Best way to know someone personally
Definition of personality profiling:
In general, personality of an individual encompasses the entire behavioural pattern of the individual. It includes the temperament of a person as well as his or her emotional maturity, values, attitudes, beliefs, intelligence along with various other components. Personality profiling is a test using various methodologies for identifying the personality traits of an individual. These methods are mostly used to help people identify themselves as well as their behaviour and understand what effect they are having on another individual.
The advent of personality profiling:
It is a long time since personality profiling came into being. It was used for the first time by the ancient Greeks and it was known as 'pigeon-holing' technique where people are divided into 'types' or 'categories' according to their behaviour. A notable researcher in this field was Carl Jung who carried on further research and formed Jungian typology which is known as grandfather of modern day personality profiling.
What are the types of personality profiling?
There are two ways in which personality profiling can be done. These are:
a) Observed behaviour: Here a psychologist comes and assesses an individual on the basis of interview as well as tasks
b) Self reported behaviour: In this an individual is asked to fill up a questionnaire with questions on their preferred behaviour in certain situations.
The second one is the most popular method used in the corporate world which is done in several ways like ticking boxes, questions with true or false answer and a list of available behaviour where the individual needs to give answers as 'almost like me' or 'not like me'.
What are the types of personality profiling tests?
The personality profiling tests are again divided into two categories:
1) Type
2) Trait
1) Type: Tests like Insights Discovery, Keirsey Temperament Sorter and Myers-Briggs work on the assumption that people can be divided into various categories. These tests try to identify the category in which an employee belongs to and let him or her understand the talent of the category.
2) Trait: These personality profile tests like OPQ, Orpheus and 16 PF believe that personality is a combination of many characteristics. All of these try to assess an individual on the basis of characteristics and match the characteristics to form a group in an organisation.
Personality profiling: Is it really valid?
