Ipsative questionnaires of personality have been attacked as necessarily inferior to normative approaches. Some even go so far as to accuse the authors of ipsative scales of reporting spurious statistics and of ‘cheating at patience'. Despite previous papers which claim to demonstrate that ipsative scales overestimate reliabilities, cannot be factored soundly and yield uninterpretable validity coefficients, this investigation shows with synthetic data that these generalizations are ill‐advised. The results demonstrate with simulated data that ipsative scores can be factored soundly, that reliability data are not overestimated, and that under moderate conditions of central tendency bias in normative items, ipsative scores actually correlate better with hypothetical ‘true’ scores than the normative form. When replicated on real data from a sample of 243 subjects, a high correlation was found between ipsative and normative scale scores, ipsative scaling did not produce spuriously high reliabilities, and both normative and ipsative data showed sensible and significant correlations with external rating criteria.

Cet article présente les résultats de deux études de validation du questionnaire de personnalité OPQ/PPE (Occupational Personality Questionnaire, Profil de Personnalité en Entreprise en français). Ces deux études se sont déroulées à quatre ans d'intervalle, dans des organisations britanniques de différents secteurs industriels. Les résultats de la première étude de validation ont servi à prédire les résultats de la seconde étude. Cette procédure de validation croisée permet de s'assurer que les résultats de la seconde étude reposent sur des hypothèses a priori, claires et ne peuvent pas être imputés au hasard. Dans chacune de ces études, les cadres ont étéévalués suivant un ensemble de compétences professionnelles définies par chaque organisation, indépendamment l'une de l'autre. Cinq des compétences présentes dans la première étude sont directement comparables à cinq de la seconde étude. Les dimensions de l'OPQ/PPE qui prédisent la réussite sur chacune des compétences de la première étude ont été utilisées comme hypothèses dans la seconde étude. Les résultats confirment que l'OPQ/PPE prédit la réussite dans un poste (au‐delà de la mesure d'aptitudes) d'une maniére cohérente à travers différentes organisations et à des moments différents, et montrent que les relations mises en évidence ne relèvent pas de simples effets de hasard dans les données. This article presents the results of two separate validation studies of the Concept Model of the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ). The two studies were separated by a four‐year interval and the organisations came from different industry sectors in the UK. The results from the first validation study were used to predict the results in the second study. This cross validation procedure ensured that the results in the second study were based on clear a priori hypotheses and were not merely the result of chance. In each of the studies the managers were assessed against a separate set of job competencies which each organisation developed independently. Five job competencies were present in the earlier study which were directly comparable to five in the later study. The scales of the OPQ that predicted success on each of the competencies in the first study were used as hypotheses in the second study. The results confirm that the OPQ predicts job success (over and above measures of ability) in a consistent and predictable fashion across different organisations and over time, and demonstrates that this relationship is not merely a reflection of chance effects in the data.

This brief article is a direct and invited rejoinder to the comments by David Bartram on our original paper on the use of 360 degree feedback in coaching. Bartram raises important issues which are likely to be of concern and interest to coaches and other users of psychometric tools, even if they do not relate directly to the primary focus of our original paper. This rejoinder reiterates our original approach which was based on a practical workshop on coaching that included a case study reinforcing the benefits of good structural alignment and validity between psychometric trait measures and criterion measures of work effectiveness. This we consider a logical and practical extension of the criterion-centric perspective to measurement, which is a measurement perspective we share with Bartram.Next, our rejoinder addresses how the Great Eight model mapping was used in the analysis as a unit weighted aggregate to predict overall effectiveness at work rather than predict behavioural competencies. Overall effectiveness (and ability) is central to Saville Consulting Wave® Performance 360 criterion measure, and we put this in the context of a hypothetical gap analysis to make the link back to the application in coaching.High level models which lead to aggregation of both predictors and criterion variables are increasingly commonplace in the literature and include Bartram (2005). We further this work by defining a reliable overall (global) effectiveness scale and reporting validities against the total scale source as well as its de-aggregated items each of which represents a distinct segment of overall performance. Rather than differentially weighting these predictors we used a priori unit weighting of the Great Eight predictors from Wave® Professional Styles and OPQ32i. We were primarily concerned with testing the hypothesis that the results were non-zero in predicting overall effectiveness in the original article.We confirm that Wave® Professional Styles trait measure of Competency Potential clearly improved on OPQ32i’s prediction of overall effectiveness (p<.05, two tailed, N=169) in this study.Finally, we emphasise the advantages of single co-validation studies in the comparison of the validity of different models and psychometric tools based on fully pre-hypothesised equations to aggregate predictor scales. This approach, paired with other methodologies, we argue will lead to the scientific advancement of the field.

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