Product - Workplace Personality Inventory (WPI)

Product Summary

Overview

Gain a Complete – or Customized – View of a Candidate’s Personality and How They Might Behave on the Job

The Workplace Personality Inventory (WPI) is an innovative and flexible assessment based around sixteen key work styles, or work-related personality traits, shown to be important to job success in a wide range of occupations. In addition to the sixteen work styles, the WPI contains an “Unlikely Virtues” scale designed to identify individuals who present an overly favorable image of themselves in responding to questions.

Use the WPI in your organization to:

Identify 16 key personality competencies necessary for success in a job (or customize the scales to fit a specific job): Achievement/Effort, Persistence, Initiative, Leadership Orientation, Cooperation, Concern for Others, Social Orientation, Self-Control, Stress Tolerance, Adaptability/Flexibility, Dependability, Attention to Detail, Integrity/Dutifulness, Independence, Innovation, Analytical Thinking
Reduce turnover and increase productivity when you hire individuals with the personal style that best meets your needs.
Detect response distortion, often referred to as “faking.”
Predict what people might say and do in specified job-related contexts.
Norms: Specific norms for Managers and Customer Service Personnel. General norms for working adults across many occupations and organizational levels.

Features & Benefits

Development of the Workplace Personality Inventory (WPI) was driven by customer needs evaluated through surveys and interactions. In alignment with identified customer needs, the WPI was designed to have the following characteristics.

Work-relevant. Efforts were made to ensure that the WPI :
- Contains questions that are clearly related to the workplace and seen as “face valid” by candidates.
- Contains scales that can be easily mapped to job requirements and competencies for a wide range of occupations.
- Is consistent with regulations established by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which emphasize the need for clear delineation between work-related personality tests and mental health exams.
Short. Administration time for the full 175-item instrument is approximately 20 minutes. Individual scales are 8 to 12 items each.
Easy to interpret. The WPI provides results on work styles in easily understood terms, without reference to obscure psychological or clinical terminology.
Resistant to faking. Many WPI test items were written with the objective of making an appropriate response difficult to guess. In addition, the WPI contains a warning against faking that has been shown to reduce faking in studies on personality tests (Hough, 1998). As a final buffer against faking, the WPI contains an “Unlikely Virtues” scale designed to identify candidates who likely described themselves in an overly (i.e., excessively) positive light when responding to questions.
Reliable, valid, and fair. The WPI was designed to produce consistent, accurate, and job-relevant results for individuals from a wide range of backgrounds.

Areas of Assessment

The work styles assessed by the WPI are based on the Work Styles personality taxonomy (Borman, Kubisiak, & Schneider, 1999) endorsed by the U.S. Department of Labor, and included in the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) online database. O*Net provides a comprehensive taxonomy of personality trait descriptors and links these descriptors to job requirements for a wide range of occupations.

Work Style Domain	WorkStyle	Relevant Behaviors
Achievement Orientation	Achievement/Effort	Establishes challenging goals Maintains goals Exerts effort toward task mastery
	Persistence	Persists in the face of obstacles on the job
	Initiative	Takes on job responsibilities without being told to do so Volunteers for new job responsibilities Volunteers for new job challenges
Social Influence	Leadership Orientation	Demonstrates a willingness to lead/take charge Demonstrates a willingness to offer opinions
Interpersonal Orientation	Cooperation	Is pleasant/good-natured with others on the job Encourages people to work together Helps others with tasks
	Concern for Others	Demonstrates sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others Demonstrates understanding of others/empathy
	Social Orientation	Shows a preference for working with others Develops personal connections with work colleagues
Adjustment	Self-Control	Keeps emotions in check even in very difficult situations
	Stress Tolerance	Accepts criticism Shows tolerance of stress caused by other people or situations
	Adaptability/Flexibility	Adapts to change in the workplace Deals effectively with ambiguity Demonstrates openness to considerable variety in the workplace
Conscientiousness	Dependability	Fulfills obligations reliably
	Attention to Detail	Completes work tasks thoroughly Is careful about details
	Integrity/Dutifulness	Avoids unethical behavior Follows rules and regulations
Independence	Independence	Relies mainly on self to get things done Develops own way of doing things
Practical Intelligence	Innovation	Generates new ideas to address work issues and problems
	Analytical Thinking	Uses logic to address work-related issues Produces high quality, useful information.