Four Groups Blog

There is always lots of talk of competencies, traits and the links to performance. I think there are basically two ways to cut this cake. The first, as implied by Rebecca Thomas and Curt Rosengren, looks at the use of use traits as a means for development, self awareness and as a means of helping you improve various activities and attitudes

It can never be said enough that the person who controls your direction in life is yourself. You control your activities, your attitude, and your fear. Once you accept those and start building them into a positive force for yourself, you are headed toward being successful, regardless of your definition of that term.

I think the second, empirically based approach is far harder to extract clean and tangible value from. I was reading a paper recently which caught my eye on this matter. “Personality and Performance at the beginning of the New Millennium” (link to pdf) reviews c. 100,000 individuals and 1,000 studies which try to link personality to performance. At the end of the day, the authors conclude that there is not much more juice to come from this particular orange

While much has been learned from this body of evidence, we believe that little is to be gained from further meta-analytic studies of this type. Consequently, we call for a moratorium on such studies, and suggest that researchers embark on a new era of research along (but not limited to) the areas we outline above.

Paul Barrett has taken this idea and many more on board and written a succinct and superb critique of the current psychological paradigm. The symptoms of the current paradigm include the questionable mantra that links individual personality to significant and valid predictions of performance. For our own sins, we prefer to focus on the links between relationships and performance