A critical task for leaders is to ensure that their followers are working efficiently toward the organization’s goals. In business, employees whose work is aligned with the organization’s objectives are more productive. So-called “performance management processes” are intended to create alignment between the employee’s work and the organization’s goals. A typical performance management process might include planning and setting goals, monitoring progress toward those goals, development and improvement, and periodic performance appraisals (or reviews). These performance management processes could be substantially improved by the use of personality assessments.

Personality is related to every meaningful individual difference. Scientifically validated personality assessments can predict substance use and abuse, longevity, relationship satisfaction, job performance, criminality, and occupational choice, just to list a few examples. Beyond these applications, well-validated personality assessments provide individuals with insights into their own motives, reputations and destructive behaviors, many of which they may not be aware of. Employees can use such strategic self-awareness to modify their behaviors at work to be more in line with the expectations of management. Consider the following (real) example.

Using Personality in Performance Management 

Maria is 36 years old and joined her company when she graduated from college. Since her first day on the job, she has been one of the top performers and has rapidly progressed to an upper-level management position. Senior managers have identified her as high potential, and she is in line for the next opening in the C-suite. Her stated goal is to reach the C-suite by age 40. While her superiors see her as a top performer, some of Maria’s co-workers and subordinates see her as pushy, overbearing and having unrealistic expectations for her staff. Some of her staff indicated that they did not like the “within-team” competitions Maria set up to motivate performance. A few suggested that they did not particularly like working for Maria and that they would consider leaving their positions with the company.

As part of her performance management plan, Maria completed a well-validated personality assessment. The assessment consisted of three parts: Maria’s drivers and motivators; her reputation or everyday behavior; and the “dark side” tendencies, or de-railers, that detract from her performance. Her scores on drivers and motivators indicated that Maria was motivated by competition, the thrill of winning and taking charge of situations. Her reputational scores indicated that other people perceive Maria as ambitious, leaderlike and competitive. Finally, her dark side scores indicated that Maria was prone toward risk-taking behavior and overconfidence.

Post-assessment, Maria met with a certified assessment user to discuss her results. During the session, she learned that she sees the world differently than others, particularly her subordinates. While Maria values competition, she learned that other people – particularly many of her subordinates – find competition off-putting and uncomfortable. This knowledge helped Maria better understand why her superiors viewed her differently from her subordinates. More importantly, it helped her develop a plan for behavioral change. Specifically, Maria now begins meetings with her staff by listening to them. This approach allows her staff to set their own expectations and Maria to use them as a starting point, rather than setting unrealistic expectations. While Maria was encouraged to retain her own competitive drive, she has removed the within-team competition and replaced it with both individual and team-based goals for performance.

Overall, Maria found the experience of taking personality assessments and receiving feedback on them to be beneficial. They helped her learn about her hidden biases and how they were affecting her workplace performance. The strategic self-awareness Maria gained by taking personality assessments was a critical part of her performance management, as it helped her perform better as a leader, thereby better aligning her behavior with the company’s goals.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

*Photo by Thomas Drouault on Unsplash.

*This article was authored by Hogan Chief Science Officer Ryne Sherman, and was originally published by Training Industry on December 10, 2018.

In January of 2017, Les Snead, the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, had a tough choice to make. Hired in 2013, his team had not had a winning record since 2003 and had moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles just a year earlier. Expectations in LA were high, and it was time for Snead to find a new head coach. The safe and easy choice would be a seasoned, veteran head coach who was no stranger to the biggest stage in American sports. Jon Gruden, who won a Super Bowl in 2003 (2002 season), seemed to be an obvious candidate. Or, you take a look at successful college coaches, such as Nick Saban, who has won six NCAA championships as head coach at the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University. Both of these coaches had proven records as head coaches and were realistic candidates to fill the Rams’ coaching vacancy.

Instead, Snead hired Washington Redskins Offensive Coordinator Sean McVay, who also was a former assistant wide receivers coach under Gruden in 2008. At 30 years old, McVay was the youngest coach in NFL history. The results have been tremendous. In two seasons McVay has lead the Rams to a 26-9 record (including playoff games). On February 3, just nine days after his 33^rd birthday, McVay will coach his team against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIII.

As the spread offense, which is popular in college football, began to slowly infiltrate the NFL, disruption was imminent. All of a sudden, offensive innovation became a priority, but not all teams saw it coming. The Rams, preferring to disrupt rather than be disrupted, took a chance and hired McVay. They hired him because he knew how to get the ball into the hands of those who could score touchdowns, which he did for three seasons as offensive coordinator of the Washington Redskins. It was obvious he had the necessary competencies to orchestrate a successful offense, and that was the top priority.

We don’t know if the Rams used personality assessments to hire McVay, but we do know that you can learn a lot about McVay’s personality by what he does (i.e., his behavior) and what others say about him (i.e., his reputation). Following a game in 2017 when he was criticized for how the Rams poorly managed their timeouts, McVay said the following:

“With some of the previous ones (timeouts) it might have been a miscommunication – guys were confused or things like that – but all things being equal, it starts with me. I’ve got to do a better job with that.”

When talking to media in 2018 just a few days before playing the New Orleans Saints, McVay was asked about what he’s learned from Wade Phillips, his 71-year-old defensive coordinator and former NFL head coach. Here’s his response:

“A guy like him, I feel great to work and learn from him every day.”

Both of these quotes tell us a lot about McVay’s humble character, and his willingness to both admit mistakes and put good people around him, even if one of them (Phillips) was defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles the year he was born.

Following their 26-23 win over the New Orleans Saints in the NFC Championship to reach Super Bowl LIII, Rams left tackle, Andrew Whitworth, said this about his coach:

“He’s a coach that knows his team. He knew we needed to do something to get things going our way, and he believed his team could get it done. That sounds simple, but it’s actually huge.”

And, perhaps the most important quote following the NFC Championship came from Snead:

“The idea was for him to come in and help us create a winning environment.”

At Hogan, we believe effective leaders are those who can develop and maintain high-performing teams. This involves possessing the required competencies for the job, being humble, getting the most out of the individuals on your team, and creating an environment where they can succeed. Gruden might have been a safe choice back in 2017, but he went 4-12 as head coach of the Oakland Raiders this year. On February 3, he won’t be coaching his team in the Super Bowl. He will be watching his former assistant wide receivers coach lead the Rams in the Super Bowl instead.

According to Hogan Assessments founder Robert Hogan, life is about competition. There’s competition within groups to attain status, and those who win generally are those with good social skills. There’s also competition between groups, and the groups with the strongest leaders win in this arena.

Competition within groups is what fascinates and entertains people. However, competition between groups, such as the increasing rivalry between the United States and China, has real worldwide consequences.

In a new video, Robert Hogan takes on these topics and more, in “The Nature of Human Nature.”

No one likes a know-it-all.

They’ve annoyed us all by talking down to us about anything and everything, even when it’s obvious they know far less than they believe. But know-it-alls don’t just ruin watercooler gatherings and dinner parties. When they rise to positions of power, they can wear away at productivity and trigger costly mistakes.

Joann S. Lublin wrote an entertaining article on the subject in the Wall Street Journal. She interviewed a number of self-professed former know-it-alls that caused major problems for themselves and their companies, such as losing over $2 million on a home purchase, hiring an unsuitable job candidate, and not asking subordinates for their input.

The know-it-all causes all kinds of professional headaches. They don’t try to learn about an issue or ask for help, which leads to poor decisions. They ignore some people or are condescending to others, which leads to a toxic work environment. They project a false aura of power and knowledgeability, which gets them promoted into jobs they might not actually be able to perform.

Right now, the United States has a perfect example of know-it-all leadership – President Donald Trump. Even before his election, he’s directly and literally said he knows it all. Axios compiled a list of all the things Trump has said he knows about more than anyone, including campaign finance, ISIS, the visa system, international borders, international trade, and drone technology, just to name a few of their nearly two dozen examples.

Despite the bravado, Trump’s declarations of expertise have created a culture of chaos in the White House and beyond. His claim that ISIS was defeated became his justification to immediately pull the U.S. military from Syria, a decision that caused confusion in the Pentagon and ultimately led to the departure of this secretary of defense. His insistence on a trade war with China has created new challenges for Apple and other American companies. And rather than tackle the numerous complex and technical issues along the U.S./Mexico border, he is insisting on a wall and walked out of negotiations to reopen the government when Democrats refused.

Though the political news of the day seems bleak, the know-it-alls in Lublin’s article took significant steps to improve their behavior. One made certain his managerial hires hold diverse viewpoints, and he encourages them to call him an idiot. Another gave his committee more power when making hiring decisions. All of them took a similar approach – they became more humble.

Humble leadership is the flip side of know-it-alls. Rather than assuming they know what’s best, humble leaders turn to their co-workers and ask questions in order to make the most informed decision possible. At Hogan Assessments, we define humility as self-awareness, appreciating the strengths and contributions of others, and openness to new ideas and feedback toward personal performance. Know-it-alls generally lack those three characteristics.

Furthermore, humble leaders become more successful than know-it-alls. They don’t allow their sense of self-worth to interfere with leading their organization to success.  A recent study revealed high levels of humility lead to higher rates of employee engagement, more job satisfaction, and lower rates of turnover. Humility is the antidote to know-it-alls.

Although Lublin’s interviewees became self-aware enough to change their habits, not all know-it-alls can correct their habits without outside intervention or a particularly costly mistake. Personality assessments can also help know-it-alls understand what they’re doing. No matter the method, increasing self-awareness and learning to ask questions is clearly a better strategy than pretending you know everything while showing the world you clearly don’t.

Political passions are running white-hot in the United States right now. Between Supreme Court nominations, immigration, racial issues, and health care, both sides of the political spectrum are fighting fiercely to win. It’s easy to believe we’re more divided than ever.

With so much at stake, you’d hope the most qualified candidates would rise to the top. Let’s just say that doesn’t always happen. Far too often, people will elect candidates with low qualifications, unworkable ideas, and downright questionable mental capabilities such as (insert the name of an elected official you personally don’t like here).

Since analyzing job fit is what we do, we started wondering what the ideal characteristics of a successful, generic, non-partisan politician would be. However, researchers have produced few studies examining work-specific personality aspects of U.S. politicians, and we didn’t want to just dictate our idea of the ideal politician. This is a democracy, after all.

That’s why Hogan researchers Michael Tapia and Chase Winterberg turned to the American people. The two set out to determine what characteristics and competencies the public wanted from politicians in general, and whether they varied by political affiliation. To do that, they surveyed people about their perception of an ideal politician using Hogan’s Job Evaluation Tool, which incorporates the full spectrum of personality scales we use to predict work-related performance.

Long story short, the study found there’s not a big difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to their preferred characteristics of elected officials. Both parties associated high political job performance with high scores on Ambition, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Prudence, and Learning Approach. Participants identified Imaginative and Dutiful as top elected official derailers. Commerce, Power, Affiliation, and Science were voted the top values for elected officials.

Overall, Republicans and Democrats showed an 83% overlap over the top-12 rated competencies. Though there are some differences, the strong overlap is a powerful contradiction to the perceived differences in today’s political arenas. Despite the widening political divide, we feel it is possible to create a universal standard for judging elected official job fit.

But if that’s the case, why can’t Democrats and Republicans agree on, well, anything? Tapia and Winterberg argue that gulf arose due to a political system that ignores job-related competence and focuses on conflict rather than resolution. Would showing the public there’s a clear consensus on the ideal politician personality help close that gap? If nothing else, it’s more productive than arguing politics with strangers on the Internet yet again.

The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre’s interesting new book, is a kind of feminist treatise focusing on the lives and work of the two amazing women, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, who developed and promoted the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI is the best known and most widely used personality “instrument” in the world. I never met the authors, but I knew pretty much everyone responsible for the development of the MBTI in the 1960s—both the critics and the proponents. It might be informative to reflect briefly on the pros and cons of this remarkably successful assessment product. In my view, there are five aspects of the MBTI that are positive and worth remembering.

First, the original goal of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is both worthy and honorable: It was intended to be used to improve the lives of working people by providing a rational basis for aligning people with jobs. It was designed to be used as a placement tool, a convenient and easy-to-use method for sorting employees in ways that maximized their happiness and the productivity of organizations. Who would not be in favor of maximizing individual happiness and corporate productivity?

Second, the MBTI is rooted in Jungian psychology. Carl Jung was a brilliant and highly eccentric psychiatrist, and a brave early supporter of Freud and psychoanalysis. After the famous 1913 break between Freud and Jung, Freud’s supporters engaged in a long and successful campaign to discredit Jung’s ideas, even though Freud adopted many of them as his own. Freud had a profound and, in many ways, negative impact on personality psychology for over 60 years; his influence began to decline in the 1970s, although for the wrong reasons. Freud argued that everyone is neurotic, that the big problem in life concerns dealing with one’s neurosis, and the goal of assessment is to identify the source of peoples’ neuroses. In contrast, the MBTI is all about people’s strengths; as such, it is deeply anti-Freudian and one of the first contributions to what is known today as “positive psychology.”

Third, a major reason for the MBTI’s popular appeal is that it describes people in terms of types, and I believe this is how we naturally think about other people. Academic psychologists, for reasons that only they understand, are devoted to trait theory. It is not a question of using trait theory to get beyond the conventional wisdom of types (the goal of most academic psychology), it is a question of carving nature at its joints—as recommended by Aristotle. For that reason, the MBTI with its focus on types is still ahead of the game.

Fourth, the MBTI can in fact be used to tailor marketing arguments for specific groups of people. The sort of argument that would appeal to an INTJ (a scientist) is, in principle, quite different from the sort of argument that would appeal to an ESFP (a new-age hipster). It is a relatively easy task to use peoples’ social media data to assign them to an MBTI type and then shape messaging accordingly.

Finally, using Myers-Briggs Type Indicator scores to align people with jobs is vastly preferable to using unguided intuition to align people with jobs. Talent management decisions should be based on assessment data not the reasoned judgment of HR professionals, no matter how experienced they are.

I believe that the MBTI also presents four problems that should be considered by potential users. First, the MBTI is often used to make personnel decisions without first gathering validity data to support the decisions. This is, of course, a problem attributable to the users and not the instrument. However, the MBTI’s simplicity and ease of use facilitates these kinds of deplorable abuses.

Second, the news derived from the MBTI is always positive and upbeat. But people can only improve their performance if they know what they are doing wrong.  MBTI results have nothing to say about the dark side, about behavioral tendencies that annoy and alienate other people and destroy the trust and confidence on which relationships depend and which support positive career development. Consequently, the MBTI has limited utility for career coaching purposes.

Third, the MBTI, along with the Five-Factor Model (FFM) that is the universally accepted paradigm for trait psychologists, has nothing to say about the up-down or status dimension in life. Every human group has a status hierarchy, with people at the top, people in the middle, and people at the bottom; in addition, the principal dynamic in every human group is the individual search for power. On issues of ambition and power seeking, the MBTI and the FFM are equally uninformative.

And finally, like most other major commercially available assessments (the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the California Psychological Inventory, the Strong Vocational Interest Inventory), there have been no significant updates or changes to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator since its original publication. It is expensive and troublesome to upgrade a major assessment with a large archival base, but imagine how hard it is for BMW to come out with a new product line every three years. Upgrading a psychological assessment is trivial by comparison.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

Does personality change? This is a question we receive regularly from our clients, along with a lot of hypotheses about when and why scores shift. Answering this seemingly straightforward question actually requires addressing three related questions:

1. How often do scores on assessments change?
2. When scores on assessments change, how large are those changes?
3. Why do scores on assessments sometimes change?

How often do scores on assessments change?

Personality assessments—like the ones we create at Hogan—measure patterns of behavior. Decades of research have demonstrated that personality assessments predict future behavior, including workplace performance. A major reason why personality assessments work so well at predicting future behavior is because personality is quite stable; that is, people do not change very much. For example, in one study elementary school teacher ratings of students’ personalities predicted how those students behaved as adults 40 years later! The best method for quantifying personality stability is the test-retest correlation: you take a test now and we see how well it predicts your scores on the same test in the future. The short term (14-21 day) test-retest correlations for the Hogan Personality Inventory scales range from .69-.87. The long term (8-year) test-retest correlations range from .30-.73. A meta-analysis of 3,217 (7-year) test-retest correlations ranged from .30-.70. The point here is this: personality test scores are highly stable. Thus, most of the time, a person retaking a personality assessment will get very similar results.

When scores on assessments change, how large are those changes?

If you are a careful reader, you will note that “very similar results” is not the same thing as “identical results,” or that the test-retest correlations just described are not perfect. Indeed, even over short intervals, test scores do fluctuate. This is true for all tests, including cognitive ability and even medical tests (e.g., blood pressure, glucose tests, etc.). For Hogan, reassessments typically fall within two raw points of the original assessment. This indicates a small degree of fluctuation, and typically does not change the interpretation of the overall profile.

Why do scores on assessments sometimes change?

Consider the following situation: Your doctor measures your cholesterol levels. After some time has passed, your doctor measures your cholesterol again to discover the result has changed. In this scenario, there are two broad (and obvious) reasons the result changed: (a) something about the measurement process changed and/or (b) your actual cholesterol levels changed. Likewise, for psychological assessments, changes in scores may occur because of measurement-related and/or individual/psychological reasons.

Changes Related to the Measure

Sometimes aspects of the testing and measurement process itself result in score changes upon reassessment. There are three major methodological reasons scores on a psychological assessment might change: (1) imprecision in measurement, (2) changes in forms, and (3) changes in norms.

Imprecision in Measurement. When a doctor measures your cholesterol, he or she is not literally measuring all of the cholesterol in your bloodstream. Only a small sample of your blood is taken, and this sample is assumed to represent all of your bloodstream. Cholesterol in one sample may vary from cholesterol in another sample. Thus, one reason your cholesterol levels might change is because the instruments and procedures employed are imperfect. These imperfections are referred to as measurement errors. On a personality assessment, most people will always mark the item “I like to bend the rules every now and then” as either True or False no matter how many times they are asked. However, for a small group of people, whether they mark True or False to this item may depend on something that has happened to them recently (e.g., watched a movie about prisoners; sped through an intersection). Such imprecision in measurement affects the person’s score on the assessment. The good news is that these measurement errors occur randomly, meaning that the tests are unbiased. Such imperfections are present in all assessments, including medical tests. In developing our assessments, we work to reduce measurement error to the minimum possible. The short-term test-retest correlations reported above indicate that measurement error is quite low for our assessments.

Changes in forms. At Hogan, we believe in Kaizen Psychometrics. This means we work to continually improve our assessments. In doing so, we regularly update our testing instruments with new, better, forms when they are available. Because the new forms are designed to be better, they are not identical to the previous forms. Thus, a person completing an assessment on an earlier form and later taking an assessment on a new form, may receive slightly different scores.

Changes in norms. Because raw scales score can be hard to interpret (e.g., what does a 7 out of 12 mean?), we report normed (percentile) scores for our clients. Our norms are calculated from a stratified sample of millions of assessments completed by test-takers from nearly every job in every sector all over the world. However, in keeping with our commitment to Kaizen Psychometrics, we continually work to update our norms as better or more representative samples become available. As a result, a person completing an assessment scored on a previous norm may receive slightly different scores on a more recent assessment using updated norms.

Changes Related to the Individual

Beyond methodological reasons for change, there are also psychological reasons scores on assessments can change over time related to (a) maturity, (b) major life events, and (c) feedback and coaching.

Maturity. Although personality is relatively stable, personality does change across the lifespan. People become more self-confident, agreeable, conscientious, and more emotionally stable as they age. This pattern of personality development is typical for most people and reflects maturation into adulthood. As a result, such changes in personality are most dramatic for teenagers and young adults (early 20s), with personality becoming more stable with age. Thus, assessments taken over a shorter time span and assessments taken by older adults are less likely to show change.

Major Life Events. Personality can also change due to life events or personal experiences. For example, personality does seem to change in the wake of major life events (e.g., unemployment, marriage, divorce). Likewise, there is some evidence that experience in the military can result in personality change. However, people tend to adapt and return towards their baseline scores shortly after, even when these events are traumatic (such as bereavement) or conversely, positive (such as winning the lottery). Large changes due to major life events are rarely permanent, though small changes may be more lasting. Assessments taken recently after a major life event may show dramatically different results from assessments taken under more normal circumstances. However, in our experience, these results are still accurate at the time of assessment. For example, if a person experiencing a personal trauma scores lower on a scale measuring stress tolerance compared to their baseline, this is often a real and interpretable result. In other words, even though the change in scores may be temporary, they should not be discarded as “inaccurate.”

Assessment Feedback and Coaching. Finally, there is evidence that personality can change as a result of intentional practice and/or expert feedback and coaching. Likewise, effective coaching in business contexts appears to affect personal and organizational outcomes. However, in such cases the change in personality assessment scores tends to be relatively small. Thus, while coaching can be effective, we would expect any changes to manifest in 360° or performance feedback rather than in personality test results. When changes do occur, it is impossible to discern whether this is due to actual developmental growth or due to increased awareness about one’s assessment results (e.g., the person becomes aware of tendency to be arrogant and un- or sub-consciously manipulates assessment responses). These changes can and do occur in both directions: (1) the score becomes more exaggerated or (2) decreases in strength due to heightened awareness.

Summary

Personality is quite stable overall. Changes in scores on re-assessments of personality are rare, usually small, and often due to methodological reasons related to the assessment rather than meaningful psychological reasons specific to the individual. Thus, when a reassessment looks very different from the original result, it is best to verify whether these differences are driven by methodological reasons first (changes in forms or norms). Although less common, assessment results may change due to psychological factors (maturation, life events, or intentional efforts). However, such changes usually are not very large or meaningful, and are difficult to interpret.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

*This post was co-authored by Hogan’s Chief Science Officer, Ryne Sherman, and Hogan’s Director of Global Learning, Jackie VanBroekhoven Sahm.

Choosing the right assessment for selecting or developing employees can make or break the success of a talent initiative. Why bother using assessments that don’t predict performance, or that fail to resonate with your business leaders?

When deciding on the right assessment for your valuable talent, pay attention to the scientific rigor with which the instruments have been tested. Any good tool should have concrete data demonstrating its validity and reliability. Validity and reliability can tell you two general things: 1) that the assessment is measuring what you want it to, and 2) that it will reliably assess the same thing each time — ensuring that the results you get aren’t a one-off.

An easy way to think about this concept is with a bullseye metaphor: The very center of the bullseye is exactly what you want to assess.

Reliable but not valid means that you are consistently testing the same thing over and over again, but it’s not testing what you want to test.

Valid but not reliable means that the average scores align with the goals of the test, but individual scores are inconsistent.

Both reliable and valid means that the test will consistently measure what it is supposed to over a period of time – it’s consistently hitting the bullseye.

What is Validity?

Validity refers to the accuracy of the assessment. In essence, does it measure what it is supposed to measure? While there are several types of validity to pay attention to, the most important for our purposes is predictive validity.

Predictive validity tells us how accurate a tool is at predicting a certain outcome. In the case of personality assessments, a good tool will be able to predict how well someone will perform their job. Validity is typically measured with a coefficient between -1 and 1 (called the Pearson correlation coefficient). The closer to one, the higher the predictive power of the test. The predictive validity of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is .29 for predicting performance across job families. However, when the HPI is combined with the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) and Motives, Values, and Preferences Inventory (MVPI), that number jumps to .54. While this may not seem very high, a good comparison is to look at the validity for something completely unrelated.

For example, the predictive validity of ibuprofen for pain reduction is only .14. For another, more closely-related example, the correlation between structured job interviews and job performance is .18. There are many ways of measuring validity, some more useful than others. Any assessment provider worth their salt should be able to provide you with evidence of validity. If they don’t, it’s worth considering why not.

What is Reliability?

Reliability, on the other hand, refers to the consistency of the test. The reliability of an assessment can be evaluated in two broad ways: 1) internal consistency and 2) test-retest reliability.

Test-retest reliability is a measure of consistency of responses over time. In other words, are people responding to questions the same way each time they take the test? Inconsistent responses can indicate that assessments results are not actually measuring personality, which should be relatively stable over time. Test-retest reliability uses a correlation of scores (again, using the Pearson coefficient) from a first assessment and a second assessment sometime later. For Hogan, the short-term test-retest reliability is .81 for the HPI, .70 for the HDS, and .79 for the MVPI.

Internal consistency relates to the questions that are used in each assessment. Test takers will notice that many questions appear to measure the same thing. This is on purpose. Asking a question in a few different ways helps us to ensure that we are getting an accurate measurement of the concept. Internal consistency scores are measured between 0 and 1 (this time with a coefficient called Cronbach’s alpha).ⁱ The closer to one, the higher the internal consistency reliability. The average internal consistency for the HPI scales is .76, .71 for the HDS, and .76 for the MVPI.

The important thing to note is that there is no one right way to measure reliability or validity. In fact, assessment publishers should constantly be monitoring their products to ensure they are as effective as they claim. Hogan Assessments are far above industry standards with continual evaluation of our own assessments. We are partial though, and we encourage you to seek out this information with any assessment system you choose.

Hogan Assessments have appeared in over 400 peer-reviewed publications to ensure that our tests are hitting the bullseye. We invite you to contact us for more information on the validity and reliability of Hogan Assessments at info@hoganassessments.com or +1 918 749 0632.

Note

i. Absolute value. Scores between -1 and 0 indicate a negative correlation.