I work for a company that places significant importance on the way employees interact with their superiors, peers, and subordinates. Within the company, we believe that having a better understanding of an employee’s personality can make them a more effective employee overall and improve their interactions with others. We use aspects of the psychodynamic approach to leadership in our office through these types of assessments.
Our company utilizes a standard personality assessment, called a “time style”, that is given to each employee upon hire. The purpose of the assessment is to identify different aspects of the individual’s personality, and rank them on several characteristics including: considerate, systematic, spirited, and direct. The questions are geared toward the work environment, and how the individual would approach a specific situation or tackle a given problem or conflict. Then, the results are posted online and in paper outside of everyone’s office. The idea is that when you are moving to a new manager, or joining a new team, you will first look at their time style, and understand how they approach problems and determine the best way to interact with them. The assessment scores can even help management to determine which employees should go to which teams and managers, since a person with a given set of scores may be more effective working under a manager of a given set of scores, or on a team that has a specific team makeup of scores. Usually they try to have representation of all types of individuals on each team so that they can take advantage of their “specialization” in a given area while minimizing the impact of their negative aspects. For example, in my own assessment I scored highly on the spirited characteristic, and lowest on the considerate characteristic. Based on the definitions of each characteristic, having a high spirited score meant that I may be inclined to projects that are free-form and creative with little guidelines, or a manager that allows me to dictate my own pace of work and is fairly hands off. In the same way, a high score in spirited may mean that I have trouble approaching very difficult tasks, and prefer short, easy tasks to long-term, challenging ones. Scoring low on the considerate aspect means that I may not be willing to take on another person’s work for them in case we fall behind on a project, or that I would rarely check in with my boss just to see how he is doing, or discuss topics outside of a work context with them.
Using this type of assessment is similar to a psychodynamic approach to leadership for several reasons. First, they are similar because both attempt to put people into “archetypes”. The use of this type of assessment takes into account the interactions between people of different archetypes, to most effectively group them together. These archetypes may have different names than those usually associated with leadership in business, such as The Magician or Warrior, but they still represent personality traits that can determine how effective the employee or leader will be, and how they will approach different situations (Grabarek, n.d.). The assessment contains a rubric that provides the individual taking the test with the definition of each aspect, and corresponding examples of how a person high or low in a given aspect may approach a situation. The assessment itself is also similar to the psychodynamic approach in that it is a representation of a transactional analysis, because it focuses on how different personalities interact and work together. Grabarek (n.d.) describes this relationship as, “When leaders act as leaders, they elicit follower reactions from followers. Similarly, followers elicit reactions from leaders”. From this perspective, it is useful to study both the leader and the follower to understand their interaction together. The assessment even works to resolve issues with the “shadow self”. The shadow self represents the negative aspects of an individuals personality that may be hard to see without an objective perspective (Grabarek, n.d.). When the individual is made more aware of these negative aspects of their personality, they can be more conscious of how they behave and are perceived by others, and even change their interactions based on this information. Ultimately, this type of assessment exemplifies the psychodynamic approach because of its focus on personality and the interactions of people with different personalities.
The assessment used in our office is less closely related to applying a trait approach to leadership and superior/subordinate interaction. Although the main aspect of the assessment is essentially to define traits of the individual that will lead them to be effective in a given area, the traits that define the trait approach are not similar to the ones on the assessment. The Big Five personality factors (FFM) that form part of the trait approach, such as neuroticism or extraversion, are used to examine very different traits from the four factors used in the assessment, and do not correlate to similar personality types (Northouse, 2013, p.27). Every aspect on the assessment is mainly a positive one, whereas neuroticism is solely negative. The assessment also differs from the trait approach in that the ultimate purpose is to facilitate a greater understanding of the superior or peer and their interaction. This approach recognizes that the effectiveness of the follower and leader is to be derived from the interaction of these traits, and not just from the traits of the leader in a vacuum. Therefore, it is not as one-sided as the trait approach, and takes both members of the interaction into account (Northouse, 2013, p.31).
There are some inherent issues with this kind of assessment. First of all, it is unclear if the results actually represent the individual accurately, or is based in research. It may actually benefit the results of the exam to have more similarity to the Big Five, since traits like extraversion have been shown to have an strong relationship to leadership (Northouse, 2013, p.27). The assessment is only taken once, so it does not account for changes in the employee’s approach over time. The employee or manager could be stuck being perceived in a certain way by their subordinates or peers, when in fact they have changed their approach enough to affect their score on a new assessment, and they have worked to resolve the flaws that they identified as being part of their original set of scores. Since everyone is aware of the test upon being hired, and what the scores mean (because they are made publicly available) then in rare cases a person could try to “cheat” the test by getting the scores they want to match them with a specific team, project, or manager. The questions are fairly transparent, and an intelligent person could likely figure out which types of responses would result in the score for each characteristic they are looking for. The psychodynamic approach itself has been criticized for being difficult to define, measure, and examine scientifically. Much of the current research is based on case studies, which typically have smaller sample sizes and may not be representative of behavior across a variety of groups (Grabarek, n.d.).
Overall, I think it is important that companies continue to use these types of personality assessments to gain insight into individual differences in leadership and interaction. Even so, they must do so with the understanding that the information from these assessments is not infallible, and should only drive one aspect of the organization’s understanding of an individual, as opposed to paint the entire picture of this individual’s approach to work. If it is to be used for the purpose of team assignment, managerial assignment, or even promotion, this must be used in conjunction with other assessments to gain the best understanding of the individual as a whole.
References
Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership: theory and practice (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Pennsylvania State University, World Campus. (n.d.). Lesson 2: Trait Approach. Retrieved from :https://courses.worldcampus.pus.edu/fa14/psych485/001/content/02_lesson/06_page.html
Pennsylvania State University, World Campus. (n.d.). Lesson 3: Psychodynamic Approach. Retrieved from :https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/fa14/psych485/002/content/03_lesson/07_page.html