Dear Philip
In my job which is a Human Resources consultant I have to be able to
answer the following questions that are posed to me by many managers. Is
this person motivated to do the job? i.e. do they value what they are
doing?, Do they have the skills and knowledge to do the job? and Do they
have the capabilities in terms of complexity of reasoning or logic ? That
is can they problem solve at the level required?
That is it, we do not have to know anything else. Basically no personality
test that I know of can do this. Because as you say in what context are we
in. Mine is solely in the work place. To answer the above questions we
split Motivation, knowledge, Complexity of Reasoning from skill and
behaviour so we can observe what is going on. We also take the feedback
loop of the system into account. We can now after assessing a person make
at least an accurate assessment of our above questions.
All I was saying before, I see no profiler that can do this let alone one
that has a systems approach. We are also not really interested how people
respond in other contexts because the work area is our focus. That is why
all the characteristics you shared with me is not particularly helpful in
what we do. I am sure that it is nice to know some of these
characteristics but of their accuracy and business use I have grave
doubts. I personally have put hundreds of people through tests and many
different types and they really do not help managers make mature
decisions. Hence us moving to the ones I describe above Kindest Gavin
Philip Pogson wrote:
> -personality is a constuct, a word we coin and use to describe an absract
> entity whose existence we cannot prove, only infer.
>
> Construct comes from a Latin word which means to pile up, build, construe
> or infer.
>
> For this reason, we will always have multiple rather than single
> definitions of love, personality, health, intelligence and all other
> constructs: we can't say for certain they exist, only construe their
> existence from the data available.
>
> To then say, as some do, that tests are not useful because definitions of
> a particular construct are different when inherently they must be so, to
> my mind evades the point.
>
> The important issue is for test designers and profilers to make
> transparent the philosophical, scientific and cultural assumptions their
> instruments are built upon and, as a consequence, what "personality" or
> "intelligence" means for them and in what context. Intelligent behaviour
> for a tribe living in the rainforests of the Amazon is different to that
> of a stockbroking firm in New York as the context, culture, success
> factors, assumptions about the world etc are different.
--Gavin Ritz <garritz@xtra.co.nz>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>