SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration
No 2010:3:
A third generation personality test
Lennart Sjöberg ()
Abstract: The development of personality testing in the workplace
has undergone three phases. The first generation of tests, such as
Cattell’s 16 PF and the British test OPQ, was characterized by complex
systems for the description of the personality. These systems were
simplified in part by the following generation of the test, which was based
on the five factor model but that model was simple only at the horizontal
level. Beneath the five main factors were a large number of ancillary
factors, usually 30-40 in number. No tests of the first and second
generation could effectively handle the problem of impression management,
nor did they take into account the effects of mood on the test responses.
These and a number of other problems were solved to a great extent in the
UPP test, which therefore is proposed to represent the third generation of
personality tests. The test features focusing on “narrow” and work-relevant
traits, inclusion of a few aggregated variables with the same focus,
including two variables especially fitted to the requirement of any given
application, an effective and validated method for correction for
impression management, extensive treatment of quality of data from each
tested person to yield a “warning signal” when results should not be
trusted, measurement of current mood at the time of testing which can give
another “warning signal”, measurement of attitude towards the test (“face
validity”), two types of narrative reports both to the person taking the
test and the recruiter/psychologist – one based on normative comparisons
and the other on ipsative (within-person) comparisons, measures of work
related attitudes which are of value in themselves but can also be used as
proxy criteria, greatly facilitating validation work.
Keywords: personality test; impression management; mood; face vaility; data quality; (follow links to similar papers)
15 pages, March 18, 2010
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