ABP News
Can Values Questionnaires be made effective?
Posted: 29/06/11In a fascinating presentation, Roy Childs presented an important aspect of his work at TeamFocus, and challenged the notion that questionnaires provided simple solutions to personality profiling. They sharpen the lens and can accelerate the process, but don’t provide the answer you want. Bankers can say they are motivated by money, but in truth they are motivated by other values which need to be ranked appropriately. Questionnaires do not achieve this.
TeamFocus was formed in 1989, after Roy had spent time working as a researcher at NFER and then working as an associate for test publishers ASE and SHL. He also delivered the first BPS approved MBTI programme under ASE’s auspices and later (when OPP began distributing it) with OPP’s blessing. Their business is understanding people, building relational capital and test authors/online questionnaires. Bring people into organisations and making teams work effectively is about managing change, which requires staff and candidates to “measure” their personality and “tell a story”, articulating their real motivations.
One of the real benefits of detailed profiling is people and their managers often realise that they may have problems, but then do not know what needs to be done to address them. One way in which this can be done is breakdown the “values” and then reconstruct them.
Steve Jobs makes a powerful point about finding your values and following your heart. Ken Robinson argues that values and innovation have been knocked out of most children at school because they have lost the ability to be curious. The result is that when they become adults they have a confused set of values which are difficult to identify, let alone rank. The challenge is to explore what can be done about identifying and measuring this area – which Roy claims is the black hole in psychometrics.
Psychometric tests are designed to produce a consistent set of results and usually to interpret these using norms – but this often fails to address the question of importance. In fact, the problem with profiling values is acute since there is both a normative and ipsative lens that needs to be used to avoid quite misleading interpretations. Team Focus have developed a unique method for overcoming these problems.
This involves using 144 questions which are scored on 24 scales. The output produced 3 rankings which are called general, detailed and comparative. Adjustments are then made for “item power” which is established by looking at population statistics and adjusting results accordingly. The result is that the rankings of the 24 scales can vary. These inconsistencies provide a powerful method for challenging the person’s self-reported values (which are sometimes espoused but not lived). This allows the reviewer to discuss issues about what really matters and what has been affected by experience in a previous job or simply by pressures created by domestic situations.
Team Focus would be interested in further research in this area – especially since the results should clearly be sensitive to the differences in cultural values. This means that anyone interested in mapping a particular culture should consider putting together a research proposition which could be used for a collaborative investigation.