Latest study of 184 terminations from financial services company reveals pre-hire behavior patterns of those terminated for misconduct as well as unsatisfactory sales performance. Strong validation of Level 1 scales.

Click here for study (pdf)

Last weekend I was walking along the beach in Rye, NH with my youngest son Nicholas. It wasn’t long before he said, “Dad, I want to find a gem to take home.” Anyone familiar with beaches in New Hampshire knows the shorelines are filled with rocks of all sizes. Over the course of a half hour we conducted a search following these steps: I’d find a cool little rock and submit it to Nicholas for his approval. He’d say, “Dad, that’s not a gem it’s just a little rock!” The cycle continued, I’d identify a rock that stuck out as being different and cool in my mind and pass it along to Nicholas for approval. I searched and searched, but had no luck. Each time I submitted a unique rock for approval, I heard: “Dad, that’s just a rock. We are looking for a gem.” Now, I’m familiar with what gem means to my wife, but deciphering the meaning of the word “gem” to an 8 year old turned out to be far more elusive. Then I found it! I’m not a geologist, and my description is probably completely inaccurate, but I believe my winning submission had quartz with some small black pebbles of some sort mixed in. I finally had it! This time my rock met his approval and he said, “Dad, that’s AWESOME! Isn’t it sick?! I’m taking that one home with us.” My little rock (a gem in his eyes), stayed with Nicholas the entire weekend and is on display in our house today.

As I thought about our experience together that day on the beach, my mind drifted to the challenge of influencing people when we don’t know what their “gem” is. Nicholas didn’t know exactly what his gem would look like, but he knew when we found it there’d be meaning for him. Many of us would’ve seen just a rock with some shimmer and black dots, but to Nicholas, for a brief period of time, it meant everything. Oftentimes, what’s meaningless to us is meaningful to those around us.

Over the course of the last twelve months I’ve been involved in helping a group of call center managers turn their service personnel into revenue generating assets to their firm. In this organization, they are compensated for this “revenue” in the form of compensation for referrals to the sales group.

As we started the program, I learned that in research circles, academia, and the minds of a large majority of service team managers, we make some dangerous assumptions about the service people who work for our companies. Often the perspective is that folks who have decided to work in a service role are not really wired to make money (if they were, they’d be in sales). Other then potentially moving into management, they don’t even have specific goals they’re trying to accomplish. I wrote an article about importance of goal orientation in sales people, and refuse to believe there are no goals hidden in the minds of most service people. These hidden goals are the elusive “gems” we have to uncover to help service people and service teams maximize their potential.

In any environment where there’s money to be made, potential gets lost when we’re not able to help individuals identify the reality of their unique personal opportunities. Unfortunately, the belief that service people lack specific, personal goals has been embedded in the culture of most service organizations. Even experienced service people have been “wired” to come in, put in the hours, provide a good experience for clients, and go home. A respected, and very important calling, no doubt! However, when there is a way to make a specific amount of money, managers have a major leverage point to finding the elusive “gem” for their hardworking service people who simply want to go above and beyond. Since most service folks don’t come wired to look at the opportunity, our role as managers is to walk the beach with them and discover that which has meaning for them. What does their “gem” look like? What will get them engaged at an entirely different level, maximizing their potential and increasing the returns to the firm? I’m not naïve, and I recognize not everyone is interested in material goods and money. It’s about what that money enables us to do, that makes it powerful.

For example; I was sitting with a service rep named Jason in a call center “ghosting” his calls and had knowledge of his potential through an assessment our company utilizes. Based on the results of his assessment, I knew Jason should be leading the pack in this Service into Sales environment. When I asked him how he was performing relative to his peers in referrals to the sales group, Jason responded, “middle of the pack”. Reports confirmed he was slightly below average in referrals to the sales group. The typical management approach would be to tell Jason “you can do more, we need more, and you could make more money.” Since he was solid in all other metrics, Jason saw no compelling reason to act. I asked him if he’d thought the possibility for additional income with the new program. Jason answered, “Nah, not really.” I replied by saying, “based on what I know about you and on what I’ve seen, you should be at the top of the charts! What’s the top person going to make this quarter?”

The answer was a couple thousand dollars. I asked what he thought he might do with that amount of money. He wasn’t sure and hadn’t thought about it. His manager overheard the conversation and piped in with “Jason, you’ve been talking about wanting to go home to Florida and spending time with your family.” Jason’s reply, “yeah, but I can’t afford that right now. I’m thinking about going at the end of the year.” That statement gave me exactly what I was looking for – Jason’s “gem.” Jason and I then spent a couple of minutes talking about exactly what he would need to do each day in order to go home and visit family at the end of the quarter. I don’t know the ultimate outcome of this story, but I do know we shifted the focus away from that which is meaningful to the company and management, to that which was meaningful for Jason. This process can and should be repeated. This is how we help people achieve their full potential. Other stories have evolved over the past year, paying off student loans in half the time, cutting in half the time it will take to accumulate the down payment for a house. A trip that was dreamed of but never viewed as attainable, doubling the credit cards payments being made. “Gems” come in all shapes and sizes.

The key is to initiate the discussion about the reality of what could be, and then enable the rep figure out how to make it matter personally. My usual starting point is to look at one’s potential versus their current performance. I almost always monetize the figure, but in some cases the “gem” is performing at a very high level to quicken the promotion to management. Once I have the value of the missed opportunity turned into a dollar figure, I ask reps to think about what they might do with the money. I don’t ask for a response today, rather I ask them to think about it for a couple of days, and ask family members “if we had an extra $3,000 in three months, what would we do with it?” It’s not the answer that’s important to me. Like my walk on the beach with Nicholas, I’m simply helping them identify the “gem” that has meaning to them. I then tie that identified goal into a daily activity that’s completely within their control. “Based on the data we have for you let’s figure out how many times you need to ask clients about deepening our relationship with them in order to make $3,000 in three months.”

I’m certain there are people for whom I just won’t find that leverage point, but too often we make the assumption that all service people just don’t have goals because they can’t articulate anything when asked to respond. Help them see the true and very real opportunities they have and then let them identify exactly what success means to them. Help them identify what until now has been hidden pain. Don’t be surprised if you see energy, engagement and enthusiasm spike when you’ve helped them find their elusive “gem”.

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.

What differentiates the very top and very bottom-ranked salespeople in a national call center for a major U.S. financial services company? SalesKey® scores of the top 1% of salespeople were compared with scores from those of the lowest 1%. Productivity is defined by assets brought under management.

The study is limited by the small sample size (N=27). Results may not generalize to the broader population.

Kolmogorov-Smirnov test confirmed that data conform to a normal distribution. Independent Samples T-Test showed that four scales strongly differentiated top and bottom performers in the sample (p<.05). The four measures are: Sales Initiative, Sales Aptitude, Telephone, and UpMarket.

Sales Initiative is the overall measure of Contact Hesitation, the disposition of a salesperson to make excuses or make sales contacts. Sales Initiative is a key Level 1 measurement; Level 1 of Barnett’s Integrated Developmental Model is made up of foundational career behaviors not cost-effective to train. The fact that Sales Initiative shows up in this study as a key differentiator adds credence to the Barnett’s developmental model.

Sales Aptitude measures the sales knowledge an individual might possess and belongs to Level 2 in Barnett’s Four Levels, Level 2 behaviors are those that impact the cost of training and managing a salesperson.

The final two differentiating scales are Telephone and UpMarket. Both are part of Level 4 of Barnett’s Developmental Model, behaviors and skills that improve the overall productivity of the salesperson. Interestingly, in this sample the significant Level 4 differentiators are “reversed;” that is, top performers scored lower than poor performers. Since the Telephone scale measures the degree to which a salesperson uses the phone without emotional barriers in the sales process, lower Telephone scores among top producers is extremely problematic in a phone sales environment and may help explain the high levels of burn-out among even top-rated salespeople.

UpMarket is a measure of social intimidation. Individuals with higher UpMarket scores are less likely to be intimidated by wealthy or influential buyers. In this study, top performing salespeople score lower, meaning they are somewhat intimidated by wealthy clientele. The reversed nature of these and other Level 4 scales probably indicate an overall lack of Level 4 development in the organization.

Although not meeting the statistical tests of certainty, descriptive statistics show that two other scales could be important in differentiating top performing salespeople from the poor performers. Goal is a Level 1 measure of the degree to which a salesperson is motivated by goals. The top 1% are driven more to excel and appear to be intrinsically motivated to do a good job.

Level 3 of Barnett’s Developmental Model addresses communication preferences within a sales dialogue. Top salespeople are somewhat more likely than poor performers to control the sales conversation and do not hesitate to ask for the business and handle objections. However, both groups score in the above average range.

The following recommendations were made by the researchers.
1. Hiring protocols should continue to focus on strong Level 1 attainment with a particular emphasis on Sales Initiative and intrinsic Goal-orientation.

2. The best way to help poor performers should be to help managers better diagnose and coach effectively to those Level 1 issues at which they are underperforming.

3. Training for top performers should focus on phone effectiveness overall and with up-market clientele specifically.

“I know Dave has the ability,” Kelly said. “How do I help him recover his potential?”

I explained that diagnosing this problem requires knowing the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic goal orientation. An extrinsically oriented salesperson is motivated to sell primarily to meet the goals other people set: meet the company quota, win a contest, or keep the manager off the rep’s back. The intrinsically oriented salesperson works to satisfy goals set by the individual him or herself because those goals represent something the rep personally values or needs. I call extrinsic motivation little “g.” It’s little because it possesses nowhere near the motivating power of big “G” — salespeople driven to achieve what’s intrinsically important to them. Reps with primarily a “little g” orientation rarely reach their potential and can be toxic to your team’s sales results. Large companies are filled with reps like Dave. The ability is there; the will is not. There is only one fix. Managers have to become extremely skilled at turning the little “g” into a big “G”.

Sales managers who can master the ability to identify the intrinsic motivators of their reps are able to maximize the performance of their teams. The alternative is to threaten, plead, and bribe in an effort to squeeze every ounce of production from salespeople. This only reinforces extrinsic motivation and virtually guarantees sporadic, mediocre performance. I cannot state this strongly enough, as long as goals are the manager’s or the company’s, sales teams may continue to hit corporate minimums but typically will fall far short of their true earning potential. Incentivize more prospecting contacts from extrinsically motivated salespeople and you will probably see the numbers improve, but the reps will not be focused on the return, and the bottom line may change only temporarily. When the contest is over, results fall back to previous levels. So, you’ll spin your sales team’s wheels faster but won’t make much progress. Corporations raise minimum targets and miraculously little “g” reps barely squeak above the bar, at least frequently enough not to get fired. This is especially costly for corporations who guarantee some level of income.

So, what’s the answer? If a salesperson is primarily motivated to do only enough to hit minimums there really is not much we can do about it. Or, that’s the fate sales managers accept because they don’t know how to transform little “g” into big “G.” It’s easier to learn to accept the mediocrity of those salespeople while pleading with the top producers to sell more, pounding into their heads every day the necessity of making more contacts, frustrating them until they decide it has to be better somewhere else. Only, it’s typically not much better somewhere else because corporate America has trained sales managers to be little “g” experts, focusing on what matters to the company and themselves instead of what matters to the people who are supposed to be out there selling everyday and making money. The real solution is to gain a new mentality about how we motivate salespeople.

When I told Kelly she needed to develop a shark mentality, she reacted with surprise as most folks do. Sharks often strike fear into people, but they are creatures perfectly adapted to their environment and task. Sharks swim around continually looking for blood. They can sense it from far away. When a manager has a shark mentality he or she is alert to even the faintest clue their sales reps give about what might motivate them to reach the full potential they have developed.

I told Kelly about another manager who was struggling with a similar situation: rep with great potential just satisfied to reach the corporate minimums and go home. The manager needed more from this rep and asking for more contacts produced additional activity but not better sales results. I suggested the manager become cognizant of conversations around the office and the pictures and other things that might pop up on this rep’s desk. The manager needed to sense the “blood” that would turn the rep’s little “g” into a big “G” so sales activities were personally meaningful to him and not just a checked box to keep management off his back. A couple weeks went by and the manager called back to enthusiastically report his shark mentality was developing. He overheard a conversation his rep was having about season tickets to a local professional sports team. A colleague asked him where his seats were in the stadium. The first rep replied that his seats were in the “nose-bleed” section because he couldn’t afford the more expensive seats closer to the action. The manager recognized the season tickets could be an intrinsic motivator for the salesperson. A conversation ensued around the possibilities of sitting in the lower bowl next season. They ran the numbers to figure out how much more revenue the salesperson needed to generate each quarter to afford the more expensive season tickets. Kelly shook her head like she got it when I told her that salesperson caught fire and in one quarter sold enough to switch seats in the middle of the season.

Managers should ask their people, “What do you want to accomplish?” If their answer is anything unconnected to a personal goal, their only motivation will be to keep their job and perform at corporate minimums regardless of what their potential is. It’s ok to start out by creating some “pain” to help motivate the rep with a little “g”. Try this: lay out what the salesperson could reasonably be capable of earning based on all the evidence; subtract out what they are currently making, and have them come to grips with how their life would change on a daily basis if they could collect all the money they were leaving on the table and they were living up to their full potential. Clearly illustrate just how much their little “g” goal orientation is costing them and in some situations their family. Once we establish a new level of desire and effort then we can be more effective as coaches, increasing the value of every conversation.

I am no longer amazed at the difference we can make in the earning power of salespeople as well as the level of personal satisfaction and fulfillment people discover in their work. It happens when managers focus on underlying personal motivators of behavior rather than merely on satisfying the company’s or our own desires. When a salesperson is infected with a little “g” goal orientation managers have to approach their reps in the same way salespeople must approach their prospects; focus on creating an awareness of needs (personal motivation) before we offer the relief (solution).

If you’re in the same situation as Kelly, saddled with a team of average producers, or perhaps frustrated by one under-achiever at the moment, take a step back. What lens are you looking through? Is the lens focused on your frustration they are not helping you hit your goals, or is the lens focused on helping them maximize their potential? Little “g” is an absolute “potential – killer”. If you want to help your reps maximize their potential and you want to maximize the potential of your entire team make sure you help them with the most fundamental aspect of sales: why am I doing this and what is the purpose of my next call? If that purpose is intrinsic, that is, coming from within to satisfy a personal desire rather than being focused on satisfying someone else’s goals, don’t be surprised to see extra effort going into every call, every day without needing you to babysit their daily activity. Being intrinsically goal-oriented is the life’s blood of selling. Like a shark, you can become perfectly adapted to your environment when you get the scent of that blood and follow wherever it leads in the hunt of helping reps clarify and get what is really important to them.

That was a little over a year ago. Recently, during a lunch break at a speaking engagement, I went to the Director of Training to see how our client was doing with the attrition problem. Here is the state of things today verbatim from HR:

16 months ago attrition was at 80% (average turnover in the call center industry is 44%)

Today the attrition rate is at 33%. There are multiple factors involved in that reduction, no doubt, not the least of which is the worsening economic climate that has tightened up the job market. But the downward trend had started before the economic crunch. The Company credits ServiceKey® as a critical component upon which they have changed the culture of the call center.

Based on company studies the training costs associated with a new hire in the call centers is $13,658. This means the drop in attrition over the past twelve months has led to savings in excess of 7 million dollars ($13,658 x 517 hires = $7,061,186). Assuming the ServiceKey platform (Hire Smarter) contributed to only 10% of that savings (very conservative estimate, we believe the impact is much higher), this client has still doubled their entire 2 year investment with PsyMetrics Global through this impact alone in 12 months.

Before implementing ServiceKey® (Train Faster) the firm got about 1 million dollars in outside client assets as a result of referrals from the service center reps to sales reps in 2007. In 2008 (implementation began early 08) outside asset growth from this source was approaching $84 million (that’s a difference of over $80 million) in outside client assets.

Prior to implementation the Company averaged 20 referrals a day to sales reps; after implementation they averaged approximately 500 referrals a day.

I do not know whether the news will ever hit the street through the Wall Street Journal, but I can say that there are a lot of high fives occurring inside this firm. They are making significant progress in tracking down the few behemoths in their industry when just a short four years ago they were rarely mentioned as a player.

Utilizing PsyMetrics Global programs of assessments and training, the company received a double-barreled impact; turnover down leading to significant savings, referrals skyrocket leading to significant asset growth! When executives decide to move decisively to impact attrition and sales results, and make a concerted effort to link service and sales organizations our programs can deliver extraordinary short-term and long-term returns. I cannot overstate the impact these programs can have in the hands of the right executive team. Without leading from the top few programs ever maximize their potential.

Click here for study (pdf)

Projection is used in psychological testing. Projective tests attempt to access the unconscious mind by asking the subject to respond to a neutral stimulus; the idea is that the individual will project unconscious desires, motivations, thoughts, etc. onto the neutral stimulus as a movie is projected onto a blank screen. Perhaps the most well-known projective test is the Rorschach inkblot test, where an individual’s interpretation of inkblots is assumed to stem from internal states (Exner, 2003). Another popular projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), where an individual is shown a picture and generates a narrative about the stimulus that is assumed to mirror the individual’s unconscious experience (Teglasi, 2001). Projective tests are often criticized for poor psychometrics. The purpose of this study was not to develop or use a projective test but rather to explore whether individuals project their basic Life Needs onto neutral stimuli. This could be an important aspect in both selling and customer service that could impact how some individuals respond to customer indifference or misread the emotional tone of sales and service interactions.

ServiceKey® is rooted in the theoretical model known as the Barnett Integrated Model (BIM; Barnett, 2008a). BIM integrates several theories (cognitive, behavioral, etc.) to understand employee development in certain professions in this case, the service profession. BIM does contain an element of psychodynamic theory in that Level Three of Barnett’s Four Levels contends that there are four basic Life Needs that manifest themselves in terms of work styles. These are the need for approval, attention, control, and information. This theory would predict that individuals would project their Life Needs onto neutral stimuli. There were four hypotheses for this study:

H₁ : It was hypothesized that individuals with a higher need for attention (performers) would demonstrate a tendency to interpret neutral facial expressions as boredom.

H₂ : It was hypothesized that individuals with a higher need for control (commanders) would demonstrate a tendency to interpret neutral facial expressions as anger.

H₃ : It was hypothesized that individuals with a higher need for information (analyzers) would demonstrate a tendency to interpret neutral facial expressions as curiosity or information-seeking.

H₄ : It was hypothesized that individuals with a higher need for the two extroverted Life Needs, attention and control, would be more likely to guess (or not select the IDK RESPONSE) than individuals with the introverted Life Needs.

Methods

Participants
A database of ServiceKey® profiles (n = 1,230) were analyzed.

Measures
ServiceKey®. The four Level Three scales (Approval, Attention, Control, and Information) were used in this study. For information about ServiceKey®, see Barnett (2008b).

Stimulus items. ServiceKey® contains seven items that are not scored. Each of these items consists of a black-and-white photograph of a person with a neutral facial expression. Subjects are asked to respond to the statement: This person is by selecting one of four responses, each representing an emotional state, or I don’t know. Two experts reviewed the stimulus items and concluded that the facial expressions were neutral, the individuals portrayed in the photographs were demographically heterogeneous, and that the stimulus items appeared to be free from any biasing factors.

The individual responses to each item were translated into scale scores, which were called projective scales in order to distinguish them from the standard ServiceKey® scales. For example, 6 of the 7 stimulus items offer bored as a response. The Bored scale was created by scoring whether or not the individual selected the bored response on each item, yielding a range of 0-6. The projective scales generated were angry, bored, information-seeking, and unsure (the number of times the respondent selected I don’t know).

Results

Preliminary analyses were conducted to ensure that the data met the assumptions for the analyses to be used. Attention and boredom were positively associated (r = .072, p = .011), as were control and boredom (r = .080, p = .005). Attention and unsure were negatively associated (r = -.092, p = .001), as were control and unsure (r = -.079, p = .005). None of the other correlations were statistically significant.

In order to confirm the methodology of constructing the projective scales (see Measures above), secondary analyses were conducted. Each item response was recoded as a dichotomous variable (e.g., bored and not bored). Four t -tests were then conducted comparing the means of the two groups (e.g., those who interpreted the neutral facial expression as bored and those who interpreted it as not bored) on the four ServiceKey® Level Three scales. Similar results were obtained, supporting the methodological use of the correlation analysis.

Discussion

The positive association between attention and boredom supports H_1. The additional finding that control and boredom were positively associated is not unexpected as individuals with a higher need for attention (performers) and individuals with a higher need for control (commanders) are similar in that both tend to have extroverted personalities. These results suggest that individuals with a higher need for attention and/or a higher need for control tend to interpret neutral facial expressions as boredom. This may represent a projection of the individual feeling bored him- or herself or a projection of fears of being considered boring. It may also be that performers have a higher threshold for social interaction, being less aware of subtle shifts in dealings with others.

The lack of association between control and anger means that H₂ is rejected. Individuals with a higher need for control (commanders) did not demonstrate any tendency to interpret neutral facial expressions as angry. Similarly, the lack of association between information and information-seeking means that H₃ is rejected. Individuals with a higher need for information (analyzers) did not demonstrate any tendency toward interpreting neutral facial expressions as information-seeking. The negative association between attention and unsure and control and unsure supports H₄ . This suggests that individuals with a higher need for attention (performers) and/or control (commanders), both of which tend to be extroverted personalities, were either more confident in their ability to interpret facial expressions or were less willing to enter an unsure response. Indeed, this result may explain some of the other results: it is possible that individuals with a higher need for approval (empathizers) and/or information (analyzers), both of which tend to be introverted personalities, responded more cautiously to items, leading to less projection, whereas extroverted personalities were more likely to guess, leading to more projection; this may explain why only the attention and control scales correlated with the projective scales.

It must be emphasized that the results of this study should be interpreted with extreme caution. This study was intended to be an exploration of Life Needs and projection. The low number of faces (7) means that each of the scales used for projection only consisted of 5-7 dichotomous items. Also, although the correlations were found to be statistically significant, the actual strength of those correlations was very weak. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that there is a statistically significant but very slight tendency for individuals with a higher need for attention (performers) and/or control (commanders) to project their internal states or fears onto neutral stimuli. In practical terms, this tendency is probably insignificant; however, these results provide evidence that the Level Three scales of ServiceKey® are tapping into actual Life Needs.

References

Barnett, D. K. (2008). Four levels of customer service. (In press)
Barnett, M. D. (2008). ServiceKey® technical manual: A technical manual for the Barnett Assessment of Service Behaviors. Granbury, TX: PsyMetrics Global.
Benjafield, J. G. (1996). A history of psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Exner, J. E., Jr. (2003). The Rorschach: A comprehensive system (4^th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Teglasi, H. (2001). Essentials of the TAT and other storytelling techniques assessment. New York: Wiley.
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"We have created the world’s first customer service assessment that allows businesses to get beyond how nice people may be to how they might behave in a service-to-sales environment," says Dr. David K. Barnett, developer of ServiceKey®.

The instrument measures 19 behavioral competencies in a 100 question multiple choice questionnaire administered exclusively online.