Behaviors and Personality in the PsyMetrics Global Universe

Dr. David K. Barnett & Dr. Michael D. Barnett

What is the relationship between job behaviors and personality? Why do many sales personality tests seem to offer little value in changing individuals or organizations? As a performance management company, PsyMetrics Global studies the relationship between what people are and what people do.

Businesses have used personality assessments since the 1920s to help unlock individual productivity. Many sales personality tests on the market today are based on research done over forty years ago. Unless your employees are selling consumer products door-to-door as reps did for much of the 20th century, most of those tests are simply inadequate. They are outdated and typically do not work well developmentally because by the time a person enters the work force basic orientations of personality are essentially hard-wired into the individual. Another problem was that managers were not trained psychologists. Researchers may know the meaning of “drive” and “ego strength,” but these attributes tend to be difficult to quantify and manage in industrial/organizational (I/O) settings.

Personality tests ask about what people are and make inferences about what they do. Our assessments ask questions essentially about behavior and make inferences about personality. Our theory and practice is built on the premise that personality is essentially a cluster of identifiable stable behavior patterns that appear in a large number of people regularly enough to be classified as sub-categories of personality. Extroversion, for example, can be viewed as a cluster of behaviors (initiating social dialogue, disclosing information, and ease in interaction) that occur frequently.

Our approach to behavior and personality is not purely behavioral, however. That would put us in the school of B.F. Skinner and other behaviorists who dismiss the whole notion of personality. Much of the American workplace has been heavily influenced by the behaviorists’ emphasis on rewarding desirable behavior and punishing unwanted behavior. Behaviorists minimize the personhood of the employee and examine only quantifiable objective metrics. They consider the origin of behaviors less relevant than their impact on performance. Following on the call reluctance research of my former partners, Dudley & Goodson, I developed SalesMAP™ to ask purely behavioral questions about selling to help quantify objective metrics. But the wholly behavioral approach was not without problems. Were behavioral questionnaires measuring stable traits? An individual might behave one way in one sales environment and do something different in another setting.

Four Levels Developmental Model

Clearly some aspects of individual performance are more difficult to change while others are relatively simple. It appeared to me that any model of job performance had to deal with both the intangible personality factors as well as individual behaviors. In our Four Levels of Developmental model, Level 1 is comprised of the most stable traits an individual takes from job to job. A person’s Energy, Risk Sensitivity, Initiative, Helpfulness, and Goal Orientation are behavior patterns that are very difficult for individuals to change. By the time a person enters the workforce, these attributes are probably fixed and as such are best understood as aspects of personality described behaviorally. We refer to these as Level 1 behaviors, and they are best managed during the selection process.

Level 3 behaviors govern social interaction and are also quite stable. Individuals’ predisposition to behave in certain characteristic ways in relationships can be mollified if not completely modified. Level 2 behaviors relate to training and management issues and Level 4 productivity differentiators are more task-driven and are mostly behavioral. SalesKey® and ServiceKey® were developed in line with this model to measure the personality characteristics, behavior patterns, occupational interests, and skill competencies associated with job performance in sales and service.

In training and coaching, we seek to change behaviors, not transform personality. No amount of intervention is probably going to turn an introvert into an extrovert. But introverts can learn behavioral techniques to apply to sales and service interactions that make them more effective in communicating with people whose personalities are quite different than their own. Since personality is, in our view, primarily a pattern of behaviors, we have to get behind the behaviors if we are going to understand deeper reasons for behavior and develop complex influencing strategies.

To that end, in the Level 3 section of the model, we adopt a “psychodynamic” model. This approach looks at behavior as being generated by the organism to satisfy basic needs. In other words, people do what they need to do. We do not infer personality from behavior so much as we infer five universal and innate needs that drive individual performance development. In coaching we are not trying to change these needs but to identify them and affirm them so that by giving people what they need, customers are more likely to approach rather than avoid sales and service people, thus increasing productivity. This is not like the many unvalidated assessments and programs that label people based on temperament. People are complex and driven by all five needs. Those behaviors that can be changed are best approached by identifying the emotional needs that sustain non-productive behaviors, either diminishing their strength or teaching individuals how to better channel compensating needs into more productive behavior.