PsyOn Management Consulting

03/03/2023

A well-orchestrated HR practice transforms a newly hired employee into a seamless part of the team from day one.

This is what we are working on since 2004, this is what Incorporative HR does, as it expertly embeds the new hire within the workgroup.

This method involves a strategic approach, where team members are meticulously prepared to take on new roles and responsibilities, ensuring smooth and efficient work distribution. In short, Incorporative HR creates a harmonious work environment where everyone is set up for success.

21/02/2023

New Research Reveals Key Factors for Employee Retention: Insights from 700 Participants and Repertory Grid Methodology

Our objective was to determine which positions should be given specific tasks and decision-making power to play the role in retention that employees expect them to play.

Using the Repertory Grid method, we asked which positions have an influence on each factor of retention according to the employee, i.e. which position is expected to take action or support. We identified three main results:

1. Onboarding vs Incorporation

Regardless of the hierarchical level, each group relies on its micro-environment for forming peer relationships and integration. By considering both processes as identical and placing them in the hands of the same positions, the need arises to shift focus from the 'onboarding' side (preparing the new person for the functioning of the company, the group, and the workplace) to the 'onboarding' side of preparing the old employees and the existing group to welcome the new employee.

2. Contribution-based retention tools

In the communication factor, we identified Schein's (1996) three cultures (operators, engineers, executives) differentiated by contribution. This highlights the need for differentiated retention tools, as the three subcultures have different orientations and types of attachment to the firm. A homogeneous retention strategy does not achieve the desired effect for any of the subcultures.

3. Ownership of work-life integration

This factor is where employees expect to have the least control over company positions, with only a few positions of influence in this area. As we move up the firm, the influence of institutional decisions on the work-life balance increases. Direct employees’ influence is transformed into the influence of management and HR as it reaches the top. At the executive level, employees manage this balance through personal agreements between themselves. At top levels, there is a demand (HR, management-ownership resolution) for system-level work-life balance regulation (flexible working hours, teleworking, possibility and extent of HO) and the enforceability of this regulation.

These results could lead to new methods and techniques, as well as a concrete action plan.

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and visit our home page: www.psyon.hu

19/02/2023

Goldmine of Personality Tests

Anyone who wants to create a personality test today has a much easier job than the psychologists of the 30s-40s.

A real validated test is a lot of work. Once you know what factors you want to measure, you have to come up with questions for those.

Then you have to see whether the questions are really measuring the factor you want; whether, for example, the statement "I would be willing to work hard to drive an expensive car" is measuring motivation or motivation to acquire a status symbol.
Once we have this, and we have eliminated many questions that we like but have no relationship with the factor we want to measure, we need to carefully analyze whether the question has any discriminatory power.
If we give four response options, respondents should choose the four options in equal proportions. I.e. equal numbers should choose "Strongly Agree", "Agree", "Disagree" and "Strongly Disagree". In the past, a test was usually "administered" to a sample of at least 3000 people, representing the population by age, education, and gender. Science needs that many, the market is now content with a sample of 2-300 people.
Questions for which the answers are not so evenly distributed go down the drain.
Then there is factor analysis, where we measure that each of our factors measures something different and expect that there is no statistical relationship between them. Because if there is, one of our factors must be discarded.
It remains to interpret the results so that whoever uses the test knows what conclusions can and cannot be drawn from the results (sometimes this is more important than the former).
The time of the Pioneers of the Great Test Making is over. An international scientific project has created a question-factor database of tests available to them, already well-tested and repeatedly reviewed from different aspects.
More than 3000 questions, around 250 personality factors - one can just open this goldmine and, in a flash, put together a questionnaire of e.g., the scales of adaptability - ambition - balance - sociability - assertiveness. If you find the questions long, you can replace them with words: for example, instead of "I am very curious", just write "Curious".
I wanted to share this upfront before starting the dialogue on the common tests in use in selection processes or HR development projects.
I think it is worth seeing how much work psychologists and the professional community have 'put in' to make methods reliable, and also what allows ever simpler, shorter methods that require less background knowledge thus introducing more and more tests to the market.

Follow our Psychology at work LinkedIn page for more!

The image below is taken from the database website, the blue ones are links to the test questions (and answer choices) while the dark blue ones are for the factors.

19/02/2023

Cracking the Code of Personality: The Fascinating World of the Big Five Traits

Using an analogy:

While the MBTI and Disc say people can be grouped according to their preferred color pencil, the Big Five (Costa and McCrae, 1992), and its predecessor, the Super Three (Eysenck, 1967), say that everyone has the same set of colored pencils, with the length of different colored pencils vary from individual to individual.

Eysenck interpreted personality traits through the properties of the nervous system - the level of nervous system arousal (extro-introversion scale), the speed (Neuroticism scale), and flexibility (Rigidity scale) of nervous system processes can be measured, among others, with medical instruments and repeated measurements produce the same results.

Eysenck even proved that personality traits do not represent two ends of a single scale (i.e., not going from "a little like that" to "very like that") but cover completely different behaviors. The Big Five added two traits to the Super Three model :
O - openness to experience (Sensation seeking scale, Zuckermann, 1971)
C - conscientiousness E - extro-introversion scale (Eysenck)
A - agreeableness Rigidity scale (Eysenck)
N - neuroticism (Eysenck).

The Big five replaced Eysenck's "yes-no" answers with "scaling" answers, making the results easier to interpret and more fine-tuned for use in career counseling, conflict management, team building, organizational development, and research.

The Big Five is the culmination of nearly 100 years of research; as a globally validated and cross-culturally standardized method for other questionnaires through item validity, both researchers and practitioners agree that it is one of the most effective tools for comparative measurement.

The Big Five traits are also available on our PsyOn Platform as part of our Workprobes Online assessments:
https://www.psyon.hu/platform/

19/02/2023

MMPI - the objective questionnaire

"The new test had to depart from existing self-report personality inventories, which were considered too transparent and therefore open to manipulation by test fillers" (https://lnkd.in/dnJjH5xu ) by Hathaway & McKinley, two colleagues at the University of Minnesota.

The MMPI test was published in 1942 after 5 years of research. The authors described it as "an objective aid in the routine psychiatric case record of adult patients and as a method of determining the severity of conditions" (ibid).

The point is objectivity.

The MMPI is not based on a personality model theory, but on flesh and blood human beings, each with clearly identifiable symptoms of their own psychiatric illness. The ten (clinical) scales of the test are a set of psychiatric symptoms, each labeled with a name (e.g., hypochondria, depression, etc.) and not personality traits (e.g., extroversion, openness), not traits (methodical, persuasive), or types (e.g., dominant or stable.

The test was designed so that there was a healthy control group and groups of people diagnosed with one of the ten symptom complexes. Only those items that were able to distinguish between the control group and other groups, or between different symptom groups, were left in the questionnaire.

This "closed-endedness" is a special feature of the MMPI. We know, we experience how people who are members of different diagnosed groups behave and react. A depressive is not mistaken for a hysteric. Because those who give the answers of the depressed to the questions that "mobilize" the depressed not only think the same way but also behave the same way.

We don't need to know why those questions and answers.
This is what gives it its objectivity, its usefulness, and its wide use in diagnostics.
The questions "does it happen to me like this", and "do I feel like this" need to be answered with yes or no. It is not a matter of judging how much I am this or that according to myself, as opposed to the case of self-description tests. Answers to questions such as "how much do I agree that I am this or that" depend to a large extent on, for example, the self-image of the respondents, the maturity of their self-image, what the two ends of the rating scale mean to them, and the image they want to convey of themselves.

In the case of the MMPI, the personality description does not depend on the knowledge and experience of the assessor. The MMPI has for some time been used only by psychologists.

An addendum: Hathaway also invented the lie detector, but instead of Marston's pulse-blood pressure measurement, he invented the one that is still in use (?), the psychogalvanic kind.

Read more: https://psyon.hu/

19/02/2023

It's a shame that it is used for labeling too...

Let's see the DISC universe.

The story of DISC begins somewhat dryly, only to become a model of storytelling and just to transform the simple board game-like universe into a 23-25 page long report in the end.

There's a lot of professional work that goes into creating very complex phenomena so simply.

Let’s look at the path it's taken.

In 1948, the organizational psychologist W.V. Clarke identified four factors of a self-descriptive scale of 81 markers from his data analysis created for selection, called Activity Vector Analysis.

These factors are aggressive, social, stable, and avoidant.

The questionnaire had to be completed twice; once identifying statements “least” describing the responder, and the second time marking statements “mostly” describing the respondent.

The AVA is still an available tool, but it has remained what it was designed to be since its inception and is an example of how an unattractive (unless it is an authority) acronym can start at a disadvantage to a brand that bides its time and finds the four expressive letters, an acronym like DISC.

To his result, Clarke found a model of W.M. Marston from 20 years earlier. In his book "The Emotions of Normal Men", he found an elegantly simple two-axis model, to which he referred: people are either active or passive, and circumstances are either supportive or full of challenges.

Active+challenging: Aggressive, Dominant;
Active+supportive: Social;
Passive+challenging: Avoidant;
Active+supportive: Stable.

However, Marston being an exciting player has entered into the picture; he had created a lie detector and the comic strip character Wonder Woman.

In 1956, there was another spin-off, which not only remained what it was intended to be but also became the dominant personality test in the Americas under the name of J. Cleaver.

Cleaver was Clarke's colleague and used adjectives like his own for the survey. He organized the markers into groups of four using 24 sets of questions. In his test, each group of questions has both a positive and a negative adjective, as shown in the second picture "how to solve Cleaver so that we get hired" guide (bottom picture).

And at last, a fourth method was born, now based on Cleaver's tool, the Personal Profile System (PPS, j. Geier, 1970s), which enriched not the tool itself but the assessment, with a thorough and detailed description of 15 types.

Finally, in 1994, the ® was added to the I, with the addition of four more sets of questions as DISCs.
According to an international survey in 2019, the global frequency distribution of types:
32 % S (stable, green)
30 % C (rule-following, blue)
29 % I (influencing, yellow)
9 % D (dominant, red).

According to the source, the prevalence of D is general, while the frequency distribution of the other factors varies from country to country.

Visit our page: https://psyon.hu/

19/02/2023

Test reviews

We would like to start talking about publicly used tests.

The MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator)

Universe-type tests create worlds positioning respondents within those. Their basis is a "map", usually with a few worlds on that, corresponding to four or multiples of four worlds.

The test looks at what kind of a world the respondents are creating and what role they build about themselves through the answers.

MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) measures 16 possible factor combinations in four worlds on four dimensions:

In the world of Analytics, everything consists of innovation, curiosity, problem-solving, and action. Its inhabitants are Architects, Scientists, Commanders, and Debaters (Intuitive and Thinking).
The Diplomats build on inspiring energy and ideas.The residents are Defense Attorneys, Mediators, Protagonists, and Campaign Managers (Intuitive and Sensing)
The Guards support, organize and act from the bastions of reliability and assistance.This is where the Logisticians, the Protectors, the Leaders, and the Consuls live. (Sensing and Judging).
In the experimental world of the Explorers, life is exciting and fun.

Here lives the Virtuoso, the Adventurous, the Entrepreneur, and the Entertainer. (Sensing and Perceiving).

Whichever world they inhabit, any of the inhabitants can be Extrovert (E) or Introvert (I)
The 1985 version of MBTI was based on Jung's typology (Myers & McCaulley, 1985).
The authors used the even comparison technique – it had to be decided whether the respondent was better described by one statement or the other.
The 1985 version questionnaire contains 93 item pairs.

For coaching purposes, a 144-question version and later for individual counseling purposes a 222-question version was created. Both were able to handle individual factors a level deeper than just types.

The result is a combination of four letters from two endpoints of Jung's four dimensions (e.g., ISFP or ESTJ, see image below), which tells us which world the respondent described himself as an inhabitant of.

Data from the personalitymax.com shows which world has the most inhabitants:
Protective (Guards) ISFJ 13.8%
Consul (Guards) ESFJ 12 %
Logistic (Guards) ISTJ 11.6 %
Adventurous (Explorers) ISFP 8.8%
Leader (Guards) ESTJ 8.7%
Campaign Manager (Diplomats) ENFP 8.1%.

The number of inhabitants of other worlds thereafter is less than 5% each.
The Guardian world is slightly overpopulated, with 46.1% of the MBTI population living there.

Because of the design of the MBTI test, everyone must be a citizen of one of those worlds, and neither there is such thing as low, high, or average.
This test is not suitable for selection; the results provide a common ground for a conversation to initiate a coaching or development process individually or in a group.

Visit our site https://psyon.hu

10/02/2022

Escape route - interesting psychology

On his first day at a transport company, the new employee drove the truck forward instead of backward and immediately knocked down the fence wall.
It was mutually agreed to end the employment contract, but the HR employee was concerned about the issue for a long time.
When we started to dissect the story, it turned out that the young man's mother had called the company to ask if they had received his CV, and then also about the interview appointment.
To the HR manager's knowledge, the mother did not accompany her son to the interview, but it would have been possible if she had waited for him outside the company.
In any case, it was also the mother who called about the outcome of the interview.
The interview went well, there were no concerns about the young man, he was cooperative, sympathetic and his experience was just right.
In the end, we concluded that the most likely reason was that he simply did not want to get hired.
As his mother had tight control over the process, and was not satisfied with the information she had received from her son, but supervised the process directly with the company, the son had no way out.
With no other option to avoid being hired, he chose the simplest solution, which would be of great benefit to him and sufficient harm to others, to avoid having to satisfy his mother's motivation.
This is not an isolated case. In a recruitment pre-screening we saw a young person performing so extremely badly in the tests, that even the most unqualified candidates could not.
We thought she would go home and complain that they, like other companies, did not find her good enough (again).

Source of the picture: utrakelo-irodalom.hu

15/01/2022

Visit our psychology laboratory!
Anybody can have an inhouse laboratory by using , our online .

Find the newcomers, who stay long-term and do not lose candidates due to the long and troublesome selection process.

Involve your candidates in quality tasks and discover all you have to about them for successful onboarding in just 20 minutes.

04/04/2021

We invite you to our PsyOn Platform - an expert system to support your selection, onboarding, and incorporation processes.

https://youtu.be/M7acqQWBY7w

27/01/2021

Companifying - simple toolset of business development

Brand new business development tools and the problems they solve.Homepage: psyon.hu