions a person’s growth, provides understanding and support, and ultimately, how the person takes on an assignment or a job and performs, including on an emotional level. Development happens differently for everyone, an aspect revealed with varying degrees of accuracy by the three models. This aspect is discussed below for each.
Summary
The three types of techniques are summarized in the table below.
| Type | Trait | Factor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Representation Locating Social Behavior |
 |
 |
 |
| Measurement |  |
 |
 |
| Adapting Behavior, Development | A rough estimate of where the adaptation starts and ends, but not how it happens, nor the effort it takes to sustain the effort. | Understanding how distant the development is at the start and the end, but not how it happens, nor the effort it takes to sustain the effort. | Understanding where the development starts, where it ends, how it happens, and the effort it takes to sustain it. |
| Typical Usage | Coaching, team building, counselling | Recruitment, vocational guidance, and other uses of types | Management, leadership, organizational development, and other uses of types and traits |
| Typically Measured | Up to a few dozen types | Up to a few dozen traits | Up to seven factors |
| Users | Coaches | Recruiters, clinicians, and coaches | Executives, managers, recruiters, clinicians and coaches |
| Emergence/Use | 1940s/1980s | Late 1800s/1920s | 1950s/2010s |
The factor approach, with roots in research dating back to the era of Taylor, has progressively emerged since the 1950s. With social behavior, a major obstacle to their use has been the availability of trait and types models that are more immediate to understand and use but however have drawbacks that this article discusses.
The factor model uniquely serves management and organizational development by offering a nuanced snapshot of individual behaviors, including most preferred and predictable behaviors, the efforts required to adapt, and engage in the job.
It also provides a refined understanding of the behaviors expected at the job, team, and organizational levels, which can be represented the same way as with people, helping to see and fill the gaps between the levels.
With critical nuances and representations that other models cannot handle, the factor model can better serve executives and managers in developing their social skills, coaches and recruiters to work more effectively with them, and researchers investigating and testing new models. In a similar way, type models have helped coaches, and trait models clinicians and recruiters for decades to serve management and organizational needs, but with limited capabilities.
The real competing models to the three models, though, are executives’ and managers’ private techniques. Social behavior is the component of personality that’s the most universal, prevalent, intuitive, and subjective, and the one that takes the longest to educate. By bringing unparalleled precision and utility, including at a strategic level, the factor model provides the missing piece for social skills metrics to enhance decision making and communication.